Eve of a New Day

Rednesday: Aprons

It's my grandmother's birthday today. The last photo I had taken with her before she died is this one, snapped at her birthday party last year by my sister Abby. She died a month later.

Chapter eight of the book my mum wrote about her experience of my grandmother's Alzheimer's starts with this paragraph:

My mother had been a balabosta, a Yiddish term for a person who raises housekeeping to the level of an Olympic sport. In her spotless kitchen, the balabosta cooks gourmet feasts for her family, and when they have finished eating first, second and third helpings, she insists they take leftovers home with them. All this she does week after week, apparently without effort, while wearing lipstick, French perfume, and an apron over her good clothes.

Even on my most house-proud of days, I could never hope to be as good a housekeeper as my grandmother was. But I do like to pretend I am a little like her when it's my turn to do the cooking and I skip from the oven to the table. I can't attribute my lack of cooking prowess to her, but I most definitely hold her accountable for my love of aprons.

(The last one reads: I cook in the kitchen, but I boil in the bedroom.)

I'm Sorry, Lauren

I'm sorry that we killed you, Lauren James. I'm sorry that we forced you to have liposuction on your legs and bottom when you were only 26.

When I read in the paper that you died three days after the elective surgery, I blamed you and thought you foolish. Then I blamed your parents. Then I blamed your surgeon. Then I blamed your boyfriend for not telling you often enough how beautiful he thought you were. And then I realised who really is at fault.

At first I couldn't understand why you did it when you weighed 65kg and were 169cm tall, but it doesn't really matter does it, how much you weigh or where exactly you sit on the body mass index.

You had your breasts enlarged when you were 21. Although that surgery didn't kill you, I'm sorry we made you do that to yourself as well. We told you you'd be happy. We told you you'd feel fulfilled when you looked in the mirror and saw what we'd created. We didn't lie to you. We weren't trying to fool you. We love you! And we thought that what we love and value is what you could love and value as well.

Pepper Turns Two

My niece Pepper turns two today.

Here she is with her great grandmother in April last year.

My grandmother died in January this year. I actually feel OK about her death today, and the unavoidable fact that she no longer exists. But what I can't quite get my head around is that two years and one day ago, Pepper wasn't here. Not her body, I understand that that took nine months to materialise, but her character; the seed of her, the way she relates to her world, the things she thinks about that cause her eyes to sparkle, her wonderment, that all these things were not too long ago, completely uncreated.

Happy, happy birthday, Pepsi!

I Didn't Know Her

Well, we arrived home from Newcastle yesterday afternoon and today I am feeling rather melancholic. We had such a fantastic time away and although it is always great to come home to where we live, I feel like I'm coming down off a great precipitous high.

Our garden is overflowing with abundance, our chooks are well fed and laying, and our friends are calling in to see how we are. And we are well. We travelled on planes that didn't crash, on legs that were strong, on bicycles that carried us far. We had a meaningful, productive family holiday, we met great people and learned lessons each day. But today I feel hushed.

This morning was Vivien Hodgins' memorial service. She is one of the Australians who died in the recent Pacific Ocean tsunami. I never met Vivien, though I have met her husband, Rod May, who's a councillor for our local shire and an organic farmer who does weekly vegie boxes.

There are so many great things about our residency that I could tell you today, so many photos I would like to post, but instead, it feels more relevant to post these photos of Rod May's hands that I took several months ago at the local Farmer's Market. Hands that are the colour of the earth.

Hand Me Downs

This time last year, when PJ's grandmother died, I drove from the funeral to the wake in the car with PJ's parents. Next to me on the back passenger seat were some of his grandmother's possessions, including her sewing kit. It revealed much about the kind of woman she was: efficient, competent, frugal.

Not long after, PJ's sister wrote a beautiful blog post about inheriting this sewing kit. Of course the kit should have gone to her, but I must admit to feeling pangs of jealousy, even though she wasn't my grandmother.

There is something about a grandmother's possessions, for me anyway, that acts as a kind of direct line of communication to my female collective unconscious. It doesn't have to be my grandmother's things, I'm not that fussy.

Which is why I was so touched to receive the red case two days ago, a gift from our friends Ian and Vivienne. Inside it, Ian's mother's knitting needles and old patterns and Vivienne's balls of gorgeously soft alpaca wool.

Such a gift doesn't feel like it's merely been given, it feels as though it has been bequeathed – for me to use, enjoy, learn from, then pass on to the next person in line.

Booba's Butterflies

We went to the cemetery yesterday where my grandmother's family and friends gathered to consecrate the headstone that has now been erected at her grave. It is a double one, with her details on one side and the other left blank for my grandfather. I asked him how this made him feel, seeing it there, waiting for him. He said, had he seen it 20 years ago it would have made him feel worried, but now when he looks at it he feels ready. He said he's not wanting to die, but he's ready to lie next to my grandmother for ever.

Our grandmother loved butterflies. They were her trademark; butterfly stickers on our birthday card envelopes and butterflies on the place-cards she used at big family functions so we'd all know where to sit.

You might already know this, but it's tradition to place a stone on a jewish grave, as it indicates longevity and doesn't wither, as flowers do. My sister Kate had the idea to give each of the great grand-children a white tile for them to paint a butterfly on to leave on the grave. Z was going to be at his mum's on the day of the painting, so he drew it a few days earlier and Kate copied it onto a tile. Kate, you did such a great job!

And so did your girls. Booba would would have loved them.

Turning Over Old Leaves

The Elwood General Store

Last week, Eddy, who co-owns the Elwood General Store, described on her blog several encounters that took place within a single hour in her store. Today I sat at my laptop all day and because it rained, didn't leave the house. I have never met Eddy but today imagined myself dropping into her store for a packet of tea and to have an encounter just like one of these:

8:30am
The Milk delivery man comes in beaming about the
beautiful day, comments on the music I have playing
and together we sing along to the next line in the song..
"Will you bend or will you break..."
(both the shitest singers you ever did hear..)
and then he wishes me a not too busy and enjoyable rest of the day

We have never met before.

8:50am
Dspa comes in to buy tofu.
She and her Husband have just adopted two gorgeous girls
A who is 6 and C who is 8. They have 6 other siblings with other
carers. I ask her how the girls are doing and she laughs and says
taking a very tired breath," They teach me every day how much stuff I have buried and not wanted to face. Not one of us are perfect, not one of us on the planet, but you should see how wonderful my girls are.
I just love them. They're perfect."

9:00am
An old man, who is quite tall with hands like a cauliflower
and the most gentlest of eyes asks very softly if I have
a cream for tired feet. I give him a cream made of mixture of calendula, paw paw and shea butter, we both agree his feet will be as 'soft as a babies bottom' and he giggles like an 8 year old boy.

9:10am
A woman buys two bags of peppermint leaf and licorice leaves and leans over the counter and says, "gimee some thyme love" so I say, "well I got ten minutes, what is it you want to tell me!" and she laughs and laughs and laughs... then we talk tea blends for ten mins quite earnestly.

9:20am
S comes in, she has just put down
her cat and has been sad.
She has taken a day off work,
"my boss is a bit of a megalomaniac
but he is quite understanding with his
bipolar employees. You know actually
I'm so grateful I can express my
grief, I'm off the Valium, I just wanted to come
in and say thank you for listening and preying for J (her cat)
as he goes to the after life"

9:30am
and in comes D
partner to N, both actors ( who quite honestly
are, if we had favorites, the shop's favorite couple)
They are always smiling anyway, gush gush..
He has a weepy eye, its been a tough week..
I have eyebright in capsule form but
"the caps just seem like the long way round, if you know what i mean!"
So a herb mix of chamomile and eyebright for an eye bath
do the trick..

9:31
I take a sip of mexican coffee and
sing to myself " will you rize or will you
fall..........will you bend or will you break,
will you give or will you take.....
while you're sleeping cold tonight?"

and the day goes on...

Introducing

In Melbourne the other night, my grandfather went to the ballet with one of his sisters. It made me feel uncomfortable to imagine that strangers might think they were husband and wife. The next day I heard that a woman had said to my great aunt how lovely it was for my grandfather that he was dating already, so soon after my grandmother passed away.

I would be shocked if my grandfather did meet somebody else so soon, but if he did, I would of course be happy for his happiness.

I am happy for our happiness today, though we are all still rather hesitant and detached. We need eggs and it makes no sense to buy them, so we went out to a guy named Neil's place and picked out three new hens. Z's is the small black 12-week old Australorp and mine and PJ's are the 16-week old Light Sussexes. As yet unnamed. As yet unknown to us. 

In an attempt to recognise our chickens' place in the local ecosystem, tonight we read to Z the first half of Dahl's Fantastic Mr Fox.

Empty Nest

For work and because of the threat of fire where we live I spent the last couple of days in Melbourne, while PJ worked in Sydney. We picked up Z and now the three of us are home and happy.

Earlier in the week the worst sound in the world was the incessant sirens of the fire engines on their way to the nearby blaze. 

Today the worst sound in the world is my own voice, unanswered by our five chicks and two beautiful hens. When I left for the train station early on Thursday morning I made the executive decision not to lock the chooks up. In case there was a fire, I liked the idea that they would smell the smoke or feel the radiant heat and escape to some place safe.

I am sorry to say that my decision killed them. Not by fire, but by fox.

This morning before I met PJ at the airport shuttle bus, I went to see The Water Hole exhibition at ACCA, which I loved. I'm not sure you can see from this photo but the discarded plastic water bottles form a giant nest on which sit dozens of abandoned eggs. 

To these birds that were born into the leftovers of our consumerables, and to our seven birds that were consumed, I say I'm sorry.

The Lucy Boot

Our town awoke inside a wintry mist this morning.

But when I opened the front door at 7am to go and let the chooks out of their coop, I realised that it wasn't fog at all but the frightening smell of smoke from the bushfires.

In the city on Wednesday my relationship to the fires was about the individual people who had died or were effected. Now I am back home it is about the people still, but in relation to their families, communities and to the land – the practicalities, not just the emotions.

O came over last night and we talked about fire behaviour and CFA recommendations and what we are going to do if our dry surrounding bush goes up in flames.

So many shops have charity tins for the bushfire appeal, so many local venues are having fundraisers. Momentous events such as this tend to bring out the best in people in the most surprising ways.

Since my grandmother died I have received emails and messages from people in similarly unexpected ways.

My friend Gil for example who runs a successful leather goods business came over with her man on Saturday. She reminded me that a few years ago she named a boot Lucy after my grandmother. At the time that range came out I knew, but didn't think twice about it. 

Now I see though that the individual ways people experience the world affect us all.

Your Dog Dies

Yesterday's post about my name being sounded out reminds me of this Raymond Carver poem. It's one of my favourites.

Your Dog Dies

it gets run over by a van.

you find it at the side of the road

and bury it.

you feel bad about it.

you feel bad personally,

but you feel bad for your daughter

because it was her pet,

and she loved it so.

she used to croon to it

and let it sleep in her bed.

you write a poem about it.

you call it a poem for your daughter,

about the dog getting run over by a van

and how you looked after it,

took it out into the woods

and buried it deep, deep,

and that poem turns out so good

you're almost glad the little dog

was run over, or else you'd never

have written that good poem.

then you sit down to write

a poem about writing a poem

about the death of that dog,

but while you're writing you

hear a woman scream

your name, your first name,

both syllables,

and your heart stops.

after a minute, you continue writing.

she screams again.

you wonder how long this can go on.

Outliers

I remember when I was young going to live music gigs and coming home feeling like the luckiest girl alive if I managed to get hold of the musicians' set list. There are some writers who inspire this feeling in me. I see their name on the cover of a magazine or book or in a table of contents and I feel my heart change gear. Malcolm Gladwell is one such writer.

I try to read everything he writes in the New Yorker, I read his first book The Tipping Point and I have just finished reading his third, Outliers. I listened to his second book, Blink as an audio book and ever since, I hear his voice in my head saying his words as I read them. He has a really great voice, really great hair, and a really great explanation of what an outlier is:

"Outlier" is a scientific term to describe things or phenomena that lie outside normal experience. In the summer, in Paris, we expect most days to be somewhere between warm and very hot. But imagine if you had a day in the middle of August where the temperature fell below freezing. That day would be an outlier. And while we have a very good understanding of why summer days in Paris are warm or hot, we know a good deal less about why a summer day in Paris might be freezing cold. In this book I'm interested in people who are outliers—in men and women who, for one reason or another, are so accomplished and so extraordinary and so outside of ordinary experience that they are as puzzling to the rest of us as a cold day in August. My wish with Outliers is that it makes us understand how much of a group project success is. When outliers become outliers it is not just because of their own efforts. It's because of the contributions of lots of different people and lots of different circumstances— and that means that we, as a society, have more control about who succeeds—and how many of us succeed—than we think. That's an amazingly hopeful and uplifting idea.

I find all of Gladwell's ideas uplifting. And I found this book uplifting too – I just couldn't put it down.

Even though he has a penchant for the macabre – suicide, police shootings, plane crashes – his curious explorations are filled with much humour and joy. And as I've learned of late, a love of life must be preceded by a love of death. Well, maybe not a love of it, but a genuine acceptance.

The final chapter of the book is about his grandmother and mother and the circumstances that helped shape them into who they were, and then him into who he is; an honouring of the matriarchy that has great resonance with me right now.

The Changing of the Guards

I have been working in Melbourne these last few days and spending nights at my grandfather's house with all the extended family.

At work I am stimulated and engaged and at night I fill my handkerchief with all the tears I have inside me as I worry about my grandfather and mourn my grandmother's death and deal with the abruptness of her final full stop.

Today at work during morning tea we watched Obama's inauguration speech and for the first time I was able to see my Booba's death in a wider context.

What's that line from Ecclesiastes? To everything there is a season.

What Makes Me

Image from here.

In Absentia

This is us yesterday morning before all our lovely guests arrived.

I thought I could do it: separate the two halves of my day into happy then sad, but I wasn't able.

I will have other birthdays and other moustache and pancake parties but my grandmother will only ever die this once.

I love birthdays. Growing up in a family of four daughters meant that every year I got this one day all to myself, but yesterday morning at my party, try as I did to feel happy, I couldn't quite pull it off.

My heart was elsewhere.

Birthday, Deathday

My grandmother died yesterday and today I turn 35.

I am having people over at 10 for a morning of pancakes and moustaches, then this afternoon we will bury my Booba.

A few people have remarked how bad I must be feeling to have my grandmother's funeral on my birthday, but really I couldn't be more pleased. It means I get to see all my family and it means I will have her close to me.

If a birthday is a celebration of a life, then it feels appropriate that my day includes a celebration of my Booba's life too; her influence over me was a like a spell.

She lived her whole life for other people – she was a woman of her generation. But this afternoon will be just for her. We will honour her, cherish and remember and salute her and hold close all the memories of her that are our favourites.

I have a lifetime's worth.

The Tall Man

I finished reading this book a couple of days ago but wanted to blog about it today on November 19, exactly four years after Cameron Doomadgee's death, the event around which this book is based. He died while in police custody on Palm Island, an Aboriginal community off the north east coast of Australia.

Doomadgee was arrested one morning for drunkenly swearing at the tall policeman Christopher Hurley. Forty minutes later he was dead.

I share journalist Mark Dapin's sentiment:

This book is everything it should be: a sad, beautiful, frightening account of one man's pointless death, interwoven with the brutal history of Palm Island and a golden thread of Aboriginal mythology. Every sentence is weighty, considered, even, restrained. Every character is explored for their contradictions, every situation observed for its nuances, every easy judgement suspended... It is The Tall Man's triumph that Hooper finds the common humanity in the accused and the accuser, the police officer and the street drinker, the living and the dead.

I read this book in a few days, a testament to the absorbing story but more so to Hooper's writing. She is present in the narrative but never intrudes. She provides just enough space – between the protagonists' motivation and her own – for readers to inhabit and make up their own minds.

It's not a space I want to inhabit. It's not a series of events I enjoyed reading about. But as a white Australian I feel it is a history that I cannot turn away from just because it makes me feel uncomfortable, just because it makes me feel ashamed.

Earlier this year Kevin Rudd formally apologised to indigenous Australians. His speech began:

I move that today we honour the indigenous peoples of this land, the oldest continuing cultures in human history. We reflect on their past mistreatment.

The Prime Minister's apology for past cruelties was way overdue. But what of the mistreatments that are ongoing? Or is that the subtext of Hooper's book's title? The tall man, aka the middle finger, extended.

Kill Bill

Billy, left, was getting worse. She had stopped laying, had gone off her food and was becoming increasingly antisocial. Unfortunately PJ had to kill her yesterday. I asked him how he did it, thinking I wanted to know, but when he said he wasn't going to tell me I was pleased.

Instead of letting Cuba and Dirt eat her, in case they too became sick, PJ put her in the compost. If she couldn't provide us with eggs, then let her decomposed little body turn to soil and help make our vegetables grow.

All day I have been thinking of these Monbiot words:

Darwinian evolution tells us that we are incipient compost... I like the idea of literal reincarnation: that the molecules of which I am composed will, once I have rotted, be incorporated into other organisms. Bits of me will be pushing through the growing tips of trees, will creep over them as caterpillars, will hunt those caterpillars as birds. When I die, I would like to be buried in a fashion which ensures that no part of me is wasted. Then I can claim to have been of some use after all.