Look Again

 Our Writing Group retreated to a sort of electronic arm's length during 2021, and was just beginning to meet in person again in the latter part of the year.  It was suggested that we put together a series of short pieces based on several prompts that focused on a family, and this was my first response.... the actual prompt is the heading.

 

BUT WHEN SHE TURNED AND LOOKED AGAIN....

When I moved into the house where I hoped to rebuild my dreams, and my life, at 32 Swanson St (a true “renovator's delight” - long vacant while its previous owner faded away in aged care) my first encounters with the neighbours left me fearing my dream was really the opening act in a nightmare.

The friends helping me move were quick to spot the old man wandering in the front yard of number 34. He was a balding, lopsided, stooped shape that, if straightened out and rejuvenated, would have given any opposing rugby opponents pause. His crooked face was in constant motion. His eyes darted like pin-balls while a constellation of expressions that danced from delight to grimaces, and back again, with detours through anger, terror, and confusion as he muttered constantly, declaiming to some invisible audience, or demanding answers from the same unseen person, except when his eyes were fixed on me as I carried the detritus of my broken marriage from the footpath into my house of new hopes. Unsettled, I left the ferrying of goods to my friends and began to unpack the kitchenware and prepare a morning tea for the workers.

A tumbling flash of red and white outside my kitchen window became a football soaring over the fence from the back yard of number 30 and vanishing in the weeds of what I hoped would one day be my perfect garden. Seconds later, three boys threw themselves over the paling fence in pursuit of the ball, while other little heads popped up above the palings to watch their progress.

Now I knew where the background noise of yelling, shouting, screaming, and laughter had been coming from. Dust rose where tall weeds shook and the smallest of the boys burst into sight, ball clutched fiercely to his chest, his shirt-tails firmly in the clutches of one of the larger boys. His mouth fell open when he saw me staring at him through the glass. He pointed, and the others froze for a moment, before charging back to the fence and scrambling up and over. The silence was ominous, and soon broken by the angry voice a woman somewhere inside number 30, and the indignant arguments of children. Not a word was comprehensible, but the tone was fierce, and soon only the woman's voice remained.

As I stood listening, the backyard came into focus, and I saw things I hadn't noticed when the agent had shown me the house, weeks earlier. Planks and sticks and dead leaves were piled up in the furthest corner, and I realized that I was looking at a tepee, made by small hands. When I walked down and peered inside, there were toy cars, a home made bow and some arrows, and a home made ladder leading to the top of the fence overlooking the back corner of number 34. Movement and muttering again – the old man was now wandering his back yard, his head just visible above the fence.

What had I let myself in for? I went back into my new abode and supervised the placing of the few pieces of furniture I owned, opened a bottle of wine and thanked my friends for their help. Their toasts of good luck fell into a murky, troubled pool of apprehension, and I was sorry to see them drive away. Number 30 was back to full volume; what were they fighting about now.? As I stood at my front door, cheering broke out from my right, while on my left, the battered old man was pacing back and forth between his letterbox and his front porch, more agitated than ever.

Suddenly, a horde of children, ranging from teen to toddler swept down the front path at number 30 and clattered along the footpath to where the old man had, paused at his gate. As I watched in fearful anticipation, he smiled, patted the smallest girl on the head, and then suffered himself to be led into his house by two teenage girls. A tall boy cradled a foam vegetable box as he followed them, and I realized I could smell cooked meat – was that roast lamb? Did one of those girls call the old man Poppy? I jumped as a throat cleared itself behind my right shoulder, and as I turned to look again in the direction of my letter box, I found myself face to face with two of the fence jumpers.

They were standing just outside my gate, looking much cleaner than they had earlier, one of them holding something covered in a tea towel. As my brain grappled with the sight, my nose clutched at the scent of warm, fresh baked cake. I blinked, and looked from them to the empty front yard of number 34, and back to them. The bigger boy spoke.

“That's Pop” he said “He's mum's grandpa – he's really old. We take him dinner every night” he added, shuffling his feet “Mum sent us to say we're sorry about jumping the fence, and we'll come after school tomorrow and clean up our fort in the back yard, if that's alright, and she said you would like this cake. She just made it. It's our favourite” 

A babble of voices announced the return of the party from number 34, and I looked again at the two earnest faces in front of me. I had to swallow before I could speak, and by then the other children were waiting quietly by my letterbox, gazing at their siblings and the stranger who had taken over their playground.

“I haven't unpacked my plates or cutlery properly yet” I said, finding my voice “Do you think it would be alright if I came in and shared the cake with you guys and your parents? I can bring some drinks”

“There's just Mum, and she loves visitors” the younger boy said, and grinned “and she loves white wine”

“Give me half a minute and I'll be right in – save a slice of cake for me”

Sounds in the Silence

Away from our beloved Mountains for a week, we couldn't resist the chance to regain some altitude, and drove to the top of Mount Vincent, one of the highest points between Coopernook and Lansdowne, north of the Manning River.  It was an interesting drive, often at little more than walking pace, through damp gullies and up steep, rocky ridges - always surrounded by soaring tree trunks.

We did so because my wife's mum and aunts had told many fond tales of their childhood days at Langley Vale, a village now vanished, that once thrived near the Langley Bros Timber Mill, on the Lansdowne River.  The men of the family had worked at the mill, or cut timber for it, and the children had walked for miles across neighbouring farms and followed the old Langley Vale Tramway up through the forested gullies and ridges to picnic on the rocky heights of Mt Vincent.

The first thing that struck us was the view.  Vast sweeps of farmland and forested ridges, cut through by slow winding rivers, spread out to the south and near west.  Further out to the west, mountain ranges framed the sky, while north west soared the jagged remnants of old volcanoes, now clothed in temperate rain forest.  Even northeast, the ocean view was partially obscured by a sudden mountain. 

Distant towns, and the city of Taree were tiny specks in the vista, and a long white line of surf marked the edge of Australia and the beginning of the Pacific Ocean.

The second, notable thing was not the silence, but the sounds we could hear coming to us from miles away - cows bellowing in paddocks half a kilometre below and several kms away - the siren of an ambulance - first heard while it was still ten kms away, drawing nearer until it stopped somewhere in the village of Lansdowne.  A dog barked, and we looked down to see a tiny black speck, far below, helping its master muster cattle.

Though we live in the middle of the Blue Mountains National Park, in one of the little towns threaded like shiny beads along the Great Western Highway, and thus imagine we are in a quiet place, the silence further out, away from the surf-like roar of highways and main roads, and the accumulated hum and grumble of myriad airconditioners, mowers, cars, stereos, and businesses, is at a different order of magnitude.

Most humans now live in an ocean of sound unlike anything that has existed for most of the history of the human race - back in the village, sitting in the sun on the front verandah of the aunt's house, I was privy to every conversation in houses a hundred metres away, to the half-cocked first crowing of a young rooster on another block, the distant conversation of cattle and farm dogs, and the many birds that patrolled the yards and gardens in their constant search for food, shelter, and company.

 Silence can seem a distant memory if too many of these guys are about, though.

That I could hear  all these things so clearly (despite old ears battered by decades of violent noises and now awash in the cricket like tones of tinnitus) is testament to the amount of noise we now inflict upon ourselves and the world around us.

We adapt to the background noise after a while, just as our noses adapt to ambient smells, and our eyes to the light available.  Yet even as we adjust our perceptions, and filter out the input our brain classifies as least important, we are still buffetted by it - often to the point of significant physical and psychological stress. 

So, when you feel the need to wander among the trees, or to sit on a rock and listen to the water tumbling downstream, or to luxuriate in the crackling warmth of a campfire, far from the hustle and bustle, perhaps you are not, as some would have it, being self indulgent.  At some deeper level, you are seeking what you need for the sake of your own wellbeing.

Unravelling

I have not been on holidays, as the lack of recent posts on this blog might lead you to suspect - if I had, then posts with pictures of surf, sunshine, and fish, would have been popping up. I have been busy providing support as various family members deal with the fraying and unravelling of some of the threads of the tapestry of their lives.  Stories have ended, and been lost, and threads have broken beyond repair, remaining only in memory.

It has been a difficult, trying time for some of them, and providing support has meant letting some of my routines slip - but that is life.  No amount of planning can identify the exact time and place when certain contingencies will pounce on us, even when the general form and likelyhood of such events is anticipated long in advance.

As the family have moved through the various emergencies and emerged at new balance points, I have been able once again to find time to write.  The journal came first, of course, as I needed to record and make sense of the things that were happening around me. As a degree of normality returned, I was able to once again address the final scenes of my current attempt at a novel - though that was simmering all the while at the back of my mind, and may even have benefited from the process of fermentation. 

A couple of days ago I was able to declare the first draft complete - the first time I have attempted a full length novel and reached a conclusion that I found satisfactory.  Short stories have always felt easier - the ingredients for the ending or the punch line are usually present in the opening lines or paragraphs.  The threads are fewer, and the weave, though it can be complex, does not have the potential for tangles that a few hundred pages can hold.  Short stories can be knotty, but novels can develop dreadlocks - combing them out can be so painful that the only option is run the clippers over it and start afresh.

Already I am building a mental file of the knots that need undoing or cutting, the trimming and polishing that has to happen to make a draft into a novel, and finding the idea of working on the second draft appealing.  Does that mean I am on the right road to completion?  I hope so, because the concept, characters, and scenes for another novel are already trying to get my attention.  Topical as those concepts and characters are, I need to get started soon.

Tonight looks like being the first in a few days not to be illuminated by lightning storms, so, as I doze off, thinking about my stories, I hope to be soothed by the murmur of the creek that has been refreshed by those storms, and the cheerful calls of the frogs and crickets enlivened by the rain and the rising waters.

Stories lost, and found.

In the galaxy of stories that is humanity, each of us orbits among the other stars of our home constellations, spinning our yarns into the thread of our story and weaving it into the vast, complex spiral.  Some weave tightly, close to other stars, warming each other, bending each others trajectories - some soar alone through the gaps and along the rim.

When a story-teller ends, when the flame sputters to its end, the constellation changes shape, and memories begin to fade and fragment.  The once tightly ordered solar system becomes a debris field to be swept up by others - or ignored and forgotten.

Though the once bright fire has been extinguished, there are still sparks and embers to be found that can tell of the glories that were, and keep some chapters, paragraphs, or even just a few phrases of the story, alive in other orbits.

Sifting through such a debris field can be joyful and utterly melancholy in the same minutes.  A dusty hoard of old cards and letters will reveal traces of dreams and nightmares, and hopes fulfilled or dashed, or even a squirrel-cache of notes or coins. A hidden diary or box of letters may reveal a surprising, even shocking, turn of events or emotions that had never been revealed before.

Carefully ordered craft cupboards, work-benches, and garden sheds have changed from places of purposeful resources to mere piles of souvenirs, as the family archaeologists assess, evaluate, allocate, or discard.

Yet, as we sort, each object still carries faint vibrations or echoes of its original task in the long story that has now ended.   A single photograph can bring all work to a stop, as the memories awaken, and a part of the story is called forth and handed around to be savoured and cherished at least one last time.  A special cup or teapot from childhood visits, long ago, or the hand-made apron that allowed the visitor to join in the work at the kitchen table, and the searcher is back in the early days of their own story.

And so the severed threads can be woven into another part of the great tapestry, continuing a weave and weft that may have been handed on over many generations. Souvenirs are often found that tell of lives generations past - artefacts that have been gathered in other long ago expeditions to other darkened stars.  We are fortunate, who can sit with friends and family, amid the tears and the laughter, and dwell again in the golden age of childhood that such fragments evoke.

As well as nostalgia, there is the carefully preserved evidence of a world that no longer exists, and we remember how much has changed even in the course of our own lifetimes, let alone in the lives of those who came not so many decades before us. It often yields clues that allow the investigator to chart and date the beginning of the decline that precedes most ends, and offers all sorts of little lessons in ways that life can be lived, and enjoyed, and managed, and endured.  Those of us who can embark on such expeditions are fortunate, for so many stories end suddenly, catastrophically, or even intentionally, and final chapters are left unwritten, or erased.

Look around your constellation - cherish your stories and theirs; they can so easily be lost forever.