The Second Step's a Doozy

Did I say that the journey began with a single step?  As true as that is, the next step can easily be a detour not imagined when the first one was taken - and so it has turned out.  This has been a year filled with side-tracks, diversions, and unexpected busyness.

 

When our government announced Covid lockdowns and restrictions on mingling with other people, my wife and I looked at each other and shrugged.  

"Not keen on crowds" we said to each other "and always happy pottering in our own garden and doing our own thing - sounds like we have been handed an excuse to live our lives in a fashion most congenial to us"

Within days, we found ourselves "in loco parentis" to grandchildren who had been sent home to do their studying online for an indeterminate period.  What fun!  What wonderful mental exercise for us as we reached back five decades or more to our own long lost schooldays, in search of discarded bits of geometry and algebra - it was amazing just how many forgotten formulae surfaced from the depths.  What wondrous new skills and words did we acquire as we grappled with the many and varied types of software chosen by the many and varied teachers who, only the previous week, had the pleasure of close daily learning experiences with those grandchildren, but now had to find, on short notice, ways of teaching them via the internet. Everyone involved found themselves on the proverbial "steep learning curve" - a trite business cliche that, for once, was deadly accurate.

 

 

 

So much has happened since then - in our family, our community, our country, and the wider world - and we have, like so many others, been busy just keeping up with it all.  Somehow, the time allotted to matters creative was nibbled away by the effort involved in keeping ourselves afloat, and helping other family members in worst straits than us - until the inevitable happened.  The long lapse in creative work began to feel inexcusable, and recommencing the work seemed almost impossible - the creative impulse was swamped by a sense of guilt and failure.

 

 

 

Now, the warnings of the scientists are again proven true, despite the wishful political thinking that had gained the upper hand, and Christmas is to be held under restrictive conditions, due to the virus once again slipping through our defences. 

 

The garden is soggy, but productive, as La Nina helps us recover from the horror and dessication of last summer's drought and bushfires - our creek is busy with minnows, crayfish, and small perch (who are growing fast) but no trout - the cicadas have had a bumper year, and the night is full of frog song. Clutches of ducklings, baby magpies, and parrots have visited our garden with their parents, learning which of the neighbourhood humans are soft touches for a bit of extra tucker. One of my 18 year old Apple Tree bonsais has flowered for the first time, and set tiny fruit.

 

 

 

The human grandchildren have resumed normal schedules, and we can allow the trigonometry and calculus to slip back into the oblivion of ancient memory - and now, with time on our hands, there is no excuse for not picking up the frayed threads and setting to work again.  Let's see what next year brings.  Ours has turned out pretty well, in the end - I hope it all comes good for you, too.

Revival

Has it only been three weeks since last I posted here?  To my writing conscience it feels like it has been months that a quiet little voice has been trying to push its way through the hubbub that has been life of late, demanding that I do what I had committed to do, and publish each week.  That little voice, though, was not strong enough to drown out the other jobs that were calling for attention- some scheduled, some not, some deemed urgent by me, or by other people, and most of them taking more time than originally allotted to them.

But now, after so many dry, windy, soil-baking months, proper rain has fallen on our Valley on The Mountain, and the creek, for so long timidly creeping down between bare banks towards the falls, is singing and dancing down the rocks and through the reeds.  The flush of chilly water has the Eustachius out their muddy lairs in search of mates, and the Cherax too will soon be doing the same. 

My ungrateful gardens, so long struggling despite what seemed to me to be an huge investment in time, effort, and water, have responded to the snow and rain by leaping to attention.  Blossom and leaf-bud have gone from dormant to bursting over night, and cabbages that seemed unwilling to grow at all have suddenly tripled in size.  Tardy irises that seemed ready to give up the ghost are hurling flower stems in every direction and crab apples are blessing the bees with an unexpected abundance of nectar.

Now, a walk in the garden, instead of being a way to build an ever longer list of chores to be done, is a brilliant, scented, soothing blessing of what is, and inspiration for the future. 

Though that list of things to do is still there, I guess - so back to the editing..........

A Dawn Surprise

Winter has come to our little Valley on The Mountain at last - we woke before sunrise to soft falling snow.

As the light grew, the rain set in, and a few hardy locals set out for the village.....

The snow and ice didn't stop the trains, but many of the roads from here out to the west are closed...

I approached my garden with trepidation, but my brave little cabbages and baby pea plants were standing their ground....

Even as Winter finally makes itself felt, Spring's first messengers have arrived.....

A Ripple Here, a Breaking Wave There

Cloudy, autumn, Blue Mountain dawns are, in our front yard, a melange of almost every green on the pallette, leavened by the dull greys and browns of bark and twig, and one brief glimpse of the white house beyond the creek, on the other side the little valley.  Later, the sun will push through even thick cloud and pick out the late roses, and second blooming of the rosemary, but, for now, the shadows and muted colours allow easy concealement for both the hunter and the hunted.

As I stood at the top of the steps, assessing what level of clothing would be adequate for a walk to the village, an anomalous fleck of brightness jiggled into view at ground level.  Brillliant white, bobbing up and down,  crossing the grass (not lawn, it hasn't been mowed for a while, and is only kept in check by the tyres of family who are staying for a while) towards me.

Changing focus from sky to earth, I find our resident Black Ducks waddling towards me.  One has picked up a fallen Cockatoo feather - small, squarish, and ever so white - and is waving it at me while its mate mutters quietly about their need for breakfast.  The feather is dropped in the rush, the moment I toss a few little scraps of (wholemeal) bread onto the grass.

How long do these birds live?  I've looked up a variety of sites and reference works and so far haven't been able to find an answer.  We met them first, eleven and a half years ago, soon after we arrived at our new home in the Valley on top of the Mountain.  I had walked to the letterbox and was standing there, checking the mail, when a soft, repetitive mutter intruded on my reading.  A duck was standing a few feet behind me, looking up, addressing me in his own language.  I don't know where he was while I crossed the yard - there was no flutter of wings to say he had flown in from the creek, so I must have walked past him.  I could hear my grandfather's voice, decades ago..

"Lucky it wasn't a Brown Snake, lad, it would'a got you"  It was a reminder to look about while I walked - what else had I missed?

He followed me back to the house, so I took the hint and threw some bread onto the lawn - he had made it clear he wasn't leaving the verandah otherwise.  A day or two later, he was back - with a friend.  Not long after that, we were introduced to seven fluffy ducklings.  I am guessing that the previous residents had been feeding them, and, despite the house having been empty for some months, they hadn't forgotten what might be possible, if the right questions were asked.

Similarly, it didn't take long for our Magpie Landlords to arrive and let us know what rent would be acceptable to them - and the King Parrot that landed on my shoulder with no warning was another sign of my place in the order of things.  Our new beginning in the mountains was, in the lives of the feathered locals, a continuation - a new, if similar, chapter in a longer story.  Those birds had been dealing with humans for a long time, and not only the owners of this house.  Our Magpie friends had a cafe-crawl that included several other houses along our street, as well as the butcher in the village on the other side of the railway line.

Before we had met many of the local humans, the birds were already greeting us and letting us know where we stood in their world.  It is a world that their ancestors occupyied and shared with humans for a very, very long time.  Only thirty years ago, or forty at the most, this ground was a swamp full of paperbark trees and reeds, frogs and snakes - do these ducks remember those times?  They would have raised many ducklings in such a place. 

The Cockatoos would remember - they are said to live seventy years, perhaps more, and the more I see of them, the easier it is to believe that they have a language, culture, and an oral history.  That would mean it is only just over three and a half Cockatoo lifetimes since Governor Phillip set his convicts and marines to work on the shores of Port Jackson.

It could be as much as a thousand Cockatoo lifetimes since the ancestors of the Gundungurra people first drank from the stream that flows past our garden.  I wonder what stories the Cockatoos have been able to tell each other about this land, and the changes that various people have wrought upon it, even as the ice ebbed and flowed, and the oceans rose and fell.

All who came before us left their marks, and created ripples that reach across time and space to affect the here and now.  Ripples seem tiny things, but when enough arrive at a conjunction, a wave can rise, and break - it can freshen a pond, or crash upon a shore and uproot what was standing. 

Have you wondered, as you paddle your canoe down the stormier reaches of the river of life, which choices of your own have put you where you are?  Most of us do - yet there are waves in that maelstrom that grew from the ripples of the decisions of others, made in other times and places, near and far, just as the ripples of our own making have gone far from our sight, to shores we may never see.  One wave might threaten to pull us under - another might wash us onto a welcoming shore - the voyage, one way or the other, is sure to be interesting.

I stood, mattock in one hand on this sunny morning, and contemplated my vegetable garden. I looked at the waves of pumpkin leaves and froth of summer grass seed heads that were breaking across my once tidy beds, and remembered the source of some of the ripples that led to this verdant tempest.  Hurrying onto rain-soaked steps while wearing old, smooth-soled shoes was one splash that is still making itself felt - one moment of carelessness, followed by months of consequences.  I can still only weild the mattock one handed, so it is going to take time to get the gardens back where I want them.  The winter frosts will probably do more clearing and weeding than me.

Still, it could be worse - we escaped the fire season that was anticipated for The Mountains, unlike so many other parts of Australia (shhhh!  I know - it is only the beginning of March - there is still April to go yet)

If a picture paints a thousand words....

If a picture paints a thousand words, how few words can I use to describe succinctly the beauty in an image such as this?

White sunlight shattered and scattered into its rainbow parts, reflecting from blood red Waratah blossoms, framed by translucent copper sprouting along a plum twig, amid shadow-dappled, chlorophyll-glossed leaves breathing verdant life and beauty into the garden.

See how that flower calls to the eye, even from a distance, surrounded and almost hidden by a tangled quilt of branches, twigs, leaves, needles, and shadows.  It wants to be seen, no matter how thoroughly the other plants may try to conceal it.  Such beauty cries out for a story, and I have encountered several stories explaining the vivid colour of the Waratah.

In one, the flower - once white - is stained red with the blood of a Wonga Pigeon that is wounded by a hawk while seeking its mate.  In another, the red is given to the flower by the blood of a Black Snake that is wounded defending a human child of its totem - while a third story has the flower coloured red by a fiery cataclysm of falling stars.

How old are such stories?  For how long have our ancestors being weaving words to pass on to their descendants the stories of the beauty of the world we all live in?  What is it that drives us to record and describe the world we see - to pass our observations on to those far away in space and time? 

What exactly were they trying to tell us with those stories?

Now cameras are now ubiquitous, and many people use pictures with minimal captions or no words at all, allowing the picture to tell the story or ask the question.  Are cameras displacing descriptive writing?  Often, yes - or so it seems.  But what does a picture tell us if there is no story accompanying it, or embedded in it, meshing into a wider culture that the viewer knows and understands?

Before cameras there were other images - before written or printed words, there were images - paintings on cave walls, carvings, images on wood or clay or stone or bark - representations to assist in the remembering and telling of stories.  Such methods are still in use, and just as DVDs failed to eliminate vinyl records from the world, and ebooks have had to live along side the paper-leaved books they were supposed to be replacing, modern technology will not eliminate our need to create images with our hands and our tongues.

For, in the end, what do we have with which to show others that we were here, thinking and feeling and loving, but the images we offer in the words we speak or sign, or the images we scratch or draw or paint? And will they understand what we offered them?