What I did on my holidays

We caught planes, trains and automobiles; we visited friends, families, zoos, art galleries; we read books; we ran around and we sat still; we got sick (and no more shall be said about that); we celebrated my 36th birthday (36 - so far, it's not so bad); we lived without email and the internet for five weeks (the liberation!) and we realised that east or west, home is best.

This past weekend was the last before we start two full time jobs (at least in the short term - we're pretty sure something's gotta give) and we went here:



I swam because I was at the beach and by golly, that's what I do at the beach. I swam without a wetsuit, and once the numbness set in, it was lovely. Before the numbness, I could feel the ice crystals forming on the bits below water.

But I think there are few places where I can swim with cows lowing and butterflies and swallows swooping above my head. There are few places where my kids can splash nudie in the shallows,



and few places this orange:



Al and I have resolved to enjoy what we have, rather than looking always to greener pastures. We're stopping the circular arguments of should we stay or should we go, we're stopping the plans for the future, and for the moment, we're nourishing the roots we have here. Thinking back to the weekend, this shouldn't be too hard.

The pointy end

This morning I picked the blackberries that grow in the old convict cemetary just over the way. (It's worth living here, just to write that sentence.) When I stand there plucking the fruit from the thorns I have visions of brambles growing through the bones interred 150 years ago - it's not such a grim vision when you taste the sweetness while stopping in the sunshine.

I had thought to pick enough to make some jam but that was a plan doomed to failure. The whole process is so fiddly, the thorns so spikey, the labradoodle so greedy and sly (snuffling up the fruit from the basket while I was deep in the thicket), the kids so demanding (there's no explaining why these particular berries are destined for jam and not their bellies), that it would take me hours to gather enough. And, as much as I like blackberry jam, which is especially lovely eaten with cream on white bread, it's always going to be a distant second to eating the berries alone, outside in a field, glad of the sun that's warming up the first cold morning of the year. I'm not a peasant and I don't need to protect myself from scurvy and starvation in the long winter ahead so I'll gather and gobble them while I may and then enjoy the anticipation of next February.

And then I fell into the brambles. They really hurt. In an old book from my own and my mother's childhood, called At School with the Stanhopes (complete with boarding school, japes and sexually non-threatening but crush-worthy older brothers and teachers' husbands) there's a incident where they whole school takes off from conjugating French verbs and studying Georgian history to go blackberrying, so that they can learn the worthy art of jam making. The uppity girl is pushed into the brambles, which is presented as a bit of harmless fun. The way those thorns bite, more like serious assault, I think.

Down on the farm

I'm always at a loss away from my garden. What to do with the left over cornflakes and bread crusts when there are no chooks to feed? Where do the meat trimmings go when there are no dogs sniffing around for sneaky treats? What to look do outside when there are no tomatoes and plums to test for ripeness? Thank goodness my parents have a compost bin- I'd otherwise be shaking in the absence of recycling.

To take the edge off things I haunt the neighbourhoods of my travels, peering over fences to catch a glimpse of gardens. If I find a veggie garden behind a back fence I'll return again and again until I must surely be in danger of being arrested for loitering. But Brisbane houses don't lend themselves to peeking - there're too many high fences and deep setbacks from the road. So yesterday we drove (and drove and drove and drove - my, but Brisbane is big) to one of my favourite places here - the Northy Street City Farm. It's a few huge blocks of 'permaculture' by the river, in the middle of an inner suburb. It's peaceful and sprawling and soothes my need to stroke some produce.

My Dad is never impressed by the place - he says it's all pumpkins and weeds, and there's not a lot of food emerging from a very big and potentially productive space. That's true enough (although there's a little more besides the cucurbits) and yesterday I was a little underwhelmed by the state of the gardens. But in that farm I recognised a space that is used. On Sundays hippies and middle class mothers gather at the organic markets under the Moreton Bay figs, their kids rollicking in the playground made from trees and bits of trash. There's a cafe in a shed selling chai and food cooked from the garden. My favourite nursery, Edible Landscapes, which is a wild and messy place, is hidden behind a fence, filled with the makings of a garden in my alternate, Brisbane life. People wander and chat and play music. For all its wildness and lushness - it doesn't look much like the farms of our childhood stories - the place is welcoming to people.

In many ways I take after my Dad when it comes to gardening - I look for maximum productivity, whether by permaculture or straight weeded lines; it must the farming stock we come from. I tend to forget the garden is a place to be in, not just a space to work in. The City Farm was so seductive yesterday, with its offer of a living space, not just a working space, and it's making me think about my garden is some very different and liberating ways ...

*****

After the City Farm we drove out to Kenmore for lunch with some friends. I like them but don't know them well - they're from Al's days as a public servant. They are a lovely couple but very together: no cracks in their ceilings and no cracks in their facade either, if you take my meaning. I always feel a little rough around the edges near them, and wish I'd brushed my hair and lost 8 kilos before arriving for lunch. And yet they didn't raise an eyebrow when Nell ate the turquoise playdough or Lu repeatedly attempted nude-ness and climbed to some inappropriately high places when I was drinking wine and not watching her movements. They pretty much share a set of the same ideas that we do, though you'd never guess it to look at the families together. You can find like souls in the most unexpected of places.

White Christmas

Tiny seeds, not snow.

Crikey ...

... it's hot. It's five years since I left Brisbane and I've lost my tolerance for the heat; anything over 24 degrees is cause for grumbling. No time in the garden; it's all I can do take the compost out and collect the eggs.

Still, this morning Lu and I managed to get out for some convict brambles and multiple rabbit sightings before the temperature crept up.



And, as a reward for her patience with her prostrate and self-pitying parents ("I think I've got heat rash"; "This could be heatstroke"), we made Lu some ice blocks. The tupperware version - were a big part of my own childhood, filled and frozen with lime cordial. As a hippy-lite mother I make them from fruit juice, to quiet the little fun-suck voice inside my head griping "if it's sugar, it's bad".



In this weather we get to eat in the courtyard, which isn't commonplace in dear old Tas. And eating out of the garden in the garden is about as good as it gets for me.



Eating from the garden: eggs, scrambled, and chives for breakfast; corn for lunch; sage, rosemary, basil, chives and marjoram in the hamburger patties, with tomatoes and lettuce for dinner; blackberries in a clafoutis for dessert; strawberries, blood plums and those sexy, sexy beans for snacks.

Free fruit

More blackberries again today, blue plums and greengages. Lu and I wandered, drifted, pottered and faffed about the tiny bush land – bush bit – up the road. With Lu, everything is slow. She takes her time and will not be hurried. This is good for me. I started the day with a spiky, frazzled energy as I dealt with work problems that had seeped into my leave. Misdirected monies and muddled timetables created overdone eggs, lukewarm coffee and a very resentful me. But after two hours above the traffic noise, helping ourselves to free fruit and stocking up on greens for the chooks, work skulked back into the darker, less visited corners of my mind, where it belongs.

Co(r)pses

Today we picked blackberries in the convict cemetery down the road from us. This is not the romantic place its name suggests. There are no markers or reminders of the people who lie here, no grottos, no ancient church. Just a small-ish field, dusty and dry, bounded by major roads, trucks and utes shuttling past. But the perimeters are hedged with massive blackberry copses, the slope looks out over a bit of forest and my ears catch on the invisible birds and not the revving from the freeway out of town. Lucy, Jasper and I spent an hour here, plucking and scoffing and saving a few choice berries for Dad, breaking the labour with, in one of Lu’s common phrases, “a sit down and chat”. So we talked about the finches nesting in the bushes – a good idea, so close to the berries – the trucks and the planes, and how some little girls don’t get to go blackberrying with their Mums, how some don’t even eat blackberries and how some only get them at the shop. We discussed how sad this was because if you don’t pick them yourself you can’t get the best ones, the biggest and sweetest ones. Lu agreed with all of this – yes, it was a shame that not everyone had personally selected berries and time with their mums – and I know that in 10 years time she’ll be mortified by my scavenging for food in public places. But for this little while it doesn’t get much better than sitting where the graves once were, sharing the sweetness. To quote Lu again, we were happy-heads.

Plus, dessert for the next few days is sorted: