Books and Forgetting

As a kid I wasn’t read to.  When I became a parent I understood why! I wouldn’t have had time to read to seven kids either, let alone inclination. Anyhow, when I was about 10 I had a book shoved under my nose by my mother. Read this, she insisted, dismissively.  I tried, really I did, but I couldn’t concentrate, wasn’t interested, or maybe I couldn’t read.  They Found a Cave was the book, and recently, to my surprise, I recognized its sepia tones on my sister’s bookshelf, picked it up, flicked thru it, felt a cold and unwelcome contraction of my heart muscle, and returned it to the shelf.  I recently tapped its title into google. The book’s about the lives of four orphans, their relocation and battling the baddies.  I wasn’t an orphan but it sure felt like it.

Not surprisingly, my book destiny never really passed go! What reading I’ve done over the decades has got me by tho.  Although I didn’t finish high school, I must have read at least one book because I won a competition in third form sponsored by Actil Cotton Mills.  I shamelessly plagiarized the entire text, adding a sample of cotton I secretly cut off a sheet (and got belted for it later!) enhancing it with meticulously traced pictures of machinery from books like they were my own. I won a set of bed sheets!

I must have read books at Business College for two years, but if I did I don’t remember, and besides I don’t have to because I’m an ace typist, administrator, and sometimes an all round smart-arse when it comes to meetings and noteworthy events at which I can demonstrate  my knowledge of Mr Pittman’s weird shapes and symbols, those that impersonate words, are lightning fast to record and code-named shorthand. 

During a theatre costume diploma, the technical and history books I read, and you guessed, barely remember, relit a fire in my belly, and my inner aesthete and costumier was reborn, along with my passion for sharp scissors (and knives!) .  All those corsets, doublets, trunkhose, frockcoats and codpieces are now buried and communing with moth balls in tea chests in the shed, but not forgotten. 

In the corridors of academia for a year, I read some Foucault and Flaubert, but don’t ask me what they said. 

I’ve now become a bookworm, greedy for horizontal time with my favourite authors.  I have a book bucket-list from here to Africa, and only half a life-time left to make a mark.  I’m not complaining.  I’ve gladly and willingly retreated into the ranks of the obsessed-by-words movement, and whilst it probably does little to cultivate the soft heart of my social animal,  half a century of forgetting behoves half a century of remembering.   Should I not answer the phone or door, well, it’s not personal, I’m just busy, right!   So if you’ll excuse me, I have a date with the page and to borrow the only useful term I remember from uni I intend to ‘faire et se taire’ ( ‘shut up and get on with it’ Flaubert).

The Juggler aka The Coffin Lid

I’m handed a torch at the front desk and enter the ‘Dying Art’ Exhibition. The darkness is punctuated by tea-light candles, illuminating shrines, highlighting and accentuating urns and shrouds, and creating silhouettes of the dozen or so eco-coffin lids standing upright at intervals throughout the room. My eyes adjust to the light as I flick on the torch and move through the space, reading inscriptions, viewing lids decorated with interpretations of end-of-life, images of nature, the human form, abstract and the obscure, all personal to the artists commissioned.  I move slowly in the extraordinary atmosphere, conscious of my breathing, aware, overcome by something I now struggle to put a name to; reverence, grace? Silently, I say a prayer.   It is at once an uplifting and sobering experience, an intricate and intimate web that I am willingly drawn into, and absorbed by, like a moth to a flame.  Tears come as I gaze down upon the infant's coffin, my Carla, and almost immediately I become one with an overwhelming sense of beauty, fragility and mystery.  I feel I've died and gone to the holy land.  At no time do I recall ever feeling so moved by an exhibition.    

At auction later in the evening I successfully bid for the coffin lid depicting the unicycling juggler, seen above. It landed like a long lost relative in the palm of my hand the moment I set eyes on it.   It is the work of artist, Kellie O’Dempsey. There’s something vaudevillian that speaks to my sense that once upon a time I moved across Northern Africa with the gypsy caravans, performing for my supper, and also reminds me of my stilt-walking days.   The juggler's skill is to work with rhythm, timing and focus to keep all her balls in the air; this I see as symbolic of keeping in check our emotional, social, practical, intellectual and spiritual life, maintaining a balance, an equilibrium, and a homoeostatis for the everyday.   The subject of the artwork is looking down, inward, trusting her intuition, confidently navigating her path on the wheel of life, getting on with what she does best. I love this piece not for its lofty, far-reaching and grand style but for its wonderful distinction between the earnest and the whimsical.

Death as a subject is often way too inconvenient a truth for the masses, but how I see it is you can’t have life without death.  It's everywhere.  Why not mention its name, talk about it?  I feel proud and grateful I'm involved in a social change movement that honours life by fearlessly naming death and which acts courageously to demystify its place in our lives.  I’ve installed the lid at home, just inside the front door, as a reminder of impermanence, that now is the new tomorrow. 

No, I haven’t recently been diagnosed with a terminal illness!

How do you view death?

Disadvantage

She’s severely intellectually disabled. Every day she wanders about the centre clutching bangles and the lid of a jar into which she’s placed wooden beads, red, green, brown, blue. She drops them frequently, and comes to you to retrieve them from under the cupboard or somewhere she can’t access. Voluntarily, or not, I don’t know, she constantly shakes her right hand, holding a bangle, as you would a tambourine. In her profile folder, it cites food and drink as her interests. Should you leave your lunch lying around, as I did one day, it’ll be gone in an instant. She's non-verbal and I find it excruciatingly difficult and excruciatingly sad knowing how to engage her. There’s lots of clients like her. When she’s happy, generally after a good lunch, she’ll produce a kind of maniacal laughter. The first time it happened I was a bit scared, wondered what was going on. Now that I know there’s a lightness of being inside, I rejoice with her. Up until today, there’s been no reason to consider her sadness. Mostly there’s enough of your own going on to spend too much time thinking about anybody else’s. She was sitting out in the sun with her back to me when I went up to her to try and encourage her to come inside and participate in the music session. As I squatted down, I noticed tears gently falling down her pink cheeks, her nose running. I took her hand, and said the first thing that came into my mind. “Are you sad T?”. Stupid, I know, it was obvious, what did I expect, an answer? I offered some comforting words, went and got the tissues and returned to her side. A couple of times as I dabbed her eyes and nose, she seized my hand in hers and held it tightly to her face. I was overcome with feelings of tenderness for her. Now, some hours later, I’m reflecting on the cruelty and the tragedy and the pathos. Most of us can choose the path of our sadness - speak it, write it, dance it, take it to bed. Not here!

Welcome to Drearysville!

If only someone had warned me! I’d have taken my name tag off the front table in the front row on day one, and replaced it down the back and brought my knitting, or done sudoku, anything but this. There’s 30 of us, crammed hip to jowl into a small room, a whiteboard that serves as a computer screen, and a change of guard up front every hour. I’ve become a terminal clock watcher, counting down the minutes to morning tea, lunch and afternoon tea and finally home. This has been the longest week of my life. The room smells of boredom and escape, a dank stale kind of smell, like old socks, one that cripples the learning neurons. Every now and then I hear what’s being said, but mostly I’m at the beach or the central desert or the bush or thinking about what’s for tea.

OH&S, IT, HR, EEO, EAP, XY& bloody Z. What on earth happened to good old-fashioned common sense, you know, look right, look left and look right again. It worked, I haven’t been run over, just run down by the stupidity of an age that considers the economy more important than its people. I’m being forced to undergo this trial by bureaucracy because I must bear in mind the risks, and lordy, there’s thousands of them, like a spillage or a cord across the floor, and don’t forget to wear the right shoes and bend your knees when you’re lifting, and did you know how much carelessness costs the country and how crushing litigation can be and make sure you’re respectful and supportive and fill out all the right forms. We’re all 30 years plus, not 14. I resent being treated like a child. Didn’t I read somewhere that if you value efficient, empathic, professional, calm and compassionate people you model it. A travesty!

For Frank

Why don't they open the blinds in the morning I think, pulling on the string to let the sun in. Such a small mercy, surely it's not too much to ask.

He’s dozing, sitting in the wheelchair on the cold linoleum floor, mouth open, complexion grey. His mop of grey hair looks like it hasn’t been combed in days. My sadness comes in a rush, and that familiar lump in the throat, again. Just as quickly I suppress it. I touch his shoulder, ‘It’s Catherine’. Opening his eyes, he beams me a big toothless grin. To him, I’m another relatively good-looking woman visitor he’s eager to impress.

‘How are you’ I enquire. ‘I’ve got pain here (pointing to his shoulder) and here (upper arm) and here (his back)’. It’s been this way for years, decades even, this chronic and acute arthritic hell. Gently I smooth his hair out with my fingertips.

‘You wrote two books’ I prompt, changing the subject. ‘One about the war, the other …’ I falter, not knowing how to describe it. ‘Did I?’ he responds, incredulous. ‘Perhaps I could bring it in next time and read to you. Would you like that’ I ask. ‘I can read’ he responds angrily. This is true. Sometimes when I remember, I’ll take one of his cards off the shelf. He’ll hold it close to his face and read the sentiments, over and over, for endless minutes. What he is thinking or feeling is impossible to tell.

This year he’s 92. He’s adamant he’s not. He was an absent dad, a man of great passion and intellect, a philanderer, a real charmer and a ruthless bully. I’ve been scared of him most of my adult life. He intimidated the heck out of me. Now, however, I love him with a bursting heart. Is this thing called Alzheimers a gift from the creator that brings forgiveness and acceptance to the table. I am grateful, for I finally see him.

Thanks Dad.

The business of death

Practising for death, with kite, in the heart of the Olgas …..
or, Waiting for the Vultures!


The woman at reception is on the phone and gestures for me to take a seat. As I pass the plump couches, on the way to empty my anxious bladder, a seated, shiny bald-headed man of 40-something flashes me a wide smile. Friendly, I think, smiling back. When I return, the woman I’ve seen in the carpark has joined him. I feel self-conscious, and chilly in my should-be-wool-but-cotton attire, and very hick under my Edward Scissorhands do! Why does everybody in the city use a hair dryer? I sit down. “I was horrified, her make-up was all wrong, I barely recognised her” the woman is saying. I’m triggered. Mum used to dab at her lipstick, the embalmer had plastered it on. It wasn’t her, and it was shocking. I empathise. We’re at the home of one of Melbourne’s original independent funeral homes because at some stage in the past few months we’ve made application for employment and we’ve been invited to an ‘information session’. Later we learn we’re 3 out of 8 invitees who’ve turned up. He’s a salesman, she a legal secretary. I have little doubt that, like me, they’ve been touched by death. We talk freely about our interest in entering the industry, our hopes and dreams. I belong.

We’re led down a maze of passageways, past the auditors, and into the boardroom. The walls are a museum to its Irish Catholic founding fathers and staff, past and present. The table, larger than my bedroom. A potted history is presented and any notion we may have had about securing a role that befits the importance of our ego is quickly quashed. In no uncertain terms we’re advised that all newcomers enter the industry through the same door, FDA (Funeral Director’s Assistant). Washing and preparing the hearse, driving the hearse, sweeping floors, assisting at funerals, transferring the deceased, assisting at viewings and rosaries, handing out pamphlets. “Some who come are too precious” states our informant, “Are you all prepared to do this?”

Despite there being no current employment opportunities, I am grateful for and humbled by the experience, and say a little prayer that in the future my wish be heard. This is the landscape of service, these are the places and spaces where I know I am at my most authentic.

How to make a dog's breakfast!

This is how it was supposed to look!










I’d made it once before. Trying to emulate my favourite dessert, sago and raspberry pudding, I’d given my first attempt 7 out of 10. This time I was aiming much higher; I wanted it to look as good as the one you buy, and taste even better. I’m a confident cook, proud of my personal success rating in the kitchen, some would even say cocky! Despite my inflated view, I had to concede there was merit in reading the directions on the pack of sago. Reflecting on that evening a week later, all I remember is reading the first three lines , water, tapioca seed and sugar, and feeling a little puzzled about the ratio of water to seed, pressed on regardless. At this point in proceedings, easily distracted, I abandoned the directions.

First sin, disregard!

So I boiled the water, and threw in the tapioca seed. Gazing down into the steaming pot, wooden spoon in hand, it occurred to me, in a blink, I’d committed the second sin. The sago had instantly cooked on the outside, leaving it raw inside. It resembled a pot of clag with hundreds of half-sucked homoeopathic pilules floating in it. Idiot! The third sin was the brown sugar. Isn’t that what the recipe said? My intended virginal dessert had now taken on a muddy appearance. Fugly! Remembering I hadn’t added the expensive coconut cream paste, I ladelled it into the mix. The mixture, now hideously murky and coagulated and spewing its fury into the atmosphere like the grey heaving geysers of Rotorua, had suffered its final assault. In an attempt to resuscitate what was, in hindsight, clearly already dead, I took it off the stove, sprinkled liberal lashings of vanilla essence on its surface, put the lid on, said a prayer, and left.

A couple of hours later, bowl of lightly cooked raspberries at the ready, and half-anticipating a miracle, I peered into the pot. It was, undeniably, irredeemable! I spooned the now dumpling-like, speckled, tea-coloured sago mistake into the raspberry sauce with a curse. The dish resembled the insides of a cow!

2 out of 10!

Just Being

Through Byron Hospice, for 4 hours every second week, I sit with him in the loungeroom of the home he built for his second wife, 20 years ago. He wonders, repeatedly, how much he'll miss his wife, how she's going to manage when he’s gone.

In this funereal atmosphere, steeped in coffee-coloured light, today I carefully turned the pages of his photo albums, awakening memories long held, names long forgotten.

He is a canvas to grief, and has grown weary, like chrysanthemums left too long at the graveside of the beloved. He is open and honest, a gracious model for conscious death and dying.

Occasionally, during the interminable minutes of emptiness, a spotlight is cast sharply on my mind’s aversions. I watch with horror, disappointment and acceptance at what happens under my skin! Sitting still, doing nothing, a deep and abiding restlessness. TV blaring, irritation, boredom, a neurotic mind that screams ‘turn it off’. Silence, a desire to fill it with clever chatter. Sometimes, during his reflections on his life, I’m triggered to speak, have the final word, offer similar experience from my own life’s narrative. I turn my mind’s eye to his hand in mine.

Just being!

Scones* Smirnoff** Snakes*** & Song****

From 3 pm Saturday 11 December

Come farewell my Burringbar sojourn, reflect on the year, practise soothsaying, swim and chill

21 Geles Road, Upper Burringbar (first house on left)

BYO togs, plate to share, musical instruments/voice and happy heart.

RSVP: 66771551/0431600138


* while they last
** be early
*** for the keen of eye
**** no shrinking violets catered for

On Loss

Green is the pool, its colour reflecting nature’s quiet melancholy. Slimy leaf matter, a bloated dead bush rat and mangled avocadoes float on its surface. This is what happens when you abandon duty for a few weeks. Things go to the pot. I look out the window at its wrongness, and watch the ripples, ripples of grief extending their wide circular arms into our community. Three more deaths. Three more young men. Tragically whisked from this life overnight by the dark hand of fate. I can’t help thinking it could have been one of mine. But for the grace of God. It feels like it is one of mine. How could it not. When you live in a small community it’s like that. You know all the young men and women, you know the mothers and fathers, you nod at them in the street, at the supermarket, you recognise their masks. Alongside their suffering you stand. You’re helpless, but to feel. I’m taken back, 26 years, and see myself screaming ‘nooo’ into the dappled sunlight of the afternoon, bellowing my despair through the gum trees in the back yard, out onto Gardiners Reserve and way beyond recall the day I returned home from hospital without my baby. I was numb, disbelieving, and full of rage and guilt. It’s real. Unforgiving. Solitary. It’s a slap that stays with you forever, a scar that defines your very being, that reminds you of the sanctity of the everyday. I remember all these things like it was yesterday. Our great loss.

Loads of Codswallop!!!!!

If only the beach was closer

If only men were more like women

If only I had a coffee and nicotine drip

If only guilt and pride could be assuaged

If only the nightly news made me smile

If only I’d listened to paternal real estate wisdom

If only Jesus had boobs

If only I could turn off my worry gene

If only the sun didn’t dazzle so happily off the pool

If only I had an income

If only I had someone to clean the house

If only I wasn’t obsessed with the past

If only I could hear the creaking of the bed springs

If only Julia Bishop’s glare didn’t remind me of my own

If only Tony Abbott dematerialized

If only I wasn’t so old

If only I could find the key to my imagination

If only the trees didn’t block my view of the mountain

If only the neighbours weren’t so surly

If only I could gag the rambunctious dog

If only my extrovert would come home with me

If only I didn’t have parents with Alzheimers

If only there was some red meat in the fridge

If only I had straighter legs, a smaller nose, whiter teeth …

If only I was someone else I’m confident I’d be a good writer!

Serpent

One constant has dominated my life here in the northern rivers. Snake. Not surprising really since I was born in the Chinese year of the Snake. Clearly snakes feel quite comfortable inhabiting my private life … I’m a sibling!

There was the time I was sitting up in bed reading one hot night a few years ago and noticed in my peripheral vision something move to my left. A large python was making its way out of the slightly ajar door of the wardrobe less than a metre away. I tracked its slow pace for about an hour, into the toilet, obviously thirsty, then down the corridor into the loungeroom. I opened the glass double doors in an effort to encourage its exit and went back to bed. A few hours later I woke with an acute sensation, reached my hand through the mozzie net and switched on the bedside lamp. It was curled comfortably around the bedhead. All three metres of it. To say the shock was intense is an understatement, but there was also awe.

Shortly after that incident, Raf, my son, lifted himself up into the manhole, armed with a torch. ‘Mum, there’s dozens of snake skins up here’. Sure enough, we were inhabiting their home, not the reverse.

Then there was the python at around the same time who found my sock and undie shelf a comfortable place to hibernate for weeks. So enamoured was I with its choice of ‘home’ I moved most of my smalls to another shelf, lined newspaper around it and even provided a bowl of water. Bad behaviour a little while later demanded I take evasive action. I didn’t know at the time what exactly I was looking at. Tiny white eggs in a slimy clear liquid. My first thought was vomit. My second, aborted snake eggs. My third, poo. I still don’t know what it was, but it was messy.

A couple of weeks ago I witnessed two pythons mating on the solar panels on my roof. It was a vigorous and sexy action, a dance of love. They could have been fighting, but methinks they were being amorous. Damned camera had a flat battery.

This morning I sat down at the sewing machine by the window to make amends and that sensation of something going on was around again. I looked up to see a snake vertically descending from the gutter toward the window sill, inches from my face. She’s beautiful. This is her in the photo.

There’s no-one more aware of the symbolic references attributed to the serpent than me. It portends transformation, a change of way, a shedding of the skin of the old for the skin of the new. Over the years I’ve felt equal measures of humility and frustration. A great honour is bestowed on me by its presence, a great responsibility to heed its message, a great uncertainty as to what it is I am meant to see or hear. Who am I to become?

Rainer Maria Rilke, the great 20th century German poet’s words act as a constant reminder … ‘you, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing'

Just whimsy

Sophie’s blue eyes are as big as the Pacific. She wears a perpetual smile and an asymmetrical hair-do. She moves like the proverbial road runner. I wish I’d had a drama teacher like her. Annie’s a doctor, has an enviable collection of aboriginal art on her loungeroom wall, an astonishingly handsome Indian husband, and a broken finger. She’s pissed off and doesn’t want to talk about it. You can tell from the dark wells in her eyes, wary body language and small voice that Uma is often sad yet when the melody begins something instantly changes in her. I feel protective of her. Alex is the one I look to when I’m in musical discombobulation land, and being the ukulele virgin I am, that’s often. She’s an amazing muso, and when she plays the dimples in her cheeks are an exaggerated animation in action. Katey serves freckles, bullets, licorice allsorts and wine gums in huge bowls when we practise at her place, and is generous with her Coopers stash. She’s a town planner in local government and talks endlessly about the big bloke with abominable body odour, bad teeth and attention deficit disorder who’s her assistant. Lee’s an occupational therapist. That’s all I know about her. I think she must be a scorpio. She rarely looks at me and when she does it’s with that glare! Takes one to know one! Mel’s a tour guide, and what she doesn’t know about crocodiles is nobody’s business. Did you know crocodiles grow new teeth every two years? I want to be a crocodile! Grace is a systems analyst with a sharp tongue, a bogan swagger and a penchant for expletives. Whilst fuck’s a relatively common word in my vocabulary, around her I feel like a nun. Luke’s a blow-in from Liverpool, an artist with a gentle personality and a torso riddled with piercings and dozens of colourful tattoos of karma sutra positions he humbly claims are his norm. Our honorary girl. They’re all in their 20s, young, vibrant, on the mark. And there’s me. Weighing in at 55 years I’m old enough to be grandma but try not to act it. I’m welcomed like one of the flock. We’re the DUKES (Darwin Ukulele Kollective) and we’re closing the Darwin Festival at the Lighthouse … ACDC, Tom Jones, Johnny Cash, Village People, Dolly Parton, Beach Boys, Patsy Cline. Ah, the whimsy!

Names have been changed, and characters partly fictionalised … but thanks for the good times Darwin.

Home

Is 'downward dog' in the morning light on the veranda watched by an audience of kookaburras, butcher birds and magpies

Is the precarious assemblage of lengths of bamboo supporting the broken and rotting guttering

Is the spectacular sight of pythons mating in the sunlight on the solar panels on the roof

Is mildew growing on every wall in every room and in probably every cell of my body

Is the quiet at midnight, a pause that allows me to feel my grief and longing for far away family and friends

Is shy platypus living amongst the lilypads that carpet the surface of the dam

Is the box of a dozen pairs of gumboots under the house and the joy in finding one pair size ‘large’

Is the generous space and multiple rooms in which to lose my reading glasses several times a day

Is white ant, industriously and silently crumbling away at the foundations of my belonging

Is the constant burden of privilege I feel as I sit here on my arse and pray for the millions of homeless, hungry and abused beings living in a parallel universe, right now.

Medicine or Mischief?

Cleary, it’s a witchetty grub. Or is it? I retrieve it from the mound of wood chips, grateful I haven’t sliced it in half with the shovel, and take it inside to show my sister Margaret. Dad and I used to eat these in Barrabool Road in Geelong, I quip. Down by the row of pines on the back fence. He’d pluck the grubs from the wood pile, one for him, one for me. They taste like coconut but sweeter, and gritty. The experience was one I shared exclusively with dad, and one-on-one experiences with dad were a rarity in the 60s. Simple, yet full of warm fuzzy feelings. There’s a dozen more where these came from, I add. Should I eat it? Up to you, she says. Something about its size makes me feel a bit queezy, I’m used to much smaller ones, and that greyish bit on its nether regions looks kind of weird. I burrow it back into its home in the wood chips and continue barrowing loads of mulch. Later on, with my new found knowledge of a secret harvest of witchetty grubs in the garden, and having just read ‘The Songlines’, an inspirational account of the aboriginal dream time, I set about trying to find some reference to witchetty grub dreaming on the net. There’s dozens of artworks, but little or no explanation. I stumble on a site that suggests that witchetty grub fat when rubbed on the skin makes a sick person better. Novel! A dispensary of therapeutic fat squirm at my back door. I flick onto google images and chance upon a surprise discovery. What jumps out is a comparison of a grub that is sometimes mistaken for the witchetty grub but is actually the white curl grub, or scarab beetle. A serious little pest that kills lawn and other flora. Mischievous Mr Curly has been masquerading as medicine, naughty blighter!

Just as well I hit pause on the culinary act.

A life in scraps

It’s unusually cold tonight, eerily silent. The fire’s burning and there’s enough wood to last the night. This means tomorrow I’ll have to confront the dragon at the sawmill to buy another $15 boot load. Worth it I suppose.

I just went outside to break a dead branch off the tree to give the fire a boost and clumsily stepped into a bucket of putrid water. Now I stink and my only thick socks are wet. Ma che stupida!

Tonight I need kindness, a healing massage, or divine inspiration, but instead I find myself obsessing about the slow and cunning osmosis that happens through the flimsy wall that separates my writer and critic. I’m practising some voice dialogue and even think sometimes a session with the therapist might be a good idea, but mostly I'm just arguing with myself and trawling through the scraps. Scraps aplenty. Nylon scraps, brown, fawn and crimson swirly abstract bits; cotton liberty prints, crushed velvet lengths in ivory from the Fatherhood Festival, scraps of faux fur, skin print, tapestry, emu skin, calf hide, vinyl. There’s scraps from opulent teal quilts and scraps of floral upholstery weave in rich mauve and eucalyptus green, leftover from the cape i made for my new and virtuous non-smoker years ago. Trimmings and cords and ribbons, braids in intricate hand-made designs, tiny bronze elephants and coins sewn in, and woolly hearts, and pom poms. Victorian tassles and Spotlight tassles. Dark blue pinstripe wool and violet and magenta felt that reminds me of my sister Margaret. Linen and poplin, fleecy and drill. Olive green rayon. There’s 50s white cotton lace, 60s daisy flower-power. Bits of old rugs and geometric black and white and red retro cuts, a cut above the rest those pants! Exotic strips of golden raw silk from Varanasi, ah, the bridal dooner cover fashioned when I was certain my internet date was the one. Peacock blue silk from Hyderabad and silver sari scraps from Byron Bay via Calcutta. Pinwhale and brown jumbo corduroy. Scraps of lycra in happy orange. Netting and tulle in rainbow hues. Dark night taffeta, even darker chiffon and organza. 20s black lace from the gothic wedding I dressed. Red leather ... the prostitute’s hot pants. And so much more. All locked away in the storage shed, miles away. Why it's taken me so long to give them a voice I'll never know!

Oh, did I say lots of scraps of relationships.

Returning

He came to challenge, inspire and calm. They ate. Pasta with chilli, sitting on the white-sheeted couch. He said do you like my new shoes. She said I hate them. They laughed. The fire paid homage to the mood with a dance from its Book of Memory. They spoke of long ago, laughed and scoffed in condemnation, sipped red and talked. Of a country of songlines and mysterious beginnings. He cracked macadamias on the hearth. They smoked. Leonard Cohen called from the back room, there's a crack, a crack, in everything, that’s how the light gets in, that’s how the light gets in! They spoke of the heart’s longing to satisfy its hunger and of the vascularity of the gut. They sipped Rooibus with honey. Watched the nightly news and wished they hadn’t. He descended the stairs, lined with fallen camellias in the cold dark night to feel for wood. They ate Lindt in tiny broken squares, it had to last. She touched on her drowning plimsoll line and He of children and death. He answered her call, this messenger of good fortune. He came back

Fear, Loathing & Sleep Deprivation

I’m tossing and turning under the doona like a hooked fish, my mind a grand prix. It’s 3 a.m. and even in the dark I can clearly see crabby written all over my face. The new pillows are too thick, one doona isn’t enough, two too many. At the boxing ring in the back of my head, I’m ringside at the showdown. The bookies are calling it evens. In the blue corner, a look of defiance on her face, grandiosity flexing the oiled muscles of her tanned arms is Commitment, bouncing around on the spot in restless anticipation of the face-off. In the red corner Discipline pants, thin lips stretched into a snarl, arrogance staining itself into semi-circles under her arms, a mocking sway gyrating from her hips. The bell sounds. Discipline lunges into the centre, bearing crooked teeth. ‘Fraud’ she spits with vehemence. ‘You and your hollow fucken promises’. Below the belt calls the referee. Commitment, white knuckles clenched, lurches to within inches of her opponent’s face. ‘Liar’ she counterpunches, spraying saliva in her adversary’s face. ‘There’s not a skerrick of self-control in your bones.’ Warning, calls the referee. Saboteur! jabs Discipline. Procrastinator! returns Commitment. The missiles fly with increased ferocity. Bully! Fool! There’s no backing down. With violent precision the adversaries hook into each other … Thief! Addict! Annihilator! Rebel. Foul, foul yells the referee … both of you … to your neutral corners, NOW! The opponents retreat. No Decision, call the three Judges unanimously.

This antagonistic couple used to be buddies. It appears something or someone is causing an existential crisis and blocking their vision. Is a reconciliation likely or do I just need a good night’s sleep? And a homoeopathic?

'Avenue'

Who is this tall thin woman with the pale complexion and what’s she doing in the loungeroom?

Strange things occur when you invite people to stay, especially when the place you call home is not really your home and the belongings of somebody else’s life fill the spaces. How many years she’s lived in the studio is anybody’s guess but last week, when I traipsed up the stairs to the studio to show Sal and Dave the large vacant room with scatterings of the owner’s art, I decided it was time for the lonely cold shape to share the winter with me in the house. She’s heavy, mysterious and larger than life and it took the phenomenal muscle of the three of us to navigate her safe passage into the house.

I’ve christened her Avenue which derives from the Latin advenire and means to arrive. It seems appropriate. I think she has something to say, but what, I don’t know. Perhaps she’s here to inform my writing, perhaps not. Perhaps she’s my Venus de Milo and has a thing or two to teach me of love and beauty. A week into her lodging, the fright that accompanied her initial sighting is beginning to wane. I welcome her presence and wonder about the truth of my inner life, that which created a path for her arrival.

Bliss and blockheads

There’s great comfort in the sound of the water rushing over the rocks at the end of the driveway. Yesterday it was a trickle, today a modest but raging waterfall, powering its way down the gully toward the ocean, 10 kilometres away. The water tanks are overflowing and the pool's burst its banks. The wet adventure continues to fall relentlessly from the sky in heavy curtains. The decision I was grappling with about whether to head down the range to the farmer’s market this morning has been answered. I’ll make do with a can of kidney beans, and some crackers. I’m hardly going to starve with the bouquet of citrus burgeoning the kitchen bench. I brave the wet to take a happy snap. ‘What a nice bit of rain, aren’t we lucky’ I call across to my new neighbour, standing on his verandah checking out the mad woman covered in plastic, a fag hanging from the side of his mouth, a surly look furrowing his brow. ‘If you say so’ he grunts. ‘I doubt the Austar guy is going to get through tho’. For some people, like my happy neighbour, nature is a distraction to endure, something that just occurs, rather than a raison d’etre. Così è la vita!