Sailor Lily sleeps and dreams

Setting fire to paper boats

2012-02-04T14:36:00.000-08:00

Two adults sit in the dusk, man and woman. Their conversation is a lake and they cavort in it like teenagers. He swirls the undercurrents and makes waves then proffers them to her like a powerful gift. She frolics a little and sometimes dives deep under to feel the strength of his tides.

They take up positions at the edge of the lake. The have each made a paper boat, beautiful objects, and now they place them in the water. He pushes his and its prow makes a handsome shape knifing through the water. Her boat is less muscular, it drifts and dips. They look at each other, at the lake, at what they have made and how beautiful it is.

Suddenly he pulls a matchbook out if his pocket. Her nostrils flare and blood thickens as he strikes flame along the paper. He smirks at her and holds the fire above her boat. In her eyes he can see the reflected flame and himself within it and he likes it. When he drops the lit match the conflagration is immediate, both boats are brief incendiary bombs that could go anywhere wreaking their damage.

But the lake is safe, just a little manmade folly. The conversation slows and turns away from the ash on the water, as it must do. Soon the ash will sink, the wine will be drunk, the evening over.

Somebody that I used to know

2012-01-29T00:00:00.000-08:00

So much resonance from six simple instruments.

Then Kimbra on this one too (but I love Kimbra like I love P.J. Harvey)

a little 'cross pollination' between blogs in the form of some poetry

2012-01-13T18:13:00.000-08:00

I tend to keep poetry for another blog-space but then reminded myself that Sailor Lily started out as my sole 'writing space' for all things.This poem came about when thinking of all the avenues of elms dotted around little Australian country towns. Often called 'avenues of honour' there would be an elm or gum tree planted along the road for each man lost to war.I wondered: if those beautiful trees, or the very earth that soldiers were ostensibly protecting could whisper to them who had died, would they try to console?

Homecoming to farm after war.

Opened by a round of shell how was he to know?
Father and Mother buried him
And then the ground and dark closed in

But the banksias crouched over him
And his sister came with seeds of heath
Who grew their blooms to softly whisper:
“Epicaris impressa, I grow tall and slender
White against the sky.”
And “correa reflexia”, chant the native fuchsia
“My brown-furred leaves to warm you
In the cold ground to adorn you
We of roots can never die”

(common flat pea over me I lie and lie and lie)

And his shell, his very bones are crumbling
The grasses grow and hiss
The years as steady as the drip
Of the yard tap, where Bubby plays and grows, waits then goes.
Daddy coughs and spits then goes…

And he of earth in earth won’t know
That Mum is forced to sell
That Sissy moves to town with Aunty Mavis,
And marries well…

I could get used to

2012-01-05T01:11:00.000-08:00

Being on hols and celebrating
Patting the cats until they love me like mad and become wonderful
Eating food I’ve cooked from my new tome: ‘Kitchen’ by Nigella Lawson.
Riding my bike that has finally been fully repaired
Having café coffee every day for half an hour at least
Going to the beach, or being at home, or ….

Rainy days and Arthur Mee and ‘Things to Make and Do’…

2011-11-26T01:16:00.001-08:00

From my seventies suburban childhood some aspects, objects and books still cavort in my mind, taking succour from thin after dinner mint chocolates and the recalled smell of ‘Le Jardin’ perfume.
There was the avocado-coloured bath, the pine kitchen table with yellow vinyl seats, the olive and taupe floral wallpaper in my room, then those special books:
The ‘How and Why Wonder Books’ kept me informed and titillated with art and history, chemistry and anatomy. I loved the way each double-page spread in ‘Anatomy’ delved one layer further at a time, like a fleshy striptease, from skin and hair, to muscle and ligament, to bone, to internal organs, culminating in the weirdness of a forming foetus in the wildly curious and curiously addictive ‘Human Reproduction’ chapter.

My ‘Illustrated Children’s Bible’ shocked and intrigued with it’s provocative breast- of-Salome exposed amidst a flirt of jewel-hued veils; turn the page and John’s head bled like an uncooked corned-beef on a gilded tray held in her taloned hand! There was David peeping at Bathsheeba and YOU COULD SEE a little watercolour furriness above her thighs…

But best of all was the inherited set of ‘Arthur Mees Children’s Encyclopaedia’.
For a reclusive kid seemingly everything could be learned from those soft burgundy tomes from art, to wise thoughts, to natural wonders, great men and women of history and even French! But the very best and for purely the reason of what it’s title denotes was the ‘Things to Make and Do’ section in every volume from two through to ten.

I still have the complete set of ‘Arthur Mees’ (mine are circa 1951-1954) and recently trailed loving fingers through them. Yes! Those ‘Make and Do’ sections (usually three per volume) were as good as I recall. They put the ‘Dangerous Books’ for girls and boys into the mediocre-shame bin they deserve.

In the world of Arthur Mees’ children there are tooth-decaying recipes for toffee apples where no ‘get Mum to boil the sugar’ is required. There are lab experiments involving sulphur, naked flames and mercury. You can learn how to make a high speed Billy-cart with laughable ‘brakes’, how to light a fire, make a firecracker, make a battery then make a light. How to sharpen your pocketknife with sand or how to semograph that there are spies in your village. In Arthur’s world kids don’t just run with scissors, they learn how to engineer a working guillotine from Daddy’s spare razor.

And the loveliest part? Despite all of Arthur Mee’s epochal love of the English as the God-blessed race and the English Child as the Superlative Human, through every book and every tale of art, science, philosophy or things to make and do- girls were there. They were depicted alongside little boys in apple-catchers making the toffee or waving the semograph flag, they were depicted as women building short-wave radio or leading an army, discovering a bacteria or writing a literary classic, and oh, there they were again making a model-plane on a rainy afternoon, while the eggs and custard boiled for their ‘nursery tea’.

Later, fully into the fifties and away from that second war that saw all hands and brains in use this would not have happened. Arthur, for all his faults, depicted his times, an era where (albeit briefly) strength and knowledge were both required and cultivated in all.

He can cop a lot these days, but for us fans the books are beloved treasures, smelling of sliverfish and early adventures on rainy days. I’m digging through them again; it’s time my little one learned how to toffee an apple and make a waxed-paper sailboat.

The explosives section can wait until he’s five and can read it himself.

Things from my ‘box of pretties’.

2011-10-22T01:37:00.000-07:00

I have in my mind a ‘box of pretties’. They are little gifts to me, and tend to be a bit like that old jewellery inherited by nanna. I know they are sometimes truly precious and at other times cheap tat. They are in my box because they are gold and pearls, emeralds and moonstone, ephemeral and true.
You could not open the box of pretties; they are intangible and only mine.
In my box
Getting the coveted yellow crayon on day three of prep. I made the sun!

Staying with Aunty Shirl and Uncle Ian and their four kids when I was five and Mum and Dad went oversees: loud meals! Children everywhere! Splooshy shared baths! Custard for dessert! Bunk beds!

A youth called Otis in my first car (yellow 1974 Volvo) stroking my thigh in 1989, parked outside the Metro on Russell Street, and groaning aloud.

My first wanted-positive pregnancy stick, in a flat in Elsternwick, three days after buying my first home with Chris: she was Violet-in-an-instant and she was GRAND!

Being on the library desk at StKilda when a very old Jewish man said quite suddenly “oh your eyes”. I felt very caught, and vulnerable, and just said ‘what?’ He kept my gaze and replied: “they are so big, and so sad”. I had just the week before miscarried my second, and I thought I had hid it so well, and his human-ness made me come undone in secret toilet-tears. But I felt such kindness.

Saying, “I’m so pleased to meet you” when the nurses laid a weird and bloody little alien across my chest almost three years ago.

A kiss under the fort in a park, a while ago now, but when I shouldn’t have. O- sweet cliché: the rain, a near stranger, some small talk, our moment: wet wool and murmurs.

An inscription in a poetry book by a man I held dear and would never touch.

Being allowed to make the Napolitana sauce for my Italian neighbours children; they turned up red-rimmed smiles to say ‘yummy’.

Holding my old cat’s paw, stroking him and telling him how loved he was as he passed on. And that same cat aged one ‘combing’ my very-long hair with those same paws while a fire crackled in the old room: OUCH!
:

I sat down to write with a small jewel-box in the lap of my mind. But it GROWS. Everything I write begets more treats for the box. As Dr Seuss would say in ‘Green Eggs and Ham’: “try it you’ll like it, try it you will see”

What would be in your box-of-pretties?

life, just lately...

2011-10-03T01:53:00.000-07:00

so something has me talking about spooks lately

2011-08-27T22:02:00.000-07:00

People around me who know how much I enjoy pop-science are surprised that I see ghosts. I see them routinely and without shock, and I have done since childhood. I see them with ease, sometimes as familiars, and sometimes as cheeky interlopers who just need to be reminded that they don’t (even if they did at some stage) pay the rent, mortgage or bills.

I grew up in a family where we talked easily about the ghosts, not always seriously, but aloud nonetheless. Dad thought it all mad but could scare me witless with old bush-tales of ghosts that roamed the desert around Burke where he walked and worked as a young man with his Dad.
They were joked about, occasionally complained about, often referred to, and always with a sense of tongue in cheek. Yet they prevailed in so many women-chats that they have always capered down the hallways of my childhood in a way that is as real and ‘feelable’ as the woof and weave of the beige-pile-carpet or patterned olive-green bathroom tiles.

Aunty Shirl had the ghost of ‘crazy Eileen’ show up at a jokey drunken séance she hosted. Eileen was a family member who’d died young and with Alzheimer’s. Aunty Mavis had the woman who’d gassed herself to death in the flat years before. On the night he died our Uncle Ian came to see my brother Dean, then fourteen, to tell him not to worry but to look after Dad. Dean is as pretty straight up kind of bloke but still gets shivery thinking about it.
One night when I was ten I dreamed that Nana came and tucked me in. the next morning I was having the usual cuppa in bed with Mum and she said she’d dreamed that she and Nana were sharing a Dixie cup ice-cream. The phone rang and we got the news that she’d died.
In a rental property in Vermont I lived in at five there were the doors to the lounge that opened, the gas oven that went on overnight causing panicked evacuations, the awful passing odours in the hallway and my bedroom blinds would be flung up often overnight. I saw one in a flat in Windsor at twenty, a sad woman dressed for work at the end of my bed, and recently one in my lounge; an old woman clutching a brown cardigan to her chest and looking startled by me. Interestingly neither Mum nor I have tuned in to male ones!

I do ‘see’ them, but not as fady-apparitions all see through, or as real people. I see them as I feel them as a high-speed flat image like a photo transposed over what is ‘really’ there, and I’ve just learned to assume/trust that the image I see so quickly is probably an intuitive representation, not a photo…maybe its even how they saw themselves. But the mind is a tricksy and old sea and who knows what shells it has shored up in its depths.

The other ways in which I ‘see’ them are as odours or darkness’s. Sometimes in a Spring-lit room that is positively twitching with light reflections there is simply a dark shape at the edge. Pay attention to it. At other times I reckon I’ve walked through a ghost fart, and phew are they dank and malodorous!

I used to think they were always about place, but now I wonder…my son has definitely attracted shadows, sound, lights and fizz. He’s made ‘things’ happen around the home that are new. Just new. Not scary, though sometimes in the night the expanse of black hallway from loo to bed can seem cooler than it should, my bare ankles feel strangely vulnerable and I feel the icy gaze of the other pressing the skin tighter on my shoulder blades, envious and seething as it watches me flee on warm and alive patty-feet back to the bed…

Fais do do

2011-08-26T10:22:00.000-07:00

In the dark of a New Orleans eve folks might gather for a Fais do do. Strangely this translates as a wild party of dance, song, food and flirtation. The phrase actually comes from this gorgeous old French Lullaby that Creoles have kept alive in New Orleans. I believe it translates as 'to your dormier' (bedroom) and was sung as babes were swept off to bed. That it then became the phrase for staying up late and partying all night was reflective of an ironic or falsely authorative command- 'off to bed with you now'. it is a beautiful lullaby, of simple melody and comorting meaning:

Fais do do, Colas mon petit frere
Go to sleep, Colas, my little brother,

Fais do do, t'auras du lolo.
Go to sleep, and you'll have a treat.

Maman est en haut, Elle fait des gateaux
Mama is upstairs making cakes,

Papa est en bas, Il fait du chocolat.
Papa is downstairs making chocolate.

Fais do do, Colas mon petit frere
Go to sleep, Colas, my little brother,

Fais do do, t'auras du lolo.
Go to sleep,
and you'll have a treat.

just perfect, which is why I'm learning it.
lily

Pregnant

2011-07-24T22:27:00.000-07:00

It's a loaded word isn’t it, something we often spend most of our youth desperately avoiding, then perhaps part of our life chasing to varying lengths and extremes of intervention.

My periods have always been wacky, very heavy, and I also in the last five years have had PMT blow out to encompass a fortnight, something pretty unfair on those around me! In the last year it seems I’ve gone peri-menopausal, and that could last ages and just means periods are very irregular. Two in a month? Sure! Then a two month wait? Sure!
So figuring that there were no ‘safe’ times I could guarantee the Captain did the noble thing and sorted out a vasectomy. Done and dusted? No way.
After three months of postoperative tests he was down to 1% ‘motile’ sperm. So we thought we’d still play a bit safely (fill in the details you’re all wize enough too) but a whole night sans Finn (who was having a blast eating ice-cream and being generally spoilt at Na and Pa’s house) combined with a blissful sleep in, coffee in bed and some amorous snuggling and well, you know what happens.
So three weeks late I last night lay awake, breasts hot and hard, just knowing that irony with a big I might be playing a big trick on us. I hopped online (as you do when insomnia and a health concern kick in to keep you awake for five hours) and Lo- entire forums devoted to the multitude of women having unplanned pregnancies after their partners had vasectomies. Turns out that ‘sperm motility reactivation’ does not seem to be the one in five thousand chance listed in the vasectomy brochure, or if so then every one is online and talking about their shocking news.
I’m a feminist, know my rights and have always been willing to avail myself of them should the need arise, but it seemed (at 4am anyway) that anything that damned determined to find is way might need to be admired, even if not welcomed.
I spent the rest of then night organising space logistics in the home, and figuring out that Finn would be out of (expensive) day care before the zygote was in it, and that I still had some long service leave to add to maternity leave, and there was someone who could walk into my job (but might have needed poisoning to exit it!). Not excited, certainly not, but pragmatic and considering, yes.
All the while my breasts ached and tingled (the biggest surest sign of early pregnancy) and I pondered why I felt disloyal to Finn in thinking that the pregnancy could continue to its conclusion, a sibling for him and the whole crazy treadmill again for us.

I took a train to Newport, where an old-fashioned strip of red-brick shops hosts a chemist. I bought my package and came home and waited for wee, which can be slow when you’re clenched all over.
I just tested negative, having kept my eyes shut and refusing to look for much longer than the required three minutes.
Despite all the ‘planning’ I went through I know the vasectomy was the right choice, for when I saw that blue stripe flying solo I whooped with relief.
one little word, so loaded. It's like the shortest story ever told really.

and about the image? well someone told me recently that blogs are personal, no matter that the audience could be known, or not, or small, or big.
lily.

long time, but can't say sorry (Sorry!)

2011-07-11T22:42:00.000-07:00

Hello to the folks who view. As you may know I am alive! And quite well too…
The leaves on the ‘tree of blog’ were always ones to be observed and quietly admired in a cupped palm; their tan veins a little life-reckoning…

A long time without posts… Just count me as caught in winter and the deep freeze or more honestly the budding of my boy Finn. Ah Mr Finn MacCool (!) Little sun, little Bugger! I think you were born with your namesake’s narrative imprinted, or maybe all heroes are two-year-olds! Your attitude and articulation of life know no bounds. They intrigue, appeal, remind, annoy, enrage, upset and often make me secretly snigger with misplaced pride (o your rages, o your certain feet-stomping’)

I (secretly) think you are all your middle-name of Wilson, but then you go and surprise me with Sager, all musically attuned and intent last night as you built ‘robot man’ with Dad out of MegaBlocks between drumming to ABC classical.

And the way you take to Grand-Souls’ homemade books (and yes they are darn good) like you know they are uniquely read to no-other-boy-but-Finn. Solway is your paternal Granny, she who comes with flute and home-made-books and songs sung in key (unlike ME!) but also dodgy heavy bread…

One day when you can understand we will most likely tell you why “ I don’t have Brothers or Sisters”. When you came along we named you for the ‘Fair One’ and for the wonderful Finn MacCumahaill (because you have some solid Irish heritage via the Cleary’s) and our friend Ursula blessed you with (dropped cigarette) ash and song when you were six days old…

Your name means at different times ‘fair’ or ‘bright’ or ‘certitude’.
You are none and possibly all of those. You are a toddler (baby/boy) with big eyes that seek. You are pretty wonderful, you give awesome hugs, and tell pretty funny stories, and play the drums better than Mum, and swim like a Fishy In Your Bath.

I like you as much as I love you. Liking you probably takes up more of my time! For me, my sweet and yummy-tummy boy, there is Certitude. I love you. I love Chris. I love your Father and all of your Grandparents. This is the post I felt too shy to write.

autumn morning at home with beauty

2011-03-05T17:40:00.000-08:00

a songbird found my garden

2011-03-05T01:05:00.000-08:00

Singing crept up and tapped me on the shoulder when I was depressed. I had post-natal anxiety, which even now just two years later is being acknowledged as a form of post-natal depression and treated similarly. The difference as I was told it at the time was that I was able to bond with my newborn, was able to get dressed and even sometimes leave the home, but that my anxiety about things that could go wrong had disabled me from being able to function normally. That means that I was awash with tears, as in all the time. That I’d cling to my husband as he left for work and cry harder. That when left alone with my newborn I could function as long as I didn’t have to leave the house or see anybody at all, including close family and friends.
Pushing the stroller I would fear that I’d get the urge to let it roll into traffic, then fearing that urge I would fear I had post-natal psychosis.

This vicious circle was worsened by not being successful at breastfeeding. That alone is loaded with womanly failure, but on a very practical level it means it’s harder to get a baby to sleep. Breast equals comfort; even adults know the pleasure of cuddling against breasts, and to not be able to offer this to my baby made getting him off to sleep all the more difficult. So he’d cry then so would I.

One day I tentatively started to sing. Feeling that the act of singing made me breathe deeply and slowly for the first time in weeks, I just kept going. When I first sang my chest hurt from breathing normally again it had been so compressed with panic. I ran out of known lullabies very fast and so fell back into singing what I had as a pre-smoking amateur actress: show tunes and jazz standards. I sang badly, then as my throat got used to the strange little stretches, I know I sang better. I found an ability to move into my own falsetto, and in doing so found many songs became more singable. I sang so constantly that before long I was walking the neighbourhood singing past new gardens and old people in them, past mechanics and bakers and thyme-pizza-makers. It not only got me past the worst, it made me happy, very often and very easily.

It helped fix my soul up. The next step was going to be meds, but I’m glad I didn’t have to go there. I think it was just part of the fix, combined with time, settling hormones, growing confidence, more fresh-air walks and a baby that was starting to sleep to a kind of routine. But I know that my singing and relaxing was all tied into his ability to sleep.

I don’t ‘have’ to sing as much now because I’m not constantly working to make a newborn relaxed and fearless. But I miss it and so remind myself when setting up the old sixties library I work at, to just sing. As I switch on PCs in the glowing early light, I sing folk tunes and gay tunes and swing tunes and rock. I sing jazz and when I forget the words I make up my own blue tales of women wronged and men with shine, tramps in new shoes and ladies pulling tricks for a dime.

Of all the lovely things to have come my way in the last few years this singing and the simple, forgiving pleasure I find in it has been the most singularly precious to me, the woman who came before the Mother and now sits alongside.

'Harlem Nocturne'

2011-01-31T02:09:00.000-08:00

At forty, dancing with cats will do.

2011-01-21T18:21:00.000-08:00

I had a hissy fit at work the other day. With some hindsight there were some decisions made I was not a Happy Jan about, but with further hindsight, (which is different) there was basically the fact that fifteen years there dealing with recurring problems had suddenly made me feel jaded, tired, and old.

I don’t often feel old. Despite always claiming I was ‘born forty’ I’ve never equated that with feeling cynical, over it, past it or anything else negative. Instead I’ve equated ‘feeling forty’ with a kind of ease-of-self and earthiness combined with a love of glamour and capricious behaviour; for me forty always seemed delicious and a little bit naughty. Sexy in fact.
So it’s with some surprise that I finally catch up to myself and hit forty come April. If given free reign and not in love with a man I would be wearing a Waratah print dress and writing a ‘love column’ for a schlock newspaper somewhere up around Hat-Head Bay.

If still just living with ‘the Captain’ we would be celebrating at Aqua e Vino with some big dollars splurged on feeding our friends cocktails from a three-hundred page drinks menu whilst a Swing Band played. As a Fair, Fat and Forty Mum I’m instead going to a gastro-pub near a beach with twenty people, passing the bub on to my parents after dinner, then having drinks and tunes in a funky little back-bar of the pub.

And hey- I’ll dance, shamelessly and drunkenly. It will be my night but I’ll try to be gracious, share my toys and say ‘please’ and ‘thank-you’. I’ll dance with my man, and some very old chums (I can say that now in truth and not offence!) and then I’ll come home silly and dance some more.

And if all the people go home too soon I’ll go out back, to the deck and garden in the home I’ve made (because I’m forty) and I’ll seductively call in Damage-Cat (because I’m wily) and dance with him amongst the spinach and hops plants.

He’s my fifth cat (because I’m forty) but he doesn’t know that. He knows the moon, the night, my perfume and what it is to be both domestic and feral.
He’ll just press his furry cheek against mine (because I’m lovely) and purr as we dance.

when not working I...

2011-01-13T01:08:00.000-08:00

stuff

2011-01-13T00:52:00.001-08:00

tonka!

all for me? butter cookie green trees

Ho Ho Ho (and as my friend Tanya would say- 'where, where, where?')

2010-12-27T18:20:00.000-08:00

It probably speaks volumes that (ex events-waitress style) I had a three page ‘run sheet’ for xmas day food preparation that began with mango-sorbet making last Thursday, moved into gluten-free stuffing creation on Friday and ended with ‘water on for peas and roasting juices on the stove for gravy’ at 12.15 Christmas day when, thanks to my open plan dining-to-kitchen arrangement everyone laughed and took photos whilst my toddler screamed in terror (of the electric carving knife, and grandparents are cruel) and my husband bailed on his ‘gravy-stirring’ duties to calm said child. Dad stepped in to stir gravy, mum followed behind me with sadly shrivelled little peas, toddler was becalmed with his ‘Mr Potato Head’ and the turkey was served. A word on the turkey- massive. And also huge and floppy and difficult to wrangle with the stuffing and butter and the kitchen string then even harder to carve as my child caterwauled and people asked me to ‘pose again like Nigella’. Fuckers….
But after all that the bird was (insert vegetarian alert here) very yummy and has made great sandwiches for us and some stray neighbours for three days now.
Master Finn played with his many toys (yay for Tonka, Fisher-Price and the beautiful rocking Pony he has named Hoodi-ooey) but mostly Mr Potato-Head because I ROCK at picking presents.
We have been semi-drunk on leftover wines for three days, almost like those irresponsible adutls we used to be, and (insert spoiler alert for prim types here) I’ve been getting some sugar in my bowl, a little jelly in my jelly-roll etc etc.

Thank god the cleaners came today though; my mum has shaky arthritis wrists and we’ve been finding peas in some highly unusual places!

However you did it, I give you this sentiment: ‘merrily met, merrily set, now parted we, blessed be.’

Pics will be up later.

monogomy is for marriage, not for blogs

2010-11-16T00:41:00.000-08:00

I'm off this grid for a while, endulging instead in the cheap, fast and dirty world of flash-fic and tiddly-wikis.
It's all a bit like some frottage against a nightclub wall really.
anon for now!

The train, the rain, and ‘Pomes Penyeach’

2010-10-13T16:41:00.001-07:00

I love train travel. Even the morning commute across two trains from West to East I used to love. I love the sway of them, the rumble of them, the narrowness of them forcing all these bodies together as a reminder that in each separate skull exists a universe of memories, ancestry and experiences. I don’t even mind that sometimes people on them are strange or smelly.

I have a train-affectation others might find strange. On train trips, long or short, I always have that arts-student staple: a ‘slim volume of poetry’. I started collecting battered old ‘slim volumes’ when I was in my late teens, often buying them from the Lake Bookhouse in Daylesford, and usually buying ones with loving inscriptions in the front leaves. The inscriptions could sway me to buy something more than knowledge of the poet. I loved that people used to give each other slim volumes of poetry and write messages in them too.

When I was in my late teens and early twenties I also fell very romantically in love (and with a surprising subtlety of inaction) with a man in his (very) late forties. He would perform at a place I often went, and scatter poetry recitation between music making with a glib and puckish sense of mischief. I adored him and knew nothing would or could ever happen, so I didn’t feel then need to test my developing wiliness on him! He must have known of my crush, and he always treated me respectfully, coming over at breaks to chat about books and music.

When I turned 21 he gave me a used 1960’s copy of James Joyce’s ‘Pomes Penyeach’. On the third page in and in a broad stroke of ink he’d written: To Amanda, with love, ………

The book though old was entirely unmarked save on thing: A single page had its corner folded. On that page was an asterix above the poem title. And the final word of the poem was underlined. To this day I wonder if he was telling me something, or if the notation was inherited with the second-hand book. The wondering was always OK and still is. On trains, reading the poem again, my heart feels warm and pleased with the gift he gave my young and chaotic self.

Alone

Thee moon’s greygolden meshes make
All night a veil,
The shorelamps in the sleeping lake
Laburnum tendrils trail.

The sly reeds whisper to the night
A name- her name-
And all my soul is a delight
A swoon of shame

(James Joyce, Zurich, 1916)

in sickness and in (sickness)

2010-09-19T21:09:00.000-07:00

I was feeling a bit bragful yesterday that we were all on holiday as a family, everyone was healthy for a change, and we were about to head up to a lovely country town where our friends live opposite a river with their two kids, two acres, tow cats and a dog.
This was going to be real free-range time for Finn, pecking in the dirt with three-year-old Gil and five year old Hermoine. Chris and I were going to drink on the porch with Gabe and Andrew as we admired our (playing nicely of course) offspring.

But alas I felt bragful too soon. When I went into Finn overnight it was to find him lying in a pool of snot, tears and sweat. I gave him Panadol, put a fresh sheet under his poor damp little head, and went back to bed myself with fingers crossed. But this morning he has spots, and the kind Doc has diagnosed a ‘random virus’.

So no road trip this time round. But on the bright side perhaps I’ll get in some gardening, distress the very ugly sideboard that has good ‘bone-structure’ and cook a meal for some friends or neighbours.

And Finn is a calm bub when unwell. He knows the drill: stewed pears, cold porridge, raisins, cartoons, cuddles and warm baths. If only adult men would listen to their good nurses the dreaded ‘man flu’ could be stopped in its tracks…

how to combat an expanded waistline, 40s style!

2010-08-04T02:16:00.000-07:00

a day off spent in sunshine is a soul-good thing

2010-07-26T22:17:00.001-07:00

Oh my- what a shiny house and serious looking garden I now have.
I must have realized some time ago that the first brighter days would have me just gagging to Spring clean, cause I’d booked myself a day off sans Finn.

I have been Goddess of hard domestic graft today. My house is shiny thanks to Valerie Vac and her hard-working dust-brush attachment.

My garden is edged, mowed and looking surprisingly cared for thanks to two hulking (and handsome) Samoan men who came and conquered courtesy of Jim’s gardening services. Now that’s money well spent: brawn to work and brawn to watch.

One self-satisfied mistress of the house right here, I’ll post photos later!

A really very hard weekend.

2010-07-04T01:07:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I long for baths with candles and oils. For afternoons where I work my way through a bottle of wine and reminisce with my man about stomping our feet to drumbeats or playing pool with travellers where three countries meet.
These days any bath I have involves a little plumply pale wiggle of boy-flesh called Finn. Fun but not exactly sensuous. My bath has squirty toys instead of ‘products’.
My man and I reminisce about sleep…

All this weekend our son has been battling sickness to try and walk. And more power to him-. It’s a Herculean effort and one I have full respect for. I feel extreme pride in watching his tenacity. But oh the misery that in applying it he’s cried every half hour for ten minutes for the last 72 hours. During which time he also wouldn’t eat.

I’ve always remembered the stress felt when my cats haven’t eaten as it’s seemed a precursor to Very Bad Things (like feline aids or cancer).
So add that to the fact that at 4 days old my son was near-starving without me understanding just how poorly breast-feeding was going for us and you might start to have an impression of how horrible it has been to watch my baby go without food for days.
People and ‘experts’ say a baby or child won’t starve himself or herself if food is offered. To them I say FUCK OFF AND WATCH MY SON DO A GOOD IMPERSONATION OF ANOREXIA.
Finally today, at 4pm after much crying from parents and bub there was some respite: a tired baby taken out for a very long walk, then bathed with some drops of lavender, then made to watch his fave TV shows, then sat down to eat.
And he ate- rice and stew then fruit and yoghurt. Then a cracker to top it all off. With every bite my shoulders dropped by an inch. Now he sleeps and I am having gin-tonics and nibbling olives. I have never been more deserving.

And I JUST DON’T CARE that I thought my next blog would be more interesting.
Next stop: reality, population 23, no camping, no fires, no dogs off-leash.

'Simple Pleasures at the Duchess of Spotswood'

2010-06-21T02:44:00.000-07:00

As a local keen to support new ventures in Hudson's road I've been haunting this lovely new restaurant/cafe since its inception. The owners are earnest in their big dreams for the place and I don't doubt they'll bring them to realization. They work long and hard and treat foood with real respect and passion. The venue, an old block-fronted terrace, is loaded with potential and at present just charming with its glittery chandelier, old wood fittings and milk-white paint. I don't always get to eat there, but last Friday decided to do some 'work from home' which means getting away from the bootiful bub to work in a cafe. I was in luck.
Was there something new? yes. I asked for it, and lo, here was one chef-Andy had just prepared: a plate of typically English 'simple pelasures' brought together for their party in the mouth- a genteel but sophisticated house-party of the kind we might see some minor aristocracy at. A mouth-party 'Tattler' would photograph for its fashion pages: crispy fluffy diced potato, a generous mound of delicate lemony goats curd, soft but fleshy globe artichoke lifted with a briny pucker on the palate and then oh joy, darkly sweet segmemts of chesnut. Served with their beautiful toasted sourdough any of these treats would have pleased alone, but on Andy's advice I merged a few flavours for best effect- comforting, salty, heavy, lemony, sweet, crunch. yum.
Topped off with a coffee made to perfection by the glowing hostess Bobby.
Get over the bridge, it's worth it.

after a long day talking to a pre-verbal bub I'm feeling non- verbal

2010-06-09T01:32:00.000-07:00

Here is Spotswood. At 6.10am to 7.30am two weeks ago.
It was cold. I'm not a photographer, and it really was VERY cold, and my camera is average.

But I love the bleak and graphic industrial lines juxtaposed with old softening homes and unkempt gardens. The homes and the parks came before much of the bleakness of economic downturn and disused industrial space but the majority of the factories came before the homes. Its just that the original factory architectue was often surprisingly pretty 'iced' red brick.The problem was what sprang up then fell down around it in the late twentieth century .
o hell- just see the film. It's called 'Spotswood' and was filmed all around my streets and stars Russell Crowe, Ben Mendehlson, Toni Colette and Sir Anthony Hopkins. Its old and very good.
and on that note:

and:

one day I shall blog again

2010-06-08T02:12:00.001-07:00

it might help if my regular-blogs-to-read weren't so long and so interesting that I feel I must comment. By the time I've gone-a-visiting and yapping on theirs the tea is poured, the cats are purring and the Man wants company. drat it. I'm off to read something from my beloved Norton's anthology of poetry. bugger blogging.

(Not so) Random Acts of Selflessness…

2010-05-13T03:06:00.001-07:00

When I was nineteen years old and in my first year of uni in Clayton I devoted a lot of time between classes to the care, comfort and good humour of my maternal Grandfather Ken Graham. He was becoming increasingly frail despite a tall frame, lantern jaw and pomp of white hair. I was sick of love as I then knew it, in all its manifestations of sweaty nightclub gropings or wild infatuations for people I’d never have to confront with said wildness.
So I made a fairly conscious decision, as well as the sentimental one of my pa’s little ‘ginger nut’, to dash off in Daisy Datsun to his home in nearby Keysborough while the other girls my age shopped at Chadstone or hit the uni bar to talk film-theory.

I was making a choice to try and learn how to love as I thought ‘real grown ups’ did, with responsibility attached. So I vacced his flat, made him lunch, organised his pills on the nightstand where a painting of the ballet Swan Lake gave view to my memories of a pastel-hued and violet- scented Nanna. Sometimes to be naughty we’d share along-neck of VB. When I left I believe he’d then have a few wee drams of Scotch and don the clan kilt he had made up at age 70 from a lady he bowled with.

Sometimes we get these moments of choice to be more selfless. Other times they’re thrust upon us. But it’s a strange word, ‘selfless’ because even when we can cast a fair bit of ego and internal angst to the side in order to care for another, the self never really goes. Its there ticking away, occasionally resentful even as we love, frustrated with its own needs as we tend to those of another, wondering when it will end, or indulging in the secret basement-level fantasies of how we could be relived of duty.

And really, who would want to be entirely selfless? How dangerous, how boring, what a cry from the crucifix: “oh look at me and watch me bleed so that I can absolve you of all your mucky human failings.” To live like that, in habit or out of fear of hell or just of bad press strikes me as pretty superficial really.

But it’s good to make the choice sometimes. And not good in some namby pamby or moral way. It’s good because it can temporarily create a different song against the drum, that ever-present noisy self that tocks away like Poe’s beating heart under the floor in the dark and the dirty stuff.

The random or chosen times of selflessness remind me that when its crunch-time, much can be dispensed with, much of the noise can drop away. Time can be found, and energy, and empathy.
The song becomes clearer and the lyrics very familiar, so that we can just sing along for a while in a fair harmony with another. The internal drum still beats, but it just has its place in bigger music, for a while at least.

Just a random aside

2010-04-25T02:23:00.000-07:00

I have a mild form of Synesthesia (a much-debated neurological oddity) which mostly manifests as what’s called ‘grapheme to colour synesthesia; that is I see colours very clearly attached to many words, particularly numbers and days.
But whilst that’s my most prevalent form (and most common generally) I also get occasional odd little connections between words/sounds and taste. Some music can bring a flood of saliva and taste (of oranges or something else specific) to my mouth.
The other night on the news a reporter used in regards to a legal case the phrase ‘due diligence’. My mouth flooded with saliva in a foul metallic-tasting way as it does when I’m extremely nausea. It was a brief sensation and mulling it over later I recognized it as a strange reaction to the phrase, and searched my mind to see if anything else wanted to connect, a kind of Rorschach mind-game. The word ‘Antwerp’ and an image of a coca-cola can were circling like cartoon birds do on a fresh-banged head and then began to seem so logically connected that I chanted them like a mantra: ‘due diligence, Antwerp, aluminium, coke’ over and over.
Yesterday upon remembering this I thought it was just a silly thing that got into my head then stuck like a Spice Girls song can still sometimes do. (“I tell you what I want what I really really want!”). But then today it came back so I decided to punch those words into the all-knowing Google-Goddess. Was there a connection? Hell yeah! Underground in Antwerp is a factory that produced among other things aluminium, for among other companies, Coca-Cola. In the days when aluminium cans were still around Coca-Cola was faced with thousands of people around Europe becoming sick (nausea and vomiting) from drinking from aluminium cans made at the Antwerp plant. This occurred in 1989, and back then my family drank 1.25 litres of coke per day. I have absolutely no recollection of this news story breaking in Australia, and have never thought about a place called Antwerp until seeing a crazy dance sequence on Youtube where folks at Antwerp station all break into the song ‘Doe, a Deer’ from ‘The Sound of Music’. Yet I guess it was big news and I must have heard a mention of it and just filed it away in the ‘forget for now’ part of the brain, where it made this connection to a mouthful of metallic saliva. For I do recall a bad batch of coke (though we drank bottles) that made Mum and I sick at one stage. When we called the company they said over-syruping had happened on some batches and offered us a free case. On behalf of my teeth I‘d like to apologise for the fact that we accepted it…
So over twenty years ago I digested (along with some bad coke) a little news-bite about Antwerp being a place that made cans for Coke. Something got into my brain about people wanting to sue Coke for getting sick. And so now the phrase ‘due diligence’ brings a taste of warm sickly metal to my mouth. Brains are surely bizarre. I mean, how weird is that?

The thinning of the veils and the comfort of food.

2010-04-09T20:20:00.000-07:00

I thought my next post was going to be about dear old neighbour Ray and how he holds the history of my home in his memory of living opposite it for forty years.
But on this grey autumn day my thoughts are turning, as a cake is baking, to other things domestic, ritualistic and fey.
Many years ago I called myself a ‘wiccan’ and practised with good friends some of the celebrations and rituals I believe are known to all women be they witch, Jew, Christian, of any faith or no religious faith at all.
At the heart of the magic I’ve practised formally or just in living is the idea that we can bless and make sacred our home and relationships through little offerings, little altars and kitchen magic.
Autumn is my birth season and the one I love most. But it is also the season of decay, of final harvest, of pulling in the produce to put away for winter. Autumn is the time of preparation against death, yet as the air grows colder it is also a time when many people die. In old pagan practises it was a time to invite in against the cold the spirits of loved ones, as the veils between life and death thinned to bring the spirit world nearer. You’d do this with bonfires, an extra table place set, and the glimmer of the fires and candles seen in your home from the dark world a world away.

I have two friends, Sharnee and Tanya, a couple in a fifteen-year-long relationship who refer to each other fondly as ‘wifey’.
Last weekend Tanya’s sister died of an asthma attack she simply could not recover from. Two years ago Tanya’s brother died in a motorbike accident, an event she is barely recovering from as this new pain brings its chill and gloom to her life and home.

So on this Autumn Saturday I am reminded that the best, the oldest, the only true magic is that kitchen magic all women know. When there is birth for a loved one we take food to nourish an exhausted mother. When there is sorrow for a friend we pour tea or wine or soup. We show our apologies in perfectly cooked favourite meals, and when there is death we do what women the world over do and have done for centuries. We arrive with a box or basket or bowl of things home-cooked or garden-picked. We visit briefly, hug, put away the things on the draining board, make tea, then leave, somehow consoled ourselves in the process of consoling.

So today I bake and boil, and I bless the chicken for the egg, and the cow for the butter and the pig for the pork in the meatballs. I stir and think of my lovely friend and her bruised self and imagine her reaching into the fridge, thoughtless in grief, to find something made by someone else with love. She should not think of me as she does so, she should only eat, and for a moment perhaps feel the hug that has been folded into the food along with every blessing I can find in the pantry.

rebirth of blog

2010-03-13T01:54:00.000-08:00

Friday morning sky from my rear porch.

Last year I spent a great deal of time at home being a new Mum to my new son. Whilst consumed by the minutiae and day to day of this strange new world of motherhood I was aware too of my home in entirely new ways. I was not at work each day, but instead seeing the seasonal changes slanting their light upon known places and objects in different ways. I was walking my streets with a stroller and with the literal capacity to stop and smell the roses, and the daphne, and the lilac and magnolias.
I love homes, and am a shameless voyeur into the ways in which people live with the things and colours dear to them.
Stay tuned as my blog becomes reborn into an expose of life in a lopsided but dear old weatherboard in Spotswood. There’ll be some tales strange and true of renovating on a shoestring, you’ll meet my Dad (also known as Grandpa Bang-Bang), some of the wild and woolly characters I meet on my rounds with the stroller and hopefully learn how not to make mistakes with stud-finders, hammer drills and power outlets that back onto leaking water lines.
The house was built in 1939 and is a side-entry three-bedroom dwelling that was extended at the rear to incorporate what is now a large lounge-room. Being old and loved by many before me she is full of character, foibles and capriciousness. In other words she came with baggage, and not all of it pretty…

'Grandpa Bang-Bang stripped out the old bathroom and found electrical wiring wrapped around the shower plumbing...

I love creating little altars (piles of things? collections?) and don't believe in clear surfaces. My husband says that's OK, they believe in me. This ode to old fashioned pretty is on a windowsill in my bathroom. The powder compact was my Mum's from the early fifties, and the tiny gold box is a sewing kit that belonged to my Grandmother when she was a young housewife.

I love this blurry image of another little altar. At christmas my parents gave me a tiny faux-art-deco record player that also plays CDs and radio. The sound quality isn't great but it looks so shiny-red and cute with its glowing lights and twiddly nobs. I use it to play just one thing really, my 12 album set ofswing and jazz. It sits in 'my' room along with a wall of bookshelves, a soft leather couch, and my rattan rocking chair.

When the hailstorm hit Melbourne last weekend my little family bunkered down in this room with mugs of tea, baby toys and the record player. I danced cheek to cheek with my baby while my man flopped out on the couch.
My home nourishes me enourmously, as does a good trife...

A day in the life

2010-01-02T15:07:00.000-08:00

Finn:
You start the day with a rumble, then a growl followed by a yowl. The red light on the baby monitor flashes its alert “Get up!”
I go to you and open the venetions singing an aubade from the ‘Hair’ soundtrack as I unpack you. ‘Good morning starshine, the earth says hello, you twinkle above us, we twinkle below.’
Dad has already fed you some hour or two earlier so you’re content to start the day with our little song. Giggle, rub eyes, the swag gets unzipped and you stretch out for bear. Tickles, kisses then up for bed-cuddles where you grasp at our hair and poke twiddly little fingers into our mouths (such interesting caves of treasures: tongue and teeth!).
Uppity up, rolls on the floor, weeties and banana or pear in your highchair then kiss Dad bye-bye, pull on his hat and tie and we begin our long and languorous day.

Little bug, one day you may learn all about science and maybe even quantum physics, but for now just now this. We trick time every day by keeping our world very small in space and distance covered. Before your morning nap it’s off in the stroller up and down and round and round the local streets, stopping in the village for my coffee and your flirty little smiles at strangers and local folks alike. Michael the Lebanese pizza man pulls faces and says he’ll steal you. The ladies in the newsagent grin and coo and sometimes can’t resist tugging one of your perfect little fingers. On our way home I give you a flower or leaf and point out the cats. I sing as I walk, completely unabashed in my wailing of blues or showtunes, and people behind fences are benign when they hear us pass with our song.
In the lounge again you roll or commando crawl, and Whiskey-cat eggs you on with her teasy little half-skips away: ‘come and catch me, yes you can’.

Back to bed for you Mr Finn, Finn-bo, Finn-de-do. Sometimes you resist and I have to sing “All aboard the sleepy-train, all aboard the sleepy train, all aboard the sleepy train, we’re going to Sleepy Ville’. While you snooze I potter about doing housework, perhaps whipping up your favourite mashed peas or fish stew meals to freeze. Its only 10.30 and we’ve already tricked time, so much day still ahead. There is your ‘wake-up poo’ that I sing to: ‘Let’s have a look at your bum chum, let’s have a look t your nappy, Pappy, cause your bum might glum chum, and we want it to be happy, happy happy, happy-happy!’

After your lunch we often take train trips: To Yarraville for faces and shops, or to Altona Beach for vast sea views and the smell of the pines. You love being out on the pier, the rumble of planks under the stroller wheels massages you into doziness and your eyelids soften against the glare of silver water and sky.

We spend a lot of time on th floor together as you learn to first grasp, then grab, then sit, roll, spin and finally do a high speed tummy crawl around the place. Cuddles and tickles and books are had. You love ‘Maisy’ and ‘Does a cat wear glasses’ but you hate ‘the Very Hungry Caterpillar’ and cry when you see the butterfly. You cry from tooth-pain too, and some days we just get by together cause your mouth is sore and you feel miserable. That’s when you get rusks and cold watermelon and your gums rubbed with Bonjella. On those days I get tired and sad that I can’t help and I’m grateful when your Dad gets home.
There’s another nap or two (lucky you) and each time you wake up happy and I am happy with you as I breathe in the gorgeous sweet smell your baby-breath has filled the room with. So the days roll on, small in the physical world we traverse, enormous in the learning and feeling and wonder. Time stretches out like a seemingly endless ball of string.

But there is an end, and this particular ball is at its.
Tomorrow I return to work part-time and hand you over into the loving hands of your Dad each day. With him you’ll play in new ways and learn new things.
And though I’m sad as I say farewell to this beautiful time spent with you I know we’ll always have had it, I will always be here to touch and tangle limbs with.
I am your touchstone, the giver of leaves and flowers, the maker of songs of games.
You will grow away and be fierce in your independence, but I will always be your singer of morning starshine, your Mum.

teething bub

2009-12-08T21:29:00.000-08:00

A very quick post with plenty of tags! Hopefully some needy parents will find this and perhaps find it useful.
Our baby boy at eight months seems to have been about to cut a tooth forever.
His symptoms are:
flushed cheeks, a scaly rash under his chin from drooling, a lot of drooling, lethargy (some days) irritability (other days) occasional cold symptoms (without a temperature)chomping on everything and 'gluey' poos. Do always check your baby's temp is normal and there are no rashes, as teething symptoms can be unfortunately close to those of more serious illnesses.
Things we find that help are 'Bonjella' ointment rubbed on his gums, lots of extra sleeping opportunities, rusks to chew, a little liquid baby panadol at night and very cold food good for sucking. In Coles in Australia you can buy a little gadget that is a small mesh bag with plastic lid attached to a ring. They are in the baby-food section. Very cold soft fruit and veg shoved into this works really well- he can suck and chew on the treat in the bag, top up his hydration and the mesh fabric seems to rub his gums and alleviate the pain. We find cold watermelon to be a winner, but also cold soft-boiled veg or other fruit work too.
Good luck!

The ghosts I know

2009-10-27T17:33:00.000-07:00

Walk with me. Take that warm coat off your hook, for it is chilly and dusk sets in. We are in Windsor, almost at the corner of Hotham and Dandenong roads. Opposite the beautiful old red-walled cemetery are two white art deco blocks of flats. I don’t want to frighten you, and you may hold my hand, just to keep warm mind, but the left of the pair has ghosts aplenty. It’s best if you go on alone now.

If you walk down its driveway you’ll see at the end a two story flat. It’s new but tries in vain to repeat the swollen ship-curves of the original block. Can you feel it? There is an overlay that sits above and within this new structure. An old two-car garage has entries so narrow only a mini could fit, but there is Lisa’s turquoise valiant with its whitewall tires. She is a drummer in surf-rock band and has painted her damp flat in deep burnt red. On her shelves sit Barbies without heads, sparrow skulls, lizard skins, buttons and cans and chip packets from the seventies. She is a curator of detritus, a collector of what gets left behind: the ghosts of products, creatures, stuff.
Walk past the garage to the right. Here are the stairs, and at their end a wooden door. Emerge into the barnlike washroom, where an old copper and wringer appear as strange to us as medieval torture devices. Women may yet live who remember their red and chapped hands wringing out the baby’s nappies. Did they sing as they worked, or purse their lips with the effort? Through the door onto the garage roof. Ancient concrete and a lone hills-hoist strike a sombre bass-note against the treble of rooftops, antennas, elms and ivy-strangled grey walls.
This place where I would leave the world behind with beanbag, book and glass no longer exists, it is a ghost place. But you see it too.

In the same block of damp old deco flats: my first home out of home. One enormous lounge with a semi-circular window wall, and a narrow kitchen that always made people feel they were in a train car: wire fronted cupboards, an ancient aga-style cooker with gas-marks and a built in breakfast nook. Off the bedroom the mildewed, frayed and falling down glamour of a bath the size of a lap-pool, a Chrysler-building pattern of red and black tiles and a showerhead the size of a dinner plate. One morning as I lay in bed she emerged from the bathroom, an image of neat skirt suit and dark hair in a bun, an expression tired and a bit baffled to see me. Then I blinked and she was gone. Poof.
The new buyers ripped apart the kitchen to modernize, and removed the bath to accommodate a laundry. I wonder if the rising damp took the hint and retreated too. And doth my lady still linger?

Stroll downhill, perhaps along Alexander Ave and alongside the cemetery. On Inkerman Street you will find the Kimberly Hotel and beside it a large Jewish convention centre. The red brick flats that still pulse within its walls were completed on V.E. day. All six of these mansion apartments of two, three and four bedrooms with separate dining were already promised to returned veterans and their wives.
When I lived there amidst falling tiles, rising damp and threadbare rose-print carpet, June still lived there. The husband had left, but left her with four rooms, rent-controlled ‘for life’, and furnished in the calmly sparse and elegant pieces of the late forties. Whilst her flat was an understatement of olive and walnut, June wore sarongs, red lipstick and dyed her hair black on her back-step once a month. She swore like a trooper when her guaranteed home was sold out from under us. She’d never been told that the promise given her as a war bride was only valid if the husband lived there. You’d think they’d mention that. But she was still glad she’d kicked him out and emptied the teak liquor cabinet.
So now the Jewish community sings there within new walls, and my old neighbour Kerstin, a witch if ever there was, flits be-cloaked amongst her herb garden, calling to the corners and bedazzling the Autumn moon with her purely female smile. And in a gloomy central room I lay more logs into the tiny corner fire and pull my old red-velvet wingback chair closer in. The lover and I will drink Morris Pressings, eat pot-chilli and read. The kitten ‘X’ will soon jump on my lap, unknowing that after another twelve years of terrorizing small creatures and my hair elastics he will die peacefully in his new home, west of the water.

Sometimes when I walk these old places in my mind it seems my existence is being torn away behind me as structures tumble and are churned into the new. Then ‘I have fears that I may cease to be’.
I will cease to be. I will go. The Skipping girl may go, the Rialto, the clown-face of Luna Park, all may go. The icons, buildings and pathways of a personal history that trail behind me like a lost narrative seeking its author, all of this could go. And should my mind go, as well it may, even these tattered skirts of story trailing behind me will go too.
So take it all away. Stand me on the brink of the Western water. I can see the Dandenong ranges. I will find the known view and start walking towards my childhood, passing ghosts with every step.

I call this house my home.

2009-09-30T16:13:00.000-07:00

Having had (at my own behest) the Loving Hubby home a fair bit lately celebrating his abundance of annual leave, I’ve become increasingly aware that whilst we tread the same creaking boards and use the same loo, we have vastly different versions of the home.

I did not know til this last week that in the mornings and on autopilot I mosey round the rooms adjusting the blinds to achieve a kind of dim glow. Or that I will not play the radio for fear of bad music creeping in; I play only CDs and they tend to the ambient side now.

I have a bug up my bum about starting each day with the dishes cleared, but I don’t mind toy-strewn floors or neat piles of laundry-to-put-away.

Feeling at times out of sorts and fractious with the L.H at home I started to fear I was selfish about ‘hogging’ our baby, or just selfish about sharing space.
Then it started to dawn, as post-dawn the bright light would stream in, making any Finn-cries seem that bit sharper. The radio would go on, making my ears confused; do I tune in to it or the every-nuance-of-bub-talk that enables me to pre-empt Finn’s hunger, boredom or fatigue?

Finally I had the source of my angst. In this house lies many homes; those past with their extra walls, less walls, piled up carpets and layers of wall-paint, their outdoor loos and freestanding kitchens.
Then there are our versions as a DIY couple: carpet up, boards polished, lace curtains off, blinds up, bathroom out, bathroom in, concrete gone, veranda up.

Then the more routine daily ones. My home dim and near silent. His home sunny and throbbing with sound. A great many homes within a little bit of space.
And fair call I guess, the old lady whose weathered arms encircles us all each day is seventy. She’s allowed to be a little capricious, or demented.

Dream feed

2009-09-19T01:02:00.000-07:00

Around 3am there must be the first snuffles that alert me to begin waking.

I enter the room quietly in slipper-shod feet. I am still asleep but have drifted from bed to kitchen to nursery. The cats snore, entwined together on the leather couch, a warm fur-mountain of tails and paws.
In Finn’s room I pick him up, sleep-limp still and heavy, a little caterpillar cocooned in his duvet-thick swag.
We sit in the lamps dim glow and he looks at me with trusting seal-grey eyes.
The bottle-teat enters his eager ‘o’ of a mouth, instantly stopping another whimper. His plump lips close round it, then back he goes to sleep, sucking so hard the bottle emits a faint whistle as the air valve does its thing. I let my thoughts roam, and they are pleased and contended thoughts. I am careful not to look at the clock, and have strategically placed a toy in front of it. To look at the clock is to think of sleep hours remaining, to not look is to sit heavy and suspended in a glowing bubble of time-proof matter, a candle-lit cabin at sea, the Tardis in deep space.
Finn slurps at a steady pace, his eyes mostly closed, but occasionally opening to check the Goddess (she who giveth and taketh away) is still attached to the sweet and warm drink
Five minutes, eight, ten, not really counting but measuring out heartbeats in mls of milk. The house ticks faintly with snuffly possums that’ve come back in after an early forage.
Replete, he allows a fine dribble of milk to escape his lips on each side, his ‘milk fangs’ we call them.
I pull the bottle back and dab his lips, glazed like plump doughnuts with a slick of milk.
When I pick him up for a burp his heavy head lolls onto my shoulder and he goes as soft as a kitten.
Ergghh. He says. Good boy, say I.
I fold him into the cot and tuck him tight as tight can be. Snug as a bug in a rug, my Dad used to say.
As I turn to flick off the lamp I hear his gurgling and satisfied snores.
The house closes in again around this little moment, this dream feed, like a shell round a nut.
I return to bed and am soon, again, asleep.

For Sharon and Allie

2009-08-06T19:31:00.001-07:00

A good old friend is losing a loved one.
I know a wise woman, an old crone-carer soul, who all her life has been what I call an animal crooner. One of those people who speak to animals and is heard by them, who refuses, as we all should, to eat meat on the grounds that she cannot partake of a friends flesh, and who has rescued animals to change their lives with her love and companionship.
As I write this she as at home with her beautiful old dog Allie, settling her and calming her into death.
Allie has golden fur like the softest velvet, a sweet and motherly nature, a body warm and made for lap-cuddles. Yet she is old and frail and may be in pain.

All those who know Allie and her wise companion, her fur-mother, hope that Allie can move peacefully into the quiet. There, she will feel no more pain. She will be all: the space, the light, the stars, the earth, the chase, the tickle, the wag of the tail and the dust that hangs in a sunbeam. As she moves into this every-ness she will hear the soft voice of her best friend and Mum telling her she is a good girl, a good girl, a good old girl.

It is our hope, all of us who know these fine friends that this passing will happen naturally. And if it shouldn’t be so, if one has to decide to free her friend from further pain, then know this, that we can dignify a life held dear by crooning out a loved one as we assist them to die.
There is no shame in this, only the deepest compassion of one being for another’s pain.
Softly, softly, you loving friends, may your end song be sung as sweet as your life together.

Farewell to an old Tivoli dancer who hung with Squizzy Taylor’s molls…

2009-07-27T20:25:00.000-07:00

Mavis was my great Aunt, or FABULOUS aunt as she would say.

From my earliest memories she was an old woman in my life. Old but never dull or invisible. I fondly remember times in various Stkilda flats where we’d feast on dim-sims and tim-tams, then she’d hop on the singer and make it sing as she rennovated or remade my latest opshop find or retro dress pattern.

If Mavis liked you, nothing was too much trouble and her generosity knew no bounds.
If she didn’t like you, look out! This old lady could be full of scathing wit, but she was also full of vim and vigour.

She gave me my first pair of clogs: red straps with cork heels, hand me downs that stopped fitting me at age nine.
Every time we re-met she’d laugh and measure herself against me as I shot past her diminutive self that seemed all corseted waist, voluptous breasts and dainty little feet in heels. She always set her hair, wore lipstick and beads and beautiful clothes that she often made herself.

Her many homes around StKilda were always warm and brightly feminine as no matter how basic they started out that singer-machine would soon be running up ruffles and covers in pretty pastel hues. She had a fondness for peach, pink and minty green and she knew how to make things over, but more importantly how to make things beautiful.

Aunty May loved StKilda with a passion we shared: its Russian shops, its orthodox jews in furry hats, but also the knowledge of its seemy underside intrigued her too. No matter how high the rent prices became, Stkilda was where she longed to be, and she would return there like a homing pigeon, or a magpie drawn to shiny things. I think she was proud when I began managing StKilda’s library, and we’d gossip about the more colourful local characters, often older drag queens she’d seen around for years.

At the many jazz afternoons I shared with her and my Mum Pam, Aunty Mavis would immediately befriend and soon know all the secret business of anyone in the vicinity. She was fascinated by people, and this curiosity was attractive to the people she met.
She would flirt with her eyes and her laugh, and call for requests and dance in her teensy-tiny shoes.

She taught me as a teenager not to fear being a woman over fifty, saying and showing that it allowed you to be as audacious and vivacious as you wanted, or could get away with. It’s a lesson I’ll hold dear as I two-step down the next few decades.

They say that heaven has good weather but the company’s better in hell.
Mavis, I hope that wherever you are the band is playing some hot New Orleans stomp, the crowd is going wild and the handsome man playing clarinet asks you to dance.

Cause dance you would.

Slowly, slowly, little seed.

2009-07-15T21:14:00.001-07:00

A few years ago I read one of those books that actually revolutionized my thinking in the same way that Kate Millet’s ‘Sexual politics’ did, the same way that Anais Nin’s ‘Little Birds’ did and the same way that E.E. Cummings’ poetry did.

And it was bloody pop-philosophy!
But it engendered that moment of ‘A-ha’, of recognition of something previously felt but unarticulated. It was Carl Honore’s book ‘In praise of slow’, a (remarkably succinct given it’s title) discourse on the merits of slowing down: in our sex, our cities, our cooking, music and parenting.

The book is not brilliantly written, but-
My slow-soul, the one who sings ballads, grows herbs, cooks pot-food and likes nothing better than the vast uncharted terrain of an unplanned afternoon, responded to the slow philosophy with a sigh as grateful as if sinking into a warm bath. Finally something articulated that tremulousness that hovers at the brink when we drink in air deeply, touch the food we cook lovingly, and rediscover the deliciousness of our lovers’ back beneath our hands over an entire afternoon.

Carl Honore is also the author of “The Power of Slow: Finding Balance and Fulfilment Beyond the Cult of Speed,” and, more recently, “Under Pressure: Rescuing Our Children from the Culture of Hyper-Parenting,” which has been recently re-released.

I’ve actually not read these, but from other reading about the ‘cult of slow’ established with my husband a kind of philosophy as to how we want to parent our little seedling. And the best way I can summarize is to say we want to stretch time, every day, for as long as possible. We want time like sticky-taffy, time like pink chewing-gum, time like in the Tardis, time like it felt on the first day of summer school holidays.

This means resisting the pull of scheduled activity to instead observe then wallow in the rhythms of what the body and mind wants on that particular day.
This could be rest, but it could also be mad joyous play, music, dancing or drumming.
Slow parenting does not mean non-stop calm and quietude.

If I have plans, I feel I must stick to them so as not to let people down.
Plan-less I can observe my boy being twitchy, or dozy, or curious or bored. I can observe myself wanting to stimulate him, or just cuddle up with him. Plan-less, I am left to my own resources to satisfy this experience-insatiable little person.

It helps that my home is full of books and instruments and things growing in the yard. But the best discovery is that my mine, oops, mind is resource-rich, veined with fine fissures of gold, silver-ore and sapphire. All the accumulated wealth of years of imaginative play with my Mum as I grew up in her slow home. Wealth aplenty!

Enough to dazzle the eyes of a four-month old anyway…

Thinking about unconditional love

2009-06-27T22:46:00.001-07:00

When I was pregnant with Finn complete strangers would gush to me “oh you’ve no idea, it’s the most amazing thing, and the most powerful love you’ll ever feel.”

Finn is now three months and I’d have to disagree.
For Finn is easy to love wholeheartedly, unconditionally and completely.
The more powerful love, purely by dent of the work it takes, is the one I feel for my husband or my parents.
Finn is indeed hard work. But he is also tiny, smells like the best thing the world has ever come up with, doesn’t give me sass, and when he tires me its through no fault or manipulation.
The love I feel for him is the easiest love there is to feel. It’s the way we should love our friends, our lovers, and our family.
As a young feminist I ‘learned’ an awful lot about sexual politics and that all love between a man and woman is based on at best an exchange of power (for money, protection, security) and at worst female sublimation to the ‘patriarch that dwells in all men.’
I’ve since had to unlearn much of this notion for my own marriage to work. Sacrifice, when both parties make it in regular small doses, does not in any way belittle me. It instead is the cornerstone of trust, for I’ve learned to trust that I can also make withdrawals from the sacrifice piggy bank when my own resources are running low.

I don’t believe I will ever be able to love a complex adult like my husband or my Mum in the same ‘no holds barred’ fashion that I love Finn, but I do believe that trying to will make me the best lover of people that I can be.

There is a marvellous short story called ‘A tree, a rock, a cloud’ about a man who teaches himself to love anything or everything by meditating upon it until its beautiful ‘self ness’ is apparent and loveable to him.

Perhaps if I held (or was allowed to hold) a fully realized adult bundled in my arms for an hour at a time ten times a day, just staring into the amazing ness that is their eyes I could add to that title the most important word:
‘A tree, a rock, a cloud - anyone’

How we know ourselves from sociopaths

2009-04-27T17:11:00.000-07:00

The beloved Oxford English Dictionary has variously defined a sociopath as
"Someone with a personality disorder manifesting itself chiefly in anti-social attitudes and behaviour"; the newly edited definition (March 2009) is "Originally: a person who performs criminal or antisocial acts as a result of a moderate degree of mental deficiency (disused). In later use (also hyperbolically): a person affected with sociopathy; a psychopath".

What neuropsychologists now know is that a sociopath seems to be hardwired differently, missing (and this is my simplification) a response of distress or anxiety when seeing other creatures in pain.

That we are generally hardwired to experience a distress response makes perfect sense. Humans though lacking many predators are fundamentally (and comparatively within diverse species) underdeveloped to protect ourselves well. We therefore need to fend not just for ourselves but also for each other. A reaction of extreme anxiety to one of our fellow tribe (and this could include the animals we shared floors, work and companionship with for centuries) is our way of knowing to wake up and check, to protect each other from danger and ensure our lone and group survival.

A baby particularly is woefully underdeveloped to fend for itself upon birth, and in fact does much of its useful development (strengthening its neck, being able to roll, being able to direct arm movement) in what some call “the fourth trimester’, or it’s first three months post-womb.

But still it’s not much in the way of survival tools, so my baby is programmed to program new responses into my brain through its cries.
There are many baby cries:
HUNGRY! In my bub this has a lament wa-wa-wa-wa sound
POO- how dare there be POO in my nappy? This sounds outraged beyond belief!

And many more….
But there is one that we all fundamentally know.
It is the cry of a beloved human in deep sadness, the cry of newborn animal we’ve taken into the home as a pet or a distressed older animal that is sick.
It is the cry that says “help, I feel very alone and scared and confused". It is the cry that calls for immediate touch, though sometimes we don’t realize that as immediatley as we should.

It is the cry that sets a flash of hot electric blue light pulsing round our head. It is the cry that hurts! We can’t ignore it, we must wake up, get up, attend.
Parent or not we all know that cry.

And in our response lies the essence of being both human and humane.

Birthing Finn

2009-04-15T21:28:00.000-07:00

I thought I wasn’t going to write about it, but now feel the urge to push out the experience, probably because now that my son is here and sleeping soundly as I write I can make the space to ponder my labour.

Facts: all was doing well after two days of false labour. This involved regular close contractions that would start to come the requisite five minutes apart that warrants heading for hospital. But then they’d suddenly stop for a few hours so loving husband and I would do stuff.
We finally went to hospital late night Saturday March 28th, because I’d had a bright bleed, and this can be of concern to Doctors. In hospital the contractions continued and they gave me some painkillers. Chris and I drifted off and awoke to again realize labour had stopped. We made the decision to head home again to sleep in our own bed…
Four hours later on early Sunday morning we were back, admitted to the birthing suite, and as planned I asked our lovely midwife Esther, a warm Jewish woman, to run me a huge bath.
I spent much of the day working through contraction in that bath, and then as things progressed began sucking back on the gas I was using as pain relief.
In early evening it seemed I was getting no further along, and a Doctors check indicated I’d stopped dilating at 8 centimetres (you need to be at 10 to start the pushing part). Finn was still inside but becoming distressed with a slight drop in heartbeat. The doc attached a clip to his head that allowed them to monitor his heart rate, and this is where more intervention began.
He was slightly tilted against my cervix and struggling to move further down, a midwife was called to rupture my waters to try and speed up birth, to no avail.
The docs kept checking, Finn and I kept struggling to move into the next phase, known as transition, and people started to get concerned.
I was then given an Oxytocin induction, and not five minutes after it labour really began- I heard myself grunting like a wild animal and finally called for Pethidine pain relief but it was too late- had I been given it it would have passed right into Finn’s system and further risked a slow heart-beat.
We were on.

I grunted and panted and clamped down on the gas- it was taken away as it was making me too groggy to push. I shut my eyes and we went deep under.
I was a huge bulb trying to push forth that one shoot towards light. All was pressing down on me, I was not in a room (though occasionally opening my eyes I saw more and more people as Doctors and midwives rushed in to help) but I was under heavy earth. Death and life were alongside us- the only other human connection my husbands voice: “it’s ok, he’s coming, push love, push, nearly there…”

I was not scared. I had a job to do and it was very hard work bringing us both up from the earth to the light. I heard animal noises- was that me?
They helped us by using the vacuum suction cup on Finn’s head- still I had to push us forth into being.

Then finally the strange slithering sensation- the gasps around me. Then silence.
“Where is he? I can’t hear him! Bring him to me now!”
Then this tiny wet-rag of a being was laid on my chest as I pushed again to birth the placenta. There was stitching being done because I’d had an episiotomy.
There was this blood-covered being wailing against my breast. He was here. My husband weeping over us and whispering in my ear. “ I love you so much, well done, well done”.

Do not be scared by this tale, though it be all true.
I am recovered, all is healing well, we are here and we are three.
And Finn sleeps as I write.

and baby Finn makes three...

2009-04-04T18:43:00.000-07:00

about birthing I'll say nothing, thus joining the great conspiracy amongst women to protect one another from the most primal and animal experience one can conceive of...

Finn was born at about 8pm on MArch 29th. When they put his slimy wriggling little self onto my chest for the first time all the pain made complete and perfect sense.

Now we're one week in and just starting to find some rhythms and not live in a constant state of terror!
All control, all 'knowledge' and all assumptions have been rolled up with the dirty nappies and thrown in the bin as we tussle with a highly scheduled routine of preparing for feeds, feeding, burping away Finn's hiccups then getting him to sleep. Just as this routine ends its starts again. It's compelling, all-consuming, exhausting and yet marvellous...

Somehow in there we find the time to feed ourselves and enjoy little moments: congratulating each other on good work and slight successes (like dressing a squirmer!), lying on the couch listening to Goldfrappe's 'Seventh tree' as a sunbeam falls over the face of my little boy and his mouth curls in a mysterious Mona-smile, tucking him into a crisp-sheeted cot and hearing him sigh as his eyes rolls back and sleep starts, or watching his eyes take in the huge morning sky as I take him outside for air-time.
The house moves to new rythms, breathes in smells of baby and glows with nightlights as we grope about learning. My cats twine around my feet, delighted with the smell of rich breast-milk that clings to me.

A house of love.

the waiting game

2009-03-22T01:00:00.000-07:00

Just six days now before I'm officially due to do some birthing.

My brain is like a hand minus its opposable thumb. It goes: pat (soft) pat (kitty) pat (tummy) etc, but cannot hold on to a coherent thought. Constructing sentences is like groping in the dark for the light switch; my language synapses have broken giving me a glimpse of some darkling future dementia...

All this though helps protect the brain from SHEER PANIC at the thought of labour and dealing with a newborn. Its like being on a nice little cocktail of selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors, valium and a glass of red wine.

la, la, la,

'lil.

Departures from the Isle of Work...

2009-03-05T15:59:00.000-08:00

Yesterday marked my last day in my library job for some ten months as I go on maternity leave.
I still can’t quite believe I won’t be heading into StKilda every day and talking up a blue streak with my colleagues.
It was a crazy week too, with some big changes to my team (to be revealed soon) meaning I actually interviewed (ask me no questions I’ll tell you no lies) to go back to work in a different position come end of year. I was so hyped up I thought my waters might burst and the bosses would have to get me off to the labour ward!
But its done now and yesterday left me feeling strangely sentimental. After so many years trying to conceive, suffering three miscarriages and believing I’d never leave to have a baby, it now becomes real: when I return it will be as a ‘working Mother’.
I’ll miss everyone, particularly Bunny-man, Wize-Womon, Stig, Noreen the Possum, Curly-Kat and Gypsy-Chic. Hugo the Cat will also have to find himself a new milk-bowl monitor...
Until this business of labour begins I plan to spend my days visiting the lovely Sun cinema in Yarraville to see all the Oscar films, and dawdling around the permanent collections at the National Galleries in town.

I suspect there will be some polishing too, and maybe some cleaning of cornices with a toothbrush or fixating on cobwebs with broom in hand…
Why clean I do not know as everyone keeps warning me of a new bub’s scary capacity to turn itself into a Catherine wheel of faecal flares!

slowing down and taking stock on our day of mourning

2009-02-21T15:43:00.000-08:00

Sunday morning and I've got the TV on in the background picking up footage of the mourning service for bushfire victims. Even though there's bound to be plenty of organised religion involved in today I hope the huge gathering of people sharing their support can act as a catalyst for the necessary grief to really begin. It must be difficult for those victims to 'find time' for their emotional needs when their basic physical needs are still so far from being met, but great stories are already emerging of the community efforts to start rebuilding. Crap stories too, of looters and cheaters, but these are still far outweighed by the good in people caring for each other and animals.

I'm slowing down, and gosh it's hard. The garden beckons but my back says go easy. Sleep no longer is enough to ease the general backache of carrying this extra little being around, so I have to rest a lot more and enjoy warm baths. I miss being able to rub heating oils into the tesne places, but its not allowed. I miss seeing my pubic hair (odd I know) and being able to cut my own toenails...

I miss hugs with my husband where our groins touch and rub, but its impossible with such a big belly!
but I like this pregnancy business most of the time, and remind myself to enjoy it.
A beautiful dinner last night- sitting at a Greek restaurent in Williamstown with a view of the water and City beyond, savouring my saganaki and calamari with 'himself' and companionable in a quietude together as we prepare for the future onslaught of 'the boy'...

Sunday morning

2009-01-17T17:16:00.000-08:00

6.30: reclined in bath with book easing away the night's sore back.
book starts sliding into the water. Realize I had fallen alseep...

7.30: eat a fibre-full breakfast of muslei with brain and stewed peaches. Have an espresso.

8.30: stand outside the two toilets in the foyer of Coles in Williamstown, belly huge and gurgling, bladder the size of a pea.

8.30 and fifteen seconds: sound of female voice fills the foyer with a long and loud 'noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo'
(the toilets are out of service)

Great (fabulous) Aunty Phyliss

2009-01-05T15:06:00.000-08:00

My Great Aunty Phyllis was born in 1918 and has just died at age ninety.
She worked like a Trojan, cooked like an angel, and protected like a lioness.

As my Da’s Aunty she was also Aunt to the Wilson mob, that rabble of eight unshod kids my Da belongs to.
She always treated them: with shoes, knitted socks and scarves, and their favourite cake. Each kid would get a day with her for lunch and a treat.
All her family remember her knitting and baking: roasts, flummeries, chocolate ripple cakes, trifles and plum-puddings.

She worked as a public servant in the defence department and lived her life with great Aunty Sissy, her sister and companion. They bullied each other, minded each other’s manners, kept each other in line and between them were fabulous aunts to (from the Wilson mob) 8 siblings, Great Aunts to 23 cousins, and now Great Great aunts to around thirty (with two on the way between cousin Kerry and me).

I recall Aunty Phil as a series of tastes, smells and textures:
Her own scent of some soft floral talc.
Choc-ripple cake all creamy and crumbly, the light sour-sweetness of pale yellow pineapple flummery, a house that smelt of lemon beeswax, lavender and tea tree, those old cleaning smells of a generation of women who took care that things would last.
The heady perfume of gardenias for the tree in the yard was always in flower.
The crackled yellowing and musty pages of the Mills and Boon collection dating back to the fifties that lined the walls of one shady bedroom. Aunty Phil lent me, aged twelve, my first Mills and Boon romance. I had forgotten that and now know how I can reconcile those books with a Literature degree. It is in the comfort of the books skins more than their narrative, the comfort of the extended family that made a child’s world sensible and safe.

She is survived by Aunty Sissy and lots of family who between them will keep her recipes alive. In her honour I’m making flummery this weekend for my friends’ visiting children. If they have never had it before I suspect they will want it again after a taste!

Aubade (morning song, seven months)

2008-12-26T11:46:00.000-08:00

ABC radio is on playing choral music; it is just after 6 am and I am already bath-clean and smelling slightly of lavender.

I play finger-splash music in the bath, which has stirred up the baby. He’s feeling lazy like me though- just turning slow morning tidal rolls that are oddly pleasant.

It’s a good time to be up: obligatory birdsong, cats weaving through the tomato plants in the yard pretending to be great white hunters, and no human noise yet from my street.

My world is well. So well it seems almost naïve to feel this lovely lull when there is storm and chaos all around. But I think pregnancy does have its own purpose, one of drawing in to integral internal rhythms of physical needs, but also of drawing in to an optimistic quietude and peacefulness. Judith Wright said it well with ‘oh node and focus of the world’

Perhaps I need to feel that my world will be a warm and safe place for my baby or I wouldn’t give birth, just stay pregnant all my life, baby wrapped and gently rocking in the safe hammock of my self.

I used to think pregnant women seemed dreamy at best, and dumb at worst.

I think now I am the same. A bit dreamy, definitely dumb at times, but clearly battening down the hatches and preparing my rusty old ship for the onslaught ahead.

The ship is calm, or more perhaps becalmed- that time of floating still in the eye of a storm where the world is silvered and semi-real and we are held motionless by big weather unseen

Little waves lap at the hull; the crew carve wooden dolls and wait.

Things about pregnancy I did not know…

2008-11-18T18:24:00.000-08:00

-It makes all food my food.

I can have just eaten my regular weekly mountain of ‘pub-grub’ at one of the many local hotels but if a plate of someone else’s food gets carried past I could happily eat that too. Pub-staff have been so convinced by my longing glance that they instinctively veer toward me with said plate. Chris has to tell them to ‘move it along now, nothing to see here…”

-At work I am more effective in meetings (cause I don’t really care if or when I’ll get my say which makes me a better 'active listener') but a real dunder-head about language. I said to Adrian the other day “I’m glad you’re here cause I have to ask Adrian to do a meal relief”. He said, “Well here I am then”.

-That nasal congestion just keeps getting worse. I feel that if I press on my face snot might shoot out of my eye-sockets. Lovely image huh?

-That there is a muscle that Pilates-freaks probably know about just above the pubis that acts as a pretty major ‘big belly bra’ for the expanding womb. I know about it now cause I’ve wrenched the fucking thing every which way when running full speed down a ramp for a train this morning. I can tell little ‘Marmaduke’ is OK cause he’s been kicking away all happy in the bliss-bubble of amniotic fluid and his own wee-wees (yes- they are very self sufficient and able to make all kinds of fun in there!). But when I go to sit or stand I feel like some previously taut and supporting secret muscle is now flubbering around loosely down there. No pre-natal yoga tonight.

-Telling people (particularly parents and in-laws) that you’ve decided to call the unborn son ‘Marmaduke Action Sager’ is a really good way of shutting them up about their favourite names. We figure anything else we decide on will inspire nothing but unutterable relief in all curious parties.

-Marmaduke doing somersaults makes me laugh my head off. Now. I may not forgive him for it after a few more weeks’ growth.

-Sleep is but a distant dream, and infomercials are surprisingly tempting when you are wakeful and hugging cats on the couch at 3am. If I had a credit card I’d now be the proud owner of a Winsor Pilates machine, some Wen (not shampoo!) hair cleanser, some Principal Secret skincare and some Bare Essentials mineral powder foundation. I have even wished for acne again so I could legitimately purchase ‘Proactiv’.

-Chanel 31 is the only alternative at this time, showing old black and white melodramas. I think my cat Damage cried with me the other night when Liza died without ever telling her Viennese lover that he’d fathered her boy-child. As he read the love-letter she’d written to him from the madhouse I looked at my fluffy feline friend and saw that he too had a tear in his eye…

22 weeks and counting down.

Big Lil’

Chris's advice to his unborn son

2008-11-13T12:10:00.000-08:00

Be a kid.

Money is not success.

Don’t put anything inside someone unless they say its ok.

Don’t buy another round of drinks until everyone has finished.

Poo is not paint.

Country music is not cool. Ever.

Foreskins are not meant to stretch that far.

It doesn’t matter how hot she looks, someone else is sick of her shit.

People are cool, unless they prove otherwise.

Girls are smarter than you, and they have more words at their disposal to prove the point with.

When mum and dad lock you in the ‘naughty cupboard’ it’s cause they love you.

want to offer our unborn boy some words of wisdom? leave your comment

swimming

2008-09-19T16:01:00.000-07:00

There’s a little flipper growing inside me, a tadpole/glow-worm, baby in its womb-room.
At just over thirteen weeks Skipper Chris and Sailor Lil can let the world know that we’re happily breeding a little sprog!

It’s been rough water and weather and times to get to this point, now its all adventures ahead. Already I can see the skipper’s stamp in the little pixel-face shown in an ultrasound pic.
There, the forehead’s bump of music, there the little tucked in chin and there the Negroid full-mouth.
You’d have to see it to believe it. Look right!

Sprog responds well to chics singing- particularly Scout Niblett. Sprog likes it when I drum along and lets me know with a warm hormonal glow. Sprog likes strawberries with ice-cream, dry ginger ale, olives, and cheese with chutney on rivitas.

In the morning, I get a rush of love I cal the ‘benigns’. Because they happen before 9am we now call them the B9’s.
Skipper can feel the B9s kind of fogging up the air around me. He gets closer so he can have his fix of the hormone cloud.

Skip thought he might have to learn nursery rhymes, but I said his versions of Nick Cave will do just fine. He has a deep voice and sings ‘the ship song’ and ‘the weeping song’ really well.

Sailor Lil likes to sing good old cautionary deep south blues and gospel. Sprog will learn about rambling men, and dice, and houses of ill repute!

This is fun. This is my time, our time, after so much grief and loss to get here.This is where my crew of two sees the first pale glimmer of dawn on the horizon.

Jacko gets his drink (short fiction, Kinchella 1998)

2008-07-30T00:43:00.000-07:00

Jacko was feeling fine before the blokes from the front bar started up with the megaphone. Sure his feet were wet, not a good sign for the sheds beneath his home, and he was out of beer, but he’d been worse off in his time. He looked across the water to the pub in Twintown. He could hear noise and see lots of cars pulling in. A cold beer would be nice. He’d just finished his last stubby twenty minutes ago, drank it quick cause he was in a lather after the work with the cows.
Looking over at Wal’s place, he thought he was better off. What was yesterday a pretty colonial-style house on stilts perched well above the river and backed by acres of cattle was now an island. No one, not even Jacko or Wal, had banked on the water coming round from behind. So they watched the river rise and spun yarns about the floods of 63 or 49, and felt sure that the water would do what they’d do as farmers, taking paths it had cut before. No one thought it might bust its banks higher up where all the creeks webbed the land.
When Wal’s paddocks started going under the sound of distressed cows mooing got Jacko into the motorboat and over there to give a hand. Cows are stupid and stubborn animals. They thought they had high ground and didn’t want to move from it. As they ummed and moo’d and shitted in their panic, the grass beneath them went slowly but steadily under water. Finally the two men got a dozen of them herded up onto the only truly high and dry ground left. Once the best cows were on the veranda Jacko hopped back in his boat and waved bye to Wally. He wasn’t going to stay for the offered beer, not with Wal’s wife bitching about the cow-dung on her newly painted ‘patio’. Heritage colours too.
So he got home, sat on his veranda and rested. His balls were itchy with sweat so he scratched. He was thirsty so he had his last stubby. He stretched and watched as the sun went down and water started lapping at the veranda’s edge. Bugger, that meant everything underneath was wrecked. He just hoped he’d pulled up one of the kegs he’d bought the other day. He had a tap set into the kitchen bench for them and knew that when he’d gone in earlier to make cheese on toast he hadn’t seen one beneath the tap. He was glad to have something warm in his belly though, the power had been cutting all day and he’d caught it on just long enough for tea and toast. It was off again now but he had his battery lantern on. Actually he had everything he’d need right here with him. Lantern, kero stove, battery wireless, gumboots for wading, and his old outboard motor tied up to a support beam. There was enough juice still in her to get him across the river if he needed to. Didn’t those little smartasses from the SES realize that old farts like him knew how to look after themselves?
Jacko had been a grown man in the ‘49 flood and a family man running his own dairy cattle when they came again in ’63. He knew that if the water started coming in he’d just have to sweep it out, until he or the water won. His house was high on stilts above the hundred-year floodline and at least he didn’t have to worry about stock anymore. Wally had bought that and most of the land ten years back, when Jacko’s wife died and his knee gave out for good a month later. If the water won this time so be it, he was an old man and he’d won the last few rounds. Water and fire had both threatened to knock him out, but here he was still punching.
He could do with a beer though. He went into the kitchen to see what he could find.

***

‘Oh Jesus his boats come loose!’ came the excited cry from outside the pub across the river. People had been running out with binoculars every hour to file their ‘Jacko report’. ‘ Ha, he’ll have to come over now’, said a slumped-over-the-bar-Willow. There was a flurry of voices as the two ‘bookies’ scratched the new odds up onto the billiards blackboard.
The pub was bored. Everyone in there had been evacuated over previous days, told by the SES to leave homes and go to the community hall in town to doss down. Everone just read hall as pub, so here they were, locked in by rising floodwaters, a bubble of good cheer floating on a river of beer. Outside, across the water, they could all see that the town crier had it right. Jacko was not in his usual sentry–post, lit up by a lantern on his veranda, and they couldn’t see his boat at all, no surprise given the speed of the river. All around people were calling for schooners and placing their bets. Just when would Jacko evacuate?
The SES had insisted to Jacko and Wally, the last two people left on the banks of Twintown, that they should get out of their homes. At 3 o’clock and again at 5 o’clock they’d ridden across the river wearing beacon-bright coveralls and tried to coax the old men away. Jacko had nearly cuffed one of them around the ears when the silly kid tried the ‘you’ll be more comfortable’ routine. It ended with Jacko pushing the boy back in his boat yelling ‘when I want to be comfortable I’ll lay meself down in my own bloody coffin and Wally here’ll hammer in the nails; now get off my fookin’PROPERTY!’ The sheepish boy was now off-duty and having his first of many beers at the bar, muttering under his breath about that ‘mad old bastard across the way’.
That was when the betting, which had started between just a few blokes, became the sport for the night. Every so often someone would go out with binoculars and come back with a report on what Jacko was doing. When he and Wal took the cows up to the verandah most folks thought they’d pack it in then. Then the water got higher up the stilts that cupped their houses, nearly up to the verandah on Jacko’s, so people who’d put money on the seventh hour got confident, then were out of the running when Jacko stayed put.
But his boat being gone changed things. As long as he’d had his boat the evacuation. time was up to him. Now that he was reliant on the SES it could all be rigged. Willow unbent from the bar long enough to start explaining this to all, there were shouts of ‘Ah bullshit’, and ‘ave another beer Willow’.
‘Wadda you doing with that John?’ Hoggy called. The kitty held maybe a hundred bucks now, people hadn’t been betting with big money, just a lot of noise. John the publican took all the money and dumped it in the fire helmet bolted to the bar. The fire helmet had lettering on it, which read, ‘support your State Emergency Service and Twintown Fire Brigade’.
‘Yeah, yeah, shut your whinging, next round’s on us.’ Much muttering then cheering as John started filling jugs. Then Browny leant over and asked in an evil tone ‘can I pull down that megaphone John?’ The megaphone hung on the wall amidst an assortment of oars, trophies, and rifles. Ha. Ha. The men in the bar’s best corner started laughing.

***

Jacko returned from the kitchen, righteously pissed off about the keg he figured to be downstairs in the water, just maybe. It was probably floating down-river by now and would land on some lucky bastard’s front lawn. He’d seen enough stuff on his own patch yesterday, when it was still visible. Green plastic from the new hay, a wheelie bin, fence posts.
He sat back in his old chair. The river hadn’t risen fully onto the veranda, just little dribbles lapping up between some cracks to wet his boots. If anything it looked steady. It was dark and the mozzies were going wild, thankfully drawn to the lamp instead of him. The rain had stopped for a while. If it didn’t rain tonight he might escape of this with a dry home.
He was really quite content on his chair in the dark listening to the river move, apart from the lack of a cold one. He sat back and sighed.
‘EH JACKO, YA MAD BASTARD…. GOT YOUR FLOATIES ON?’
Jacko nearly shat himself, the voice was so loud. He jumped up from the chair and stood at the edge. Couldn’t see a thing apart from the pub lights and a streetlamp, but he knew that voice. Browny, the little prick. Browny and the old police megaphone from the wall above the bar across the river.
‘YA UP FOR A SWIM, EH ,JACKO?’ Boomed the voice.
What was this swimming crap, he had a boat and a dry deck up here.
That’s when Jacko saw he no longer had a boat. ‘Shit’, he swore. He couldn’t see it anywhere. Those boys over at the pub had probably watched as it went adrift. He checked the rope that had moored it to a verandah support. Soggy, frayed, and going nowhere.
Jesus, he wished he had his own megaphone. He’d give that little shit what for. But there might be something he could do just as well. The phones were still working.
Jacko went back inside and called Browns’ farm. When Trina answered he started talking quickly.
‘Eh Trina love, its Jacko here…
--Di’ Browny make it home ok?
--Nah, don’t worry. I’ve heard the road’s still well above…
--Nah; that went out a few hours ago, I’ve got radio national on the old battery-wireless.
--Yeah sure; I saw him over at Hoggy’s place- aw, an hour, two hours ago; said they were heading off to the Pub for a few…
--Allright darl- you too. Bye.’

***

‘Is Browny about?’, asked John across the bar. He had his hand over the mouthpiece and said in a low voice “She sounds pretty pissed at ya mate, have you left yet?”
Browny shook his head frantically as he gulped beer. He held out all ten fingers and shook them twice at John.
“Nah Trina? He apparently left for home about twenty minutes ago. Here? Just the one …heard he got roped into helping Hoggy move his Mums’ things upstairs.”
“Alright… yup, nah your road’s still fine, another bloke’s just come through.
Yeah; gotta go… you too mate. Bye.”
John put down the phone and smirked. Farmer Brown quickly drained his glass, put his hat on and left the pub. His mates in the best corner giggled at him from behind their beards and beers.

***
‘There you go you little shit’, thought Jacko happily as he watched Browny’s old Ford peel away from the pub.
None of the other blokes in the best corner of the bar picked up the megaphone, perhaps sensing the righteous hand of a wrathful Jacko in the call from Browny’s wife.
‘He’s not gonna get a shag in months’, said Hoggy. The men just looked into their glasses, sadly. None of them had wives, or even shags…
The SES guys came in, calling across the bar for soft drinks. Everyone rushed at them, asking about roads out and properties under. Some old blokes in the corner raised their voices as they discussed ‘what planks those SES blokes are, never heard more bullshit, too many men trying to be boss’, blah blah.
Closer to the bar a young couple who’d been ridden in on the SES boat earlier offered the men in orange a round of beers.
‘Nah thanks guys, still on duty’.
Johnno grabbed a bucket full of soft-drink cans and started heading out.
‘Might take you up on it later though’, he called back. ‘Change of shift… right lads, you can all piss off home’.
He turned to the only other middle-age bloke in the group. ‘You up for this last one Steve?’
‘Eh’, said Steve. The group dispersed, and soon was heard the rumble of the outboard motor chugging away. As quickly as it started it seemed to stop. ‘Shit!’ said a few of the men. They ran outside fearing the worst: that the boat had tangled into one of the trees under the water. They stood on the road and looked across the river.

Jacko was really thirsting by the time the SES made their last attempt to get him out. They tied up to his veranda post then stood in their boat swaying as the fast water rocked them.
‘Come on Jacko, time to pack it in’, coaxed the voice from the boat.
‘We’ll get you over to the pub, there’re rooms free upstairs; bit drier than this, eh?’
Jacko stood up from his chair, opposite and a little above them. For a man in his eighties he was still big, when he unfolded from the chair he stood fully six-foot tall. The lantern glowed behind him like a halo and he stood squarely in the gleaming dark water, arms crossed over his big chest. Steve hadn’t been to church since he was a kid, but he thought the old man looked like the God of the Old Testament, big and angry and cussing from behind his beard.
‘That you Steve?’ asked Jacko.
‘Yup’.
‘ Allright, allright here’s what we’ll do. I’ll hop in your boat-
‘Good on ya mate’, Steve interrupted quickly. ‘Otherwise we’ve just gotta worry about you all night, less blokes working later too’.
‘-And you can take me over There for a few’, finished Jacko, nodding across the water.
‘ Few what?’
‘ Beers you idiot! I bin sitting here without one for ages’.
‘Oh for Christ’s sake Jacko! Why don’t you just come over, have your beers and go to bed in the pub for the night?’
‘ Cause my bed here’s fine’, growled the old man.
‘Fine, I’m not carting you over there and back though, waste of bloody of time’, muttered Steve.
There was a lengthy silence cut only by the buzz of mosquitoes.
‘That’s a allright boy’. Jacko suddenly smiled at the younger man.
‘How’re your crops doing Steve?’
Steve grew lucerne.
‘Not gonna know for a while yet mate. Back paddocks are under near Turner’s Point Creek… the wife and house’s high and dry though so that’s a relief’.
‘And your other crop?’ asked the old man.
‘Huh?
‘The other crop, that lovely fragrant green crop in the lower east paddock?’
Steve knew then that Jacko was God and knew everything about everyone.
‘All right Jacko, hop in’, said Steve.
‘And you’ll bring an old man back home to his bed?’ asked Jacko in a querulous little voice.
‘Hop in’, growled half of the two-man rescue team.

***

The men on the road ran back into the pub. ‘Boats ok!’ they yelled to all. ‘Think they’ve finally got Jacko into it, can see a tall bloke at the back.’ People checked their watches and started arguing about who’d won the bet, even though the kitty was now in the charity hat. Jacko blustered in, pushing the double doors hard and shaking spray from his shock of white hair. He strode up to the bar and the younger ones scrambled to make way.
‘Finally decide to give it up, eh Jacko?’ yelled a brave soul from the best corner.
‘Let a man have a beer in peace, wouldya Baby’. Jacko downed his schooner in a minute then ordered another. Steve and Johnno rolled fags and puffed on them contentedly. Jacko ordered his second schooner. Steve caught his eye. ‘Ten more minutes’, he said. Jacko nodded into his glass.
Baby couldn’t help asking. ‘Ten minutes what?’ Jacko ignored him, pulled out an old leather pouch and started to roll. Steve and Johnno finished their smokes and went outside before more people offered them a beer they couldn’t have. Steve yelled over his shoulder towards Jacko, ‘Near the monkey bars’.
Jacko quietly enjoyed his smoke with the dregs of his drink.
He handed John a fifty and asked for a slab.
‘Wadda ya need a slab for?’ asked Baby. ‘You gonna go upstairs and drink all by yourself?’
Jacko heaved his slab under one arm, strolled out, and made for the monkey bars that barely rose above the new waterline. A few people followed him out, including Baby and Hoggy and the boys from the best corner.
They watched him get into the boat, and then just a few moments later they could see his silhouette up on his veranda. Backlit by the lantern his shadow-self looked like Moses holding the tablet of the Ten Commandments; he put the slab down and they could all see his silhouette settle into the chair.
Baby looked at Hoggy. ‘Mad old bastard’, he said. The men went back to the best corner they inherited from men like Jacko and Wally. They all felt a bit sheepish and called for another round of beers.

Jacko pulled his lantern up onto the slab; the water was still seeping up through the veranda boards and he didn’t want to lose his light whilst he still had some drinking to do. He put his feet up on the railing and enjoyed the happy little pop and hiss of a cold can opening beneath his hands.
Looking out across the water he could see the string of coloured lights at the pub and could hear the faint hum and clatter from within. He could imagine Willow, now fully curved over the streaming bar, and Baby and the boys sitting tight in the best spot, where you could see the Wives driving up either road and duck beneath the windowsills.

He took a long swig from the can.
‘Mad bastards’, he said fondly.

The House that Jack built (excerpt from chapter three)

2008-07-01T03:21:00.000-07:00

Contemplating love with duster in hand:

Lisa looked after her grandpa when he was sick. He was terrified of being put in a home.
Why did she do it? She thinks it helped her make a ritual of becoming an adult. Drinking in pubs with girlfriends wasn’t doing it. Finishing school hadn’t done it. A few fumbled goes at sex hadn’t.
The dusty flat. Eating semi-thawed dim sims at the too-big table. His hideous, startling night cough. His drinking scotches then donning the kilt. The pub over the back fence and the arguments she heard in her single bed with a faded blue chenille spread. A small framed picture of a ballet scene from Swan Lake.
Her feeling that she was she was paving her way to love. That she was steeped in love, that in these small domestic acts of love she was making memories of the closure of a life. She had a presentiment of her own future nostalgia in contemplating her pa’s death.
And grandpa talked.

He talked about his sister -in- law Eunice, known to Lisa all her life as ‘Mad great aunty Eunice’.
Eunice had disappeared suddenly one night, rumoured to have gone up north by a female colleague who received a single postcard from Kempsey. She left her husband and was never heard from again- the stuff of childhood myth and fantasy, a symbol of adventure and freedom and travel. Lisa always secretly admired mad aunty Eunice, and had been told she looked like her, having the same ‘beer-coloured’ hair.
Lisa pictures her, as she always has, in her forties, though now she’d have to be in her seventies.
But there she is, a radiant and unlined forty three, sitting on a verandah overlooking the scrubby beauty of Hat Head Bay, wearing a Jenny Kee Waratah print dress and contemplating, over a gin and tonic, her delicious, sinful life. Her mad life.

Lisa is somnambulant around the house; listless and locked, she can’t be bothered doing all the little fix jobs she’s listed and considered over and again. She’s thinking about how much Pa talked about Eunice at the end.
People say that when you’re close to dying it’s the old memories, the ones that really count, that keep surfacing. Eunice the young and lovely, vibrant woman; the factory worker with a taste for gin-tonics. The funny, dancing life of the party Eunice who despite her red hair had a soft temperament, was known to be lovely with children and animals. How people gossiped about her going out with girlfriends when her husband pulled long hours at the furniture warehouse.
“What they didn’t know Lisa, was that it wasn’t work that kept him there. I knew he was drinking, he’d always drunk and was pretty good at hiding it in public. I didn’t know how bad it had gotten at home though until Eunice pulled up outside one night and stumbled out of the car to my door. She couldn’t drive, not really, had just bunny hopped her way round the few backstreets between us. She was in her nightie with an overcoat and boots on, and her right eye was red raw and starting to bruise. I knew the pain of Tom’s swift right hook; I’d suffered it myself as his brother. She pushed past me -she was angry more than scared, muttering “I can’t, I can’t. You have to – you’re his brother, get him off it even if you have to punch him out and lock him up. That bastard”.
She finally cried then.
“He hit me, that stupid bastard”

“She stayed that night and at about 3am my brother came to my door looking for a fight. Someone must have seen his car parked outside my place and let him know, bloody gossips. I’m ashamed to say he got his fight. I laid him out cold with a punch to the nose then put him on the couch. Eunice stayed in the back bedroom the whole time; I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d wedged the chair under the door-handle. The next few days my two older brothers banded together and told Tom’s boys at the warehouse we’d kill anyone who opened a bottle with him after work. We talked to him about his responsibilities as a man and as a husband. I think over time he slowed down, or maybe got even better at hiding it, but it didn’t matter to Eunice. He’d hit her and she was gone a week later.”
That Pa had loved Eunice was clear to Lisa. In that week, before she did the infamous ‘runner’ did something happen with that love? Where did she stay, who gave her money? Was it the factory girlfriends as everyone had thought?

Alone in each day in this old house she is caught in this story as if in a web, dazed by it and hopeless to it as she imagines their possible ‘middles’, for she knows the end. Pa married Dora and they had a son, her Dad Nicholas. Dora died of a stroke at only 49 and Pa, many years later, died alone in hospital. No one ever heard again from Eunice- did they? For all anyone knows Eunice’s ashes lay in a pot under a rosebush in some cemetery that borders a dirt-country road.

'The house that Jack built'

2008-06-28T00:58:00.000-07:00

this is the introduction to a 'novel in progress' (dreadful term) of which an earlier blog ('Capacity for crulety') is a crucial moment. So I'm fucking with your head by popping these in out of synch, but hey, ships traverse strange currents and sudden wind-shifts, so just ride the waves if you will...

'The house that Jack built'
Chapter 1.

They stand, diminutive, before the giant house.

It looks unowned; its obvious wood-rot, need for re-pointing and sagging tin roof glow in the autumnal light with a strangely blessed and benign neglect. It was Peter’s Dads home and the young man for whom honour is a living word kept it on after his Dad died five years ago. It was too big for Peter and his young brother Simon anyway; so various renters have maintained, or not, its sprawling garden. Whilst Peter played Dad to his younger brother, a decade of local autoparts workers, farmers then a teacher and his family variously battled, lived with or caused this decay of wood, this blurring of once clear lines, this home or house.

The house; has it been waiting? Though the light is not bright Lisa shades her eyes to better see it. She has not come here before, all is new yet old, strange yet familiar. Before her, almost all around her so big is it, sprawls a sagging red brick federation with cream concrete pillars supporting the return verandah. Within, beyond the door that is locked, lies a long and dark central hall, its gloom and grimy paint interrupted by archways and pendant lights of shallow upturned frosted-pink bowls. Two small rectangles of bedroom come off at either side. These are cool pea-green and a shadowy teal-blue, baby-pink and old-lady-lilac. They are old country rooms, made for two boys, two girls, a guest and the parental bed. Single long windows are close-lidded by blinds with frayed and braided pull-hoops. There are posters of rainforests, or in one room, famous trains. Behind the front door lie beautiful things now dusty, a pleasing decay that whilst inert of itself creates swift imaginings of things held soft to the heart in a clutch of lavender. Ceiling fans. White lace drapes. Dust motes that hang in space.

Peter and Lisa will traverse all of this soon, and call it theirs. They will read in a mammoth lounge and dining room where a wall knocked out leads to the old kitchen. Peter will grow muscles along his spine from chopping wood to feed the combustion stove and Lisa will learn to make stirfries in a wok on a single ring of gas supplied by a bottle out the back. The house will be cold; the ceilings go up to 18ft and off the kitchen a wraparound rear verandah houses a 1980s peach bathroom that is perpetually mouldy. They will learn to keep rugs on their laps in the evening, and Lisa will work with the mouldy bathroom by planting a small rainforest of ferns in it. As she bends over the stove old boxes in the attic overhead will hold tight to their secrets. And as she gazes out of the kitchen window chook sheds will make her smile and plan.

But now they stand quietly as Peter fishes in his pockets for the keys.

Lisa sees herself busy gently fixing here. The house will whisper to her what it needs done and she will set about it. The house has an air of both incredible stillness and expectancy. Nothing moves, all is silent waiting. She sees herself restful here, but busy with the work of her hands.

“I love it” see says turning to Peter.
He sighs, “me too”.

Don’t you think it feels like its waiting?
For us?
Maybe just for something to happen.
Like us, he says.

(No, she thinks. Not like us.)

***

In bed.

As I turn away I feel his sleep. He sleeps. I had been so milk-washed and warm too. Then the house shook and shimmied. Wind picked it up and squeezed its arthritic old bones. Warm wind of autumnal rot and wet squeezed with its cold fist. The house gasped and flinched then stilled.
He stirs, I go still. He has to sleep, one of us has to sleep.
I roll to face the grey window square. We are in the lilac room which faces out to the property’s front. A tallboy looms in the corner, keeping sentinel over us as it has for so many previous sleepers in the old oak bed. The wind suspends itself in dawn stillness. It is at this time, always this time that it happens. My lungs slow their movement.
I hear it. Quiet at first then closer- the voice that calls. I listen. The voice calls my name.
The voice calls my name into the day. It is my own voice. If it is my own voice, then where am I?

About.

She gets up and moves through a house all a twitch, all a flutter. Early morning light refractions and a silence as vast as a yawn. It makes her feel stretched, this quiet, bigger and more open to the vast wastes of land beyond their drive. There is porridge soaked to cook for breakfast and ripe oranges to squeeze. The birds gossip, the toilet flushes and the stove gets fed a log. Outside a cat closes in for the kill. In the time that its mouth stretches monstrous around a starling a radio spurts dj talk, the porridge is burned in the pot- let their jitterbug day begin.
Later they stand at the edge of their block. She looks sadly at their new house, which is an old house in an area being newly developed. Around them acre lots are pegged out with string. The driveway curves in a slow arc up to the garage, the path makes its line to the front door, just as it should. Yet despite the huge expanse of gnarled old gum trees that hover aver it the house looks undressed and vulnerable, old and alone against the huge expanse of sky and dirt, dirt and sky. Windows like lidless eyes look back at her. She’ll get finished washing the lace drapes today. The garden will have to wait until they can afford to hire help to do something about it; it’s so overgrown it seems to dwarf the house beneath it, huge branches arced over a small child, in protection or threat she doesn’t know.He turns to her and smiles. ‘Here we are then’ he says.

goddamn

2008-06-23T02:20:00.000-07:00

fucking blogspot swapped over my email -to one on Gmail I'd set up yonks ago, without even telling me. Much vexation as my login attempts kept failing...
will write a blog soon, just glad to have found the source of the problem...

'captain Dad' is here and fixing!

2008-05-26T20:08:00.000-07:00

sad to say that this sailor girl's big ole boat of a house is under seige.
Day two of the holidays and the Captain (my pa) is out in the rain, aged 70, pulling rotting old timbers pasted with builders bog out of my creaking 'ships' window frames.
I can't believe the half-assed job prior owners have performed in lieu of 'maintenance'.

so as the timbers are peeled back like onion skin and the ants nest are discovered the rain keeps coming down and the list of ongoing work gets longer. I hope for clear skies tomorrow to keep on trying to make this old duck in the water seaworthy and tight as a tick in a drunken whores mattress...

no hammock time for me my friends, storms are a coming and the crew is busy on deck!

2008-04-29T18:16:00.000-07:00

For all the Mothers, but moreso for all the Sisters.

As Mother’s day approaches I’m deeply mindful of my own Mum’s wonderfulness, failings, sacrifices, foibles and love.
I recall little magical things: the times home sick when I’d be tucked into a bed so tight I had to fall asleep because movement was impossible. So sleep I would, until around 10am, then it was a chicken-noodle cuppa soup and a white-bread cheese sandwich and a promise that if I stayed in bed until 1 pm I could get up in my jammies and watch ‘The Young and the Restless” then ‘Day’s of our Lives’.
She’d be ironing and the lounge would smell of warm fabric; I’d be hooking my rug or working on the latest craft tapestry.

Or the time she made her first chilli-con-carne using real chillies and got over excited and used sooo much that even my Dad (a business traveller accustomed to the hottest of curries) was gagging and beet-red.

She has her strife (hell she’s Scorpio!) and her lack of sensibility at times- but she’s mine. I get to say that about her, it’s the nature of parenting I guess that for a kid the parent is simply ‘theirs’…

Yet as the advertising sweeps in celebrating this one aspect of Womanhood I’m also mindful of my sisters who aren’t mothers and will not or may never be.
I have friends who have chosen the clear path of not having kids. I salute them for this bravery in a time where ‘family’ still means just one thing in the mainstream.

These smart and beautiful single woman around me who hear the dreaded ticking clock and hope then don't and find ways to somehow push through with open hearts and yet deep introspection.

My lesbian friends who are so strong together and caring and kind but for whom physical motherhood means so much 'assistance' they've chosen to write it off.

My friends and all women who have tried and struggled and tried again and been constantly accosted by the images of babies in most advertising media. It used to be nude gals and sexualization of women I hated in ads, now it’s the notion of the super-mother and super-father with their perfectly clean and cuddly offspring.

I too have tried and tried and struggled and been made little by the medical profession who though they do want to help must have hides of leather to keep themselves sane. I don’t hate them.

But I love my sisters who know the grief, or the choice, or the existential crisis of not being part of this huge club. We stand outside the circle and make our own clubs where the sheer rudeness of strangers and their assumptions, or the sheer arrogance of a culture that celebrates only one form of mothering, are offset by a deep understanding of our times of loneliness and our times of mad and liberal joy.

This mother’s day I ask you to thank any woman you know who has ‘mothered’ you with her care, her cooking, her straight talk or her tough love.

For Jenny, Tracey, Sharnee + Tan. For Aaron and Shona. For Alanna and Sharon and Shellie and Emilie:
My love, respect and abiding fondness for our own 'parenting' cirlce.

The Capacity for Cruelty (draft chapter)

2008-04-06T19:27:00.000-07:00

Simon arrives. He is like a raven to her. Black clad, liquorice whip thin, dusty in bike boots; he is incendiary, smoky smelling, his hair wiry-black, bristling like feathers, his eyes the green-black of petrol. His eyes are slanted; astigmatism makes even his most candid glance seem slanted. His fingers are tobacco stained, he reeks of cigarette smoke and hot fumes. His voice when they talk is full of ire and fire- a year’s travels to scorched places, strange dreams dreamt under tin roofs during the shear. He emits sun and dust and sparks and reminds her of the grass fires she as a child saw sweep across the suburban paddocks near her home. Over the next week she learns he’ll pull his weight. His new medication makes him hyped up, manic at times but he burns it up in hacking at the garden with saw, hoe, spade and bare hands. He needs family and home until the next job, until the medication starts doing its level best. One day she finds him squatting under the shadowing ghost-gum examining a single stem of the wild and scrubby garden. He looks slowly from the plant up at her with eyes both flat and brilliant. “Correa Reflexa” is all he says, so that she feels stupid with her mouth full of small hostessy words, and must walk quickly way. She watches him. Her nostrils quiver at his passing odour- hot dust and an acrid tang of sweat. She is appalled by how sharp her lust is, feels the tight pink whirls and coils of her cunt and labia become slick and plumped with blood. She is a creature, an animal, feels every scorching inch of skin, and feels her nipples chafe inside their soft white cup of cotton. She watches from the kitchen window; she wants, and in this rasping state of breathlessness thinks of a match dropped to arid grasslands, contemplates the power and cruelty of fire, of fucking, of this irrevocable thing that she knows must happen.

That night the three of them sit on the veranda drinking beer and wine. Simon rolls cigarette after cigarette from a pouch of Champion Ruby as he and Peter talk of the house, of their boyhood, of Simon’s future.
His voice crackles in the dark against the more soothing hum of Peter’s. Lisa doesn’t talk much, downs the cheap the chardonnay quickly and lies back on an overstuffed and leaking armchair letting Simon’s matches fall at her feet, his voice twine around her like ropes. He is grandiose, drunk, but not as she’s been left to assume, particularly mad. His meds are to help him stop counting and finding numeric solutions to simple acts; the small tablet carefully halved each day allows him to loosen a control he describes as having been so rigid it was bowing his back tight, forcing him to smoke huge quantities of the good grass always available in rural towns. He speaks of people he has known, dogs he has loved. She imagines many women he has loved too, or that have loved him with his petrol eyes and calloused hands. About them the air is heavy and sullen, leeching the dusk sky of all colour save a metallic, toxic silver green. Simon reaches in to the esky for another beer, as the ice tinkles she becomes aware of a faint stirring, of atoms trembling on the brink of some coming shift. As the leaves of the ghost gum dryly flutter on the sudden hot gusts of north wind she realizes she has been holding her breath and lets it our in a sweeping sigh.
She is drunk, twitchy, and sticky with her own sap. She rises. “ I have to go and cool off, too much wine. G’night.”
Peter grabs her hand as she brushes by and kisses it. He is soft and lovely with beer and new company. “I’ll come and scrub your back”
“Don’t, she laughs. “Stay here with Simon or he’ll think we’re a boring old married couple”

Simon looks at her face intently, for what seems an age.
“I don’t think you’re boring” He leans up briefly to kiss her on the cheek, misses and his lips catch the tender skin under he jaw. In an instant her skin communicates this thing to him, flushes against him and she knows he knows.
“goodnight”.

She runs a bath; sometimes a bath is all that will do. When she was a girl if a storm came and the house beneath the hills screamed and shimmied with the wind she would cry and thrash about all electric until her mother dumped her in a bath full of bubbles. Mum would bring in the radio and play ABC oh so soft, sometimes radio-talk would tell a spy story or a torrid romance and the eloquent Shakespearian voices would seem sensible and lulling.
Now she sinks. Into the water to expand like a sponge as the ripples loosen her shoulders and belly. The wind struggles against the violeted window glass and the house creaks and bumps. It is an old house, it breathes in air much the same way she does. If she reclines until her head floats semi submerged she can hear her own heartbeat and water slowly seeping through the plug. She lies like this for minutes, the steady drip of water in her ears like a ticking clock, dulcet, soothing.
When she opens her eyes she sees the dark shadow of him is standing in the slit of open doorway.
She brings her hand up to her ribcage, her elbow making silken eddies in the now cool water. As she touches two fingers to her puckered areola the door softly closes.

....to be continued

copyright Amanda Wilson, 2008

Tourmaline

2008-03-24T22:59:00.000-07:00

Selene had dreamed of red the night before she found the lip rouge. In the dream she stood before a smeary mirror in the office tearoom and stared into the image of a face, which rippled as on water. She was taller and leaner and wearing fabrics she struggled against, fabrics she associated with pornography. The lace against her breasts was shiny and rubbed with wear. The silk skirt left her deliberately exposed and nude.
In her left hand, long and coolly pale, she held a delicate black pot stenciled in curlicues of gold gone to brass with the rubbings of time. Poised in her right hand like a cigarette filter dangled a slender brush. She dipped the brush into the pot, still transfixed by her cool other-image, and swirled it so that it emerged coated in redness. Thick vermilion that glistened as brilliant and wet as Chinese lacquer.
With a studied voluptuousness she raised the brush to her mouth and coated over and again the swollen lips. Over and again prod the brush into the pot, rim her mouth deeper and deeper into the red until her lips are sealed and invulnerable, as glossed and impenetrable as cherrywood.
She is asleep behind her mouth and yet in dreaming eases the brush again over the curving swell of her lower lip. It is warm wax. It seals and protects her.

She wakes up to the bass-heavy rattling kump-KA, kump-KA of a hot and rotting autumn wind pushing at the old panes. She makes coffee in the dark and draughty kitchen. No make-up to work today, yet still she is conscious of her mouth, the shapes it makes as she murmurs in the quiet office or sips a half cold coffee from the machine. She keys in data and lets its mindlessness wash over her. The red lip-rouge and all its potency glimmer in her mind, blood-heart of vividness in a room of grey walls, green terminals and shadow. She knows the pot of rouge to be hiding in a drawer; the last of its color caked like shoe polish, smelling of old roses.
That night Selene finds some of her Nana’s old things in a seed pearl purse. She also finds herself frightened by the accuracy of the dream image. She’s not usually prone to deep dreaming, or even to everyday vanities like lipstick. She knows she is colorless and wears her pale peach hair in a ponytail. Her skin is chalky-white and though she’s tried to wear make-up in the past, it always looks garish under the fluorescence at work. Now she moves into the bathroom and flicks her grey-eyed glance across the shelves, looking for the right oil. This is Selene’s private indulgence, fragrant oils for bathing. She loves to bathe, loves to lie in the tub in the darkened bathroom letting her ears drop just below the surface water until she can hear her own heartbeat. She takes a small bottle of macadamia oil, its fragrance already warmly exposed. At the dresser she carefully drizzles oil into the caked pot, watching it moisten and glow brightly red. As she watches this brightening, this process of glimmer and shine, Selene recalls again the dream and how she sucked in her breath as she looked at her final self. She begins to touch her face, and then she opens a bottle and is touching her face with circles of creamy foundation smoothed over her pallor. She puffs talc around her sharp jaw and sees it immediately soften, then with a long pencil rims her eyes in a hint of smudged grey kohl. They are enormous eyes, pools of silver in a blank face. She is a blank canvas that cries out for the red heart/mouth at its center, the color that will twist gazes to her; twist herself into someone new and dangerous. She paints, the color glimmers from the pot, glows on her lips like passion and tastes like old perfume. Selene dresses in a suit the color of milk-touched coffee. She slides pale silk stockings over her smooth legs. The fur collar she found in the old suitcase of her nana’s fits over the jacket and fluffs in a soft amber glow against her throat. Her shoes are oxblood leather. A look in the mirror from heels to head tells her that she is new. She is new and marvelous and shivering with possibility.

She goes perhaps to a darkened jazz club, listens to the sultry music as she sips at short blacks. The saxophonist is tall with long legs and slim hips. She watches and sips, he senses her stare and returns it. Selene feels as though she holds him in place with an invisible thrumming wire of energy that connects their gazes. On the break before the bands’ third set she finds herself being led insistently from the bar, past cables and amps and drum cases and into the half-lit industrial kitchen. His lips are searingly hot as they push aside the fur collar to lick and nuzzle her arched neck. Selene feels his hands between her shoulder blades undoing some hooks, her bra is pulled down leaving her breasts cool and exposed to the air, then his hot mouth finds her nipples, laps and sucks at the tightening pink skin. She is both out of her body with disbelief and immersed deeply in her own flesh as her skirt is hitched up and her knickers eased down. He is sliding incredibly long cool fingers along her thighs and the sink under her arse is icy cold and the sensation of being emotionally detached even as she pushes her breast into his mouth, of burning through her belly even as she shivers against slick metal overwhelms her. Selene pulls at the belt of his jeans then slides the clingy rayon shirt up his smooth torso. He doesn’t say anything to her. His fingers flick against her clitoris sending shimmering heat up her spine, they tangle in her pubic hair as he strokes the skin in low slow rhythms that leave her slack and sprawled and open. She slides her hands into his shorts, delights in the feel of the hard contracting muscles under the hot skin of his arse, then moves her hands round slowly to touch the thick velvety penis that strains towards her fingers.
He bites her throat, her ear; growls ‘God your mouth’ as he pulls her to the edge of the sink and kneels between her wide-flung thighs. His tongues is inside her then lapping and swirling around the whirls of her labia and clit until she collapses, panting, against the tiles, so glad she chose the sax player over the drummer that she laughs aloud…

But maybe Selene doesn’t dig jazz. Perhaps she goes to a gothic club then hides in the toilet fearing her new face in this crowd of strange faces, these ‘petals on a wet black bough’. A woman, tall with a beautiful pale décolletage offset by stiff black ruffles will watch her, then ask her to dance. They go the bar and Violet buys her shots of tequila. Selene drinks and her pink cat-tongue flicks out to lick the salt. They stare at each other and suck on the wedges of lemon. Selene’s mouth is ruby-smeared and tingling as she holds a slice of lemon between her teeth and leans into Violet’s perfumed neck, plum-hued mouth. Violet nips at the lemon, then growls low as she as she twines Selene’s hair into a rope and pulls her inexorably in for the kiss that is soft yet casts a handsome burn. Their knees draw closer together; they finger each other’s hair and napes as their lips slant harder in this kiss. Red lipstick smears with purple so that when they draw apart, panting, their lips looks bruised.

Maybe though Selene tires. Maybe the cat is hungry and wants to play; maybe the flat is warm and safe. Maybe she stays at home, undresses again slowly removing all but the red lipstick at the heart of her face. She reads a few chapters from an erotic anthology with a beautifully photographed black and white nude on its cover. Then, sprawled naked on her old couch she begins to caress herself. She will sigh as her hands glide down her arms against the inner flesh that is white, vulnerable and supple. She muses then that she is glad for this preciousness of skin housing self, for its youthfulness, it’s feeling. She must not waste this skin-communicated thing she has, that people have together. The book drops to the floor as she runs her fingers (so new seeming!) in delicate whirls over her breasts and belly. Her breathing deepens, she feels its heavy ebb and return eddy in the thickly radiant heat of the furnace. She drifts in currents of warm-water pleasure and her cat slinks out an open window.
Here is her form on the old couch: her lips glow softly carmine, her body rises and falls like pale tidal spume; rises, retreats then sinks into the deeps of sleep.

She dreams that she sits in a very hard-backed chair in a row of other people sitting in various poses: upright, stiff, sprawled or coyly cross-footed. In this formation they seem to be flying and so begged on by great gust of wind she stretches out her arms as wings. The one sitting before her does the same, then soon the one behind, and like this, like children in a school game, they turn great arcs against the sky, wheel and dive like birds over a tourmaline-green sea.

promenade

2008-03-20T20:42:00.000-07:00

Somewhere between this now
black and white pixilation
in a picture,
And then when she
strolled gently through the air
(little stirrings everywhere)
was the moment-
all wavered, shivered, stopped-
of her capture
in the ether
in the other
in the second of the shot.

Where air sucked in and held,
a pause of motion, atoms tremble
and water fixed to sand.
An umbrella caught,
caught in flight
flutters on the brink.

Captured in the knowing eye
swift finger, held breath
- indolent click.

villanelle

2008-03-20T20:40:00.000-07:00

The window is a lake she’d like to swim
Arrow through the mirror dark of water
Flicking feet like ghost-white fins

She knows she could breathe in and then
Go deep enough that breathing doesn’t matter
The window is a black lake she’d like to swim

Turn out the light, the sound, and him
Then through the surface break and shatter
Flicking feet like ghost-white fins

The night beyond the pane is beckoning
Soft now is the voice of her Mother’s Daughter
Beyond the window, a black lake she’d like to swim

To know the sun in water drops on skin,
To curl her toes in current and then
Flick her feet, like ghost-white fins

And in the room the TV men are proclaiming
Danger! A boy-child killed his mother.
The window is a black lake she’d like to swim,
Flicking feet like ghost-white fins