Market day

I love markets. At work, I spend all day under artificial lighting, staring at a screen and unaware of the light and weather of the day. I don't want to do much the same in Coles on the weekends. Looking at lettuce and grapes under trees, in the sun, with people milling and chatting, is my idea of how our food should be got. There's a sense of possibility, of perhaps stumbling across something lovely and unexpected, in the markets, and that's something absent from the trudge through the aisles at Coles (and only imperfectly experienced at our lovely Olde Greengrocer who gives us stuff for free).

Nell and I went to the West End markets today. They are down by the river, under old Moreton Bay fig trees. There's lots of produce (though not, of course, all very local or organic), a few stores selling old clothes and some Indian tat, and the hippy coffee sellers, who provided me with some cardamon coffee (which I almost liked, I think the cardamon was a little too strong) and a baby latte and scone for Nell.



While Nell stumbled and gobbled and won hearts and minds, I got to watch the people go by: urban hipsters in their distressed and ironic retro Ts; toned middle class mammas who like their family's eating to be authentic; neo-hippies in tie-dye and fisherman's pants; retirees in navy hats. But the one thing these groups had in common (and this shocked me to the core) was their use of those once super-daggy vinyl bins on wheels, to cart home all that right-on produce. These are the wheelie baskets once favoured by old ladies in shopping centres. No more Oxfam baskets or the free green bags from supermarkets; it's bowling lady chic all the way. And I don't even think their use was post-modern or tongue-in-cheek or self-referential or ironic or any of the other stances that have allowed us all the embrace the un-embracable.

I fear I am losing my touch with style.

Whaaaa?

Once upon a time I was Ms. Since becoming sadly over-educated I go by Dr (the proper kind, not the medical type). So why is my daughter calling me 'Mrs Mum'?.

Lu also calls me "Mother Fox", which I don't mind so much, as it sounds a little sexy, somehow.

Art is what you can get away with

Well, Warhol would know. I'm not a huge fan of his stuff, and when we went to GOMA today, I gave the big Warhol exhibit a miss. But there's some excellent kids' stuff: the usual drawing room where Lu abused her free paper privileges; a play area filled with Campbell's soup boxes and other people's babies for the girls to kiss; a space with silver helium cushions bobbing around; and a photo both wherein frazzled parents get to transform their units into little bits of pop art. Everything looks better in brights.

Gender bending

Today was Grammy's funeral. I walked into the room wearing my black dress - the go-anywhere black dress that we all read was a wardrobe basic in Cosmo , back in the late 80s - and Lucy looked at me and asked "Why are you being a girl today?". I thought that going out to work each morning dressed in trousers would be somewhat counter-balanced by my breasts and vagina (or at least my uterus might give me away) but no - despite our best intentions to to de-emphasise gender, girls wear dresses.

Oddly, Lu and Nell almost never wear dresses but Lu's very clear that they are girls (because they are brave, and apparently boys are 'often not so brave', poor possums). Kids' gender rules are more confusing than those in men's mags (and women's mags and just about everywhere else in society), that's for sure.

***

The girls slept through the funeral. On the way to the wake we explained Lu wouldn't be able to say good-bye to Grammy:

"But I wanted to kiss her".
"I know but now she is in heaven and so you can't".
"I want to go to heaven and kiss her".
"Well, we're going to the bowls club to eat cake instead".
"That's good too".

No use pining for things you can't have, I guess.

***

Thanks to all those who left such caring comments. It's been hard and sad but some peace is beginning to grow in my heart.

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.

Last rights

My grandmother died on Wednesday evening while I sat in Brisbane airport waiting for a plane home that was delayed two hours, watching Lucy tear about being a horse. I had gone to Brisbane on the Monday evening to say goodbye and I guess I didn't really think what goodbye would mean. I thought there would probably be chances but it turns out that when I kissed her in the afternoon before catching the train in a storm, I was kissing her a final time.

Grammy started fading two weeks ago, pulled down by unspecified causes. The doctors had a range of theories but Gram was 95 and sad - isn't that enough to make the body wind down? The interventions were becoming increasingly intrusive and nothing was working and so Mum - but really, the whole family - decided to end all treatment. The nurses spoke to us of dignity, of not letting Gram linger; the doctors - all aged about 15 and dressed in very natty shirts and ties - talked about the failure of anti-biotics, the lack of further treatment options - but no-one really told us what ending treatment means. No drugs and also no food, no hydration - only pain relief. I don't think that it was a wrong decision but it's not a dignified death, begging for water without being able to speak because your dentures won't fit, not able to move even your arm or your head, hoping someone will divine your needs and say 'yes' rather than 'no'. Lingering is relative - I don't know how the minutes and hours and then days passed for Grammy, but for us, a day waiting for an end that the nurses said would occur twelve hours before is a really long time; a night keeping vigil over a woman balking at death, frightened and thirsty and wanting to go home is a dreadful, dragging time.

I wanted to stay until the end but in the end we thought it best if I went. I had Lucy and she was getting restive; the logistics of dealing with a three year old don't match well with the needs of a family waiting in a hospital room. Nell was in Launceston with Al, missing me. I had a plane ticket which couldn't be changed to an open flight date. I knew Gram would die quickly if I left and I knew that if I'd stayed she'd linger for two weeks and my own little family would be in turmoil. I was second guessing things that can't be controlled and in the end Dad said, just go, just stick with the original plan. And so Gram died while I waited at the airport in a storm, and I'm back on the plane tonight, this time with Al and both girls, with black clothes in our bag.

Our decision about ending Grammy's treatment was the best we could make and my choice to go home seemed the best in bad circumstances. But my, I feel bad. I said it didn't matter if I was there or not, as long as someone was (and at the end, it was my Dad, Gram's most loved and trusted son-in-law). But leaving seemed a poor repayment for 35 years of receiving nothing but adoration. No matter what I did or where I went, I knew there was an old woman who was boasting about me, swelling with pride over everything I did, loaning and giving me money, buying me pretty things, cooking me treats, telling me stories and singing me the songs that I now sing my girls as we walk through the neighbourhood. Grammy always did the right and generous thing by me and I worry that at the end I didn't do the right thing by her - I went, I didn't stay.

Still talking about zucchinis

Quite possibly the perfect pasta sauce, and the reason I plant more zucchinis than I'd ever really need:

Take a few cloves of garlic and soften in oil with three rashes of bacon, if you're the kind who likes their meat (otherwise, leave them out). Very finely slice three of four young zucchinis - if they're a mix of colours then so much the better. Stir in with the garlic and bacon until everything is cooked but not at all brown. Now is a good time to stir in some pesto if you have any (but here I would specify homemade as it tends to lack the harshness of the stuff you buy in bottles; I think the pine nuts might matter here) and regardless, bind the whole with a little cream, season and leave to bubble. Then toss in any flowers that came in with the fruit, ladle over pasta and offer to an appreciative audience with some parmesan on the side.

We eat this with two yelling kids, one who'll only have the green stuff and the other who'll eat the pasta. There's usually some wining on the topic of "I don't like conversation", food thrown to the floor, milk sloshed on shirts by a 13 months child who refuses to acknowledge she needs to work on her hand-eye coordination, and a few shouts at the dogs to get out of the dining room. But I am working towards a more fabulous context:

Serve outside under the grapevine, with perhaps a cold riesling (though really, I wouldn't know), a salad from the garden, good friends who appreciate the six months taken to produce the meal, and Bach playing through the open windows of the house.

Maybe next summer