Tidy

Last weekend we were up in the area, bumbling around when a man limped by and stopped to chat, wanting to know what the space was. And he said, "what a pity no one uses it".

In the past five years we have walked the dogs, watched sunsets, made plans, picked blackberries, collected kindling and sticks for my bean teepees. I have watched my kids learn to climb rocks and trees, to swing, to run down hills and climb back up them. We have eaten plums, picked flowers and jumped back and forth across the tiny creek. We have had picnics. We have played endless hours of Skippy the Bush Kangaroo. This is where I have noticed my babies growing into children.

I know what 'use' is code for, and I don't like it. I wonder how a dozen big houses sitting in ashphalt, with small backyards and big garages, could possibly prove a richer use of this space. To wipe out the mysterious, the possibility of adventures, in favour of sitting on a couch or mopping the tiles in the family room shows a lack of imagination and a misunderstanding of what space can mean for children and their families. I very much hope that guy is not sitting on the local council.

I pointed out that we were, in fact using it. (That families do in fact, exist.) And he had the grace to look a little discomforted. He tried to make things right by saying, the place could at least be tidied up a bit. I let it lie. Because if a person prefers concrete paths and banks of azaleas, there'll be no changing their mind.

It's like a switch has been flicked: it's now cold in the morning, so cold I walk into town wishing for gloves; three weeks ago it was hot.

Yesterday I smelled the first wood fires that keep people warm in my suburb. In the past few years that smell has come to conjure both the peak of dry and dangerous summers and their end. It can't be the scent of comfort and home that it once was.

Cool

I am uncool. It's true, and it's okay. I'm a thirty-six year old mother of two with a house in the suburbs and a generally harried air and (I'm almost sure) the wrong sneakers; I'm not aiming for cool. So I'm not embarrassed to say that I love to visit the Launceston Horticultural Society's flower shows at St Albie's Hall down the road from Brickfields. I love it in a non-ironic, really looking forward to it, I'd like a lamington and a cup of tea kind of a way.

Two dollars gets me an hour to wander between of row after row of colour and form, funny horticultural names, and stalls with seriously cheap perennials. I am always the youngest person in the room, and I win the love of every older person who fears the art and science of flower arranging and growing for exhibition are being lost: I am the future of their passion, and I think I wear that mantle with some grace (but no cool). And lately, I have learned to become a dahlia fancier.

I think dahlias must be one of the most uncool of flowers: all soldier rows and elderly men pre-occupied with size and rigidity. But, check it out:



They're like little manifestations of mathematical formulae. Plus, it's easy to tell a good story in a dahlia show: Devon Carnival, Devon Temptation, Devon Caress, Devon Seduction ... and then the sad ending to the tale: Devon Citation. (Who new Devon was such a hotspot for licentiousness?)

Oh, the youth of today with their hair gel and those night clubs - they don't know where to go for a good time. But I do.

Conspicuous

Gillian talks of being conspicuous. I understand, I understand: awkwardness exposed and magnified by my imagination. Misjudging a step down, turning one way when the person I'm with turns the other, my cardigan buttoned wrong - on raw days, I die a teeny tiny death of shame.

But here's conspicuous: being a learner bus driver, with a great big L on the front of the bus, turning a corner slowly, slowly, slowly, inching around, going wide and nudging a street sign on the corner; and then looking up to see a woman standing on the footpath, watching the progress.

Intimacy

A man is slowly renovating a small white house with peeling paint. I track the changes as I walk past in the mornings and the evenings. I trick myself into thinking I know The Guy a little from the outside: he is green (a no pulp mill sticker on the car); he cooks (veggies in the rocks, a lemon tree in the corner); he once Did Things Outdoors(kayaks stacked on the side fence, gathering spider webs). I construct a life for him from the bits and pieces that lie around his yard. What an odd and presumptuous thing to do, but I am a curtain-twitcher, a peerer over fences and through the cracks in curtains; I take an interest in the bits of life that are unwittingly available to me; I will grow into a very gossipy old woman.

This morning, I walked past the house half an hour later than usual, after a slow start from a bad night's sleep. The Guy stood at the kitchen window, washing a mug, with no shirt on. I saw his soft white belly. His things are ciphers, something to play with as I walk to the bus but the vulnerability of his flesh and his domesticity shot a shock of intimacy into my solar plexus. In a glimpse of the mundane I recognised The Guy as a person, and I saw that of course, of course, I did not know him at all.

How odd. I will remember that moment when I am 45, when I am 60, when I am 80 - I am sure of it. I will remember it for no good reason, and for some very good reason I will never put words to.

How odd, how odd, how odd.

Serendipity

There's a house not far from where I live, across the road from a landslip area where the most muscari can be found in the spring.



I think it might be a rental - it's not a house that's carefully tended, and its garden shrinks a little each week in the dry of the summer.

I walked past this morning with the dogs and saw, in the front garden, an old hydrangea with bright and sharp blue flowers, squatting next to a crayon pink geranium. It was unplanned, obvious and vulgar, and so lovely I stopped and stared and schemed for the same in my own front yard.

I think that particular blue and that particular pink are the colours of serendipity.

And now I must fly - there's an escalating dispute over a fallen lemon.

Swing

Our town has fantastic dog parks but the kid parks are not so great. Maybe it's what comes of living in these old towns, where people own huge backyards with trees and space - the need for public swings and slides doesn't seem as pressing. With a few exceptions, the ones that are available to us are near major roads, unfenced, and are scattered with broken glass and discarded smokes from the local toughs' mad Friday night fun.

But up the road, in the area, someone has hitched a swing. A close to perfect swing: a plank on the end of some climbers' ropes, knotted to a high branch in the oak tree. It moves like the pendulum of a grandfather clock, back and forward slowly and serenely, with weight and purpose. The ground drops away so that even the tiniest movement propels a person out over the abyss.

Things I want to remember:

Fifty black cockatoos making their way across the sky above our house. Flying above the suburbs, they sound and look like the product of some weird magic. And now, a gang comes past everyday about 5pm.

Six white cockatoos stripping the last of walnuts off the neighbour's tree, out the back.

Silver eyes, tiny birds I've longed for in my garden, eating pink flowers from the prunus in the front garden.

A bumblebee as long and as fat as the top of my thumb, moving across the broad bean flowers.

All the vulnerability of love and joy in Lucy's face as I agree to play princesses with her.

Nell drinking water from an urn on a grave, in the parish under the care of Josephine Pyecroft.

Nell interjecting 'Yep, yep, yep' in Baa baa black sheep. That flat drawl: I thought she was going to spit and then wish for rain; she's something out of Hanrahan

Lime green euphorbia, blue forget-me-nots and iris, deep pink magnolia flowering together in the front garden as planned.

So many flowers in the garden I run out of vases and give them away.

Still life with lemons

I have a lemon tree and it is bearing fruit. This is the source of more satisfaction than a bald sentence might suggest. When we moved into our house there was no lemon tree, which seemed a mysterious absence given that the yards around my suburb still bear the traces of more productive times, when a veggie garden and some fruit trees were expected; the old and shapeless trees, dripping fruit and dropping it to the ground, glimpsed through back fences, are the most spectacular, juicy evidence of this past. Tantalising evidence too, with all the lemony deliciousness just out of reach and largely ignored and unloved, or at the very least unused by those who don't seem to know their luck.

I'm not sure why our own yard was missing this mainstay of suburban productivity. We live on what was the rich side of the street; maybe those posh folks didn't want to suggest they were peasants in their planting. It might be it was sacrificed to one previous owner's preference for straggling and inappropriately large natives. Possibly the people before us, whom we suspect have family ties to the big names in the state's forestry industry, chopped it down and pulped it. Whatever the reason, we had none of the easy abundance that a lemon tree offers a home.

I planted a tree - a Meyer - in the courtyard at the beginning of last year and have plucked off the blossoms with great self-discipline, in the knowledge that this leads to more impressive yields later on. Further, I manured, watered and trained Lucy to wee on the tree whenever she felt the need for some alfresco relief. And now that she'll only pee on flowers I've been known to stroll out after dark, perch precariously on the raised bed and offer up a little goodness. It's a very peaceful thing, squatting there and staring out over the lights of the suburb, and not without a charge of danger now that we have cut down the trees that once shielded us from the very tidy neighbours' view. All this care is working well: the tree is still small but it's hung with fruit that is bright and gold.

I need a lot of lemons in my life. Not so much for lemonade, which has never really thrilled me. When life sends me lemons I'm more likely to make lemon butter, to eat neat at the open fridge door so as not to dilute the sharp-sweetness (and so as not to share). But I'm more of a person who demands lemons; I don't wait for life to send them to me. I need them to eat with avocado and salt and pepper on toast, with steak, over salads, stirred into spinach with butter and salt, on chips, in icing for biscuits and no nonsense cakes. In my cooking, lemons are as much a seasoning as salt and pepper; anything that tastes really, really good is almost always finished with a lemon.

There are two iconic lemon moments in my cooking, repeated over and over again. The first: making wholewheat pancakes by myself on days of mizzle and drizzle, standing at the stove and looking out at the grey and the wind, eating each one with sugar and lemon as the next one cooks. The second is as yet repeated only in my head and draws from some grim New Zealand family drama, all marital dissolution and pedophilia on a bay in a small beach house a little like this. Before each evening's debauchery, the parents sit in deck chairs on the lawn, next to an enormous lemon tree, reaching out for fruit to squeeze into their gin. Seasonal eating at it's very best, I think, and the driving force behind my own small tree out the back. It's winter now, but the deck chairs are ready.

Yellow

I am walking the dogs a bit later in the morning, and the sun is up earlier. I hear kookaburras, not roosters, and I see these flowers in a front yard down the street. It is golden rule of gardening: Thou Shalt Not Plant Bulbs in a Straight Line. And I'm in agreement - usually. But there's something very cheering in this guard of honour, defending the possibility of loveliness in an otherwise neglected space.

Couldn't give a fig

Sick, again. Al had tonsilitis last weekend and into the beginning of the week; I held on until Friday and am now wallowing in unspecified illness. How is it that no-one has splashed a red cross above our door?

I wandered out into the sun in the back garden yesterday afternoon, to indulge in a little morose drifting about. And there, in the far corner, next to the compost bins, on its small and sorely neglected tree, I came across the last remaining fig. It has escaped the birds, the kids, and the frosts, and was perfectly, sweetly, sexily ripe; purple and pink and pale, pale green; an unexpected gift hanging off the elegant bare branches. Normally, I share my finds with the girls, to encourage them to see the garden as a place of promise and deliciousness, but not when it comes to figs. No-one loves figs as much as I do, and these are my selfish delight, the one bit of garden produce I keep all for myself.

When I first moved down here, I lived in a small terrace house that backed onto a lane. (For the local readers: on Balfour St, the first terrace next to the Sporties hotel.) Two houses down, the yard was filled with massive fig trees, with branches that hung over the fence. When the fig season came I would wander down each morning, collect an armful of ripe fruit and then sit on my deck under the banksia rose and grape vines and gobble the goodies in the cool morning air. Even after we moved, I would sometimes take a walk past the fence at an appropriate time of year and renew my acquaintance with those generous trees.

Driving past the lane the other day, I noticed the trees have been heavily pruned so that there can be no more sharing with the neighbours. Even though the branches will no doubt grow back, and even though I hadn't visited for a couple of years, I felt that one of my special places had been irrevocably altered, and I was washed, inexplicably, in a subtle yearning for those lonely, confusing and fig-filled days.

Cold hands, warm heart

I walk the dogs early in the morning, in the dark. Today it was so cold I jogged to get warm. I know I'm not the runner I once was back in my prime, but the greyhound didn't even break into a trot as I pounded along the road; rather insensitive, I thought

***

When I walk the dogs I go by a small cottage. Each morning, a bearded man sits on the verandah in a short sleeved shirt, drinking a cup of tea. Today, for the first time this year, there was ice on the ground. I was waiting on tenterhooks to see - would he be out today? And there he was, drinking his cuppa in a short sleeved shirt, 5.30 am and the temperature less than zero. I was comforted to see the big man with his brew, starting his day regardless of the weather.

***

I was the only person on the bus this morning, until it stopped to pick up a young guy, about sixteen, rumpled in a hoodie and baggy jeans. He was shaking with the cold. As he stood to get off at the Centrelink stop, Paul Kelly's Winter Coat started on my ipod; with that melancholy voice in my ears, the shivering boy seemed so impossibly sad. These kids, sometimes they break my heart.

***

I have poor circulation in my hands - they go white with the cold, no matter how warm the room or how thick the coat. Today, a workmate suggested I get some fingerless gloves. This is very sensible advice but ... I'm not a fingerless glove kind of a gal. Only women with really elegant fingers can wear these gloves and lovely though I am, I've never attained elegance.

TGIF

Last day at a full time job, at least for the next six months or so. I forgot my glasses and left early when my eyes began to hurt. We went to the park. For the next little while, there'll be a lot more sentences like that last one, I'm hoping, and a lot more swinging on swings, kicking through the leaves and a slowing down of my days.

Autumn

Five years down here and it's still a shock to walk into Princes Square and see the leaves tumbling from the trees and lying deep on the grass. For the first time, the kids understood just how much fun this autumn thing can be.

Good night

After dinner we raced through the back streets with the girls in matching yellow prams screaming 'faster, faster', the dogs running beside. We passed the little white cottages on the corner and the owner stepped down from the verandah to give us a bag of passionfruit. He had been sitting, waiting for someone to come by, so that he could share the bounty; tonight, we were the lucky ones.

So this weekend, pavlova.

The old house down the road, the one I was worried would be knocked down and replaced by a McMansion, is safe. The new owners are living in a caravan parked on the road while they a rebuild the interior. When it's all done, they are holding a barbeque so that the neighbourhood can come by and see what they have done. They're getting rid of the roses but I can't have them: the local women have already claimed the plants (they're vultures, these long time ladies). I dream of these sorts of people buying houses in my suburb. I love that they acknowledge the interest and ownership of the the people who already live around here, I love that they respect what already exists, I love that they are offering free meat.

My island home

The photos from a few posts ago were snapped by Al as I walked back over the road after taking the above. We were parked at a small church in the middle of nowhere special, a church with a swifts' nest under the eves. It was summer; our weekend away at the beach happened at the same time the area got its first proper rain in two or three years. (The holiday-rain nexus is the common denominator in all our trips away.)

I look at this and I can't believe I actually live here. I'm a lucky woman; we're a lucky family.

Tassie seems to be enjoying a certain regard in the Australian media at the moment. In the Weekend Australian magazine Swansea has been framed up as an emerging hot holiday spot; Lonnie, where I live, is in the recent edition of Australian Country Style, looking as much like a cosmopolitan urban area as the writers could manage. But it's the moments and places we stumble upon accidentally that make this place feel so special to me. Day-to-day, I tend to forget what it means to live here - it can be hard to remember in the face of loneliness and the hassles of daily life - but photos like this snap our luck and our blessings back into focus.

Centre of power

Until these past few weeks, I have never resiled from my position that Canberra is a hole. It is hot and circular and a nightmare for people who don't drive. It is flat and featureless, I always get lost, and everyone gossips about politics all the time. But now I think it is maybe not so bad; when I was there, I thought maybe this is the kind of place I could live in, maybe this is my kind of place.

Canberra is harsh in its drought but something beautiful has grown out of that: streets with verges and front lawns grown into small meadows as people let the lawn go rather than pour their laundry buckets on it. At every corner galahs nibble at the grass seeds, in backyards cockatoos casually strip fruit trees of their promise, and parrots eat out of the hedges. There's an awful lot of disrespectful medium density development going on - all horrible Moditerranean - but still so many humble houses with crazy veggie gardens out the back and no fences at the front. And the movies! The job prospects! The presence of friends who are easy and fun and generous, who make me smile when I see them. It's a heady thought, that possibility of a different kind of life where the dull bits of this one are coloured that particular shade of green you only ever see in grass on the other side.

Going away has thrown into relief some of the frustrations my town holds for me. It's re-opened that constantly recurring question: do we go or do we stay? Al wants to stay, the girls want to stay, I would go in a heartbeat if I wasn't bound to them. But when I leave the one movie cinema showing nothing I want to see, the lack of deep friendships, the less than promising opportunities my job currently holds, I'm also leaving our ability to live well on one income, to avoid the rush and stress that would come if we needed to put the girls into childcare, to travel without a half hour commute. Single and childless, I could breeze through the disadvantages of city living; as a mother and a partner in this particular family unit the thought of that life is daunting even as many of its opportunities are exhilarating.

I want my cake and I want to eat it too, but I've been well schooled in the knowledge that we don't get to do that. I think we'll stay because I've no wish for a brilliant career at the expense of my family's peace. Sometimes I think my decision to stay is more about my fear of big ponds and big fish, that I use my family as a cover for a failure of nerve...

But then yesterday, up at the area, the blackberries had arrived. And Lu, gobbling them down, said "Mmm, delicious and familiar". She knows what delicious means; familiar, I think, she's just trying on for size, feeling its fit in her mouth. But it reminded me that here is a kid who, for every summer of her little life has walked ten minutes up the road with her family to pluck the fruit from the thorns, who at less than three knows where the best pickings are to be found, and who could say with perfect honesty that those pickings are indeed delicious and familiar. The sharp edges of our big sacrifices are weathered to a softer shape by the daily reminders of what it is Al and I have chosen instead.

Renovate or detonate

There's a property coming up for auction just down the road from my house. It is beautiful, solid and symmetrical, with a front garden filled with different types of roses, planted in two neat squares. The house is also decrepit: some rooms have no walls; the kitchen is a bench and some ugliness; a person would get lost in the grass in the backyard. It is an elegant dump.

Out the front hangs a sign: Renovate or Detonate. I hate that sign when I walk past in the morning on my way to work and I hate it when I walk past in the afternoon, coming home. In part, I'm worried that the detonate choice will lead to another pastel stuccoed starter mansion with a concreted backyard. But also, it seems so disrespectful and so flip. I wouldn't take on a renovation myself but that word detonate suggests to me a thoughtless blowing up, an enjoyment in destruction, an event that wipes something unwanted from our existence. It's a house, I know, not a senient being but it's also a symbol of a time (unspecified, possibly 'ye olde' or maybe 'the olden days') and a place and presumably many people's lives.

The other evening I chatted to an old gardener who lives just across the road from the house for sale. He was working on his dahlias in his front garden and we got to talking about flowers and then the neighbourhood. When I told him where I lived he said "Up in the money" (well, things have changed in that regard); his street was where the working class families lived. When we wipe away these old buildings for something pseudo-posh, no doubt jerry built and just like every other new house in the suburb, we're wiping away the acknowledgement that difference matters, and we're wiping away the memory that not every suburb and not every family has a history of wealth, of just reward for being a winner.

I think there's been a lot of sadness and fear in that house - a small family once lived there, and when I look at the interiors my heart goes cold knowing a baby was kept there with the curtains always shut. And there's been a lot of disregard - at one time there was a sharehouse of louts who spent every evening on the front verandah, music too loud and drinking huge numbers of UDLs. It's not like a church, a focus of peace or sanctity or devotion. But I believe someone was proud they could afford to offer their family that home, and someone was proud they built it with such skill (80 years on and the lines are still straight).

Even if it can't be kept, I don't want the house to be detonated. I want its history acknowledged, its beautiful bits recycled into new homes and re-woven into the fabric of the town. I want its roses to be loved and restored. I want it to be acknowledged as something valuable, not only because it's on a large block fifteen minutes walk into town, in 'highly sought after ***', but because it's a reminder of a history and a way of life that is fast disappearing.

Dutch, at Sweet Juniper, takes the most incredible photos of urban decay in Detroit. Some are beautiful but mostly they're surreal in their shapes and colours and the depiction of materials and memories left to rot. He mentioned how often people comment on the sadness of the images, and wondered why. I've thought and thought about this question in terms of the huge swathes of abandonment in inner city Detroit and in terms of the isolated examples that dot my own suburb. And I still don't know.

Maybe it just reminds me that one day my family and my life will hold no relevance or interest for anyone at all and the last vestiges of our love will be smacked down by heavy machinery.

Maybe I don't like waste, and a disused house is a wasted resource.

Maybe it's the social forces that lead to a house or an area being left behind: poverty, violence, fear and bigotry; and a lack of support and resources by institutions who fail to deal with people with sympathy and in good faith.

Maybe I'm just foolishly sentimental and weeping for an abandoned house is like cooing over puppies and babies (which I do, all the timee).

Maybe I just don't like change.

But whatever it is, this house gets me. I wish I had the money to save it (I just can't see it being restored by anyone else). The auction is on the 20th of January and I get back from Canberra on the 26th - I know settlement's never so quick but I worry it will half hacked away when I return. When the inevitable happens I think I'm going to have to find a new path to work. I'm also going to ask for those roses.

***
And in other news ...

Today I saw a doctor riding to work at the hospital on a unicycle, stethoscope around his neck and briefcase in hand. That's not something you see everyday.

No news is good news

After the horrors of last week's attack on Christmas it's a relief to hear some good news. Today's Examiner headline

North's Rhubarb Supply Boom

Go North. YEAH!