It Looks Like Music
An email came through from work yesterday. It’s official: according to the state’s legislation, Covid-19 will now be treated like any other illness. Three years to the month it all… Continue Reading
Browsing Category: Life
Today is the Day You Worried about Yesterday
The recent furor surrounding the revising of some Roald Dahl books, reminded me of something I wrote a couple of years ago. I tend to fall on the side of… Continue Reading
December
It’s Heiligabend, the most important of the three days of Christmas in Germany. I think 900 people died yesterday and the day before and the day before that. The numbers… Continue Reading
November
November. The first frost on the last leaves, the shelves full of bulbous root vegetables you can only sprinkle liberally with salt and roast, the beginning of a long time… Continue Reading
Shelter
In late summer, the hydrangeas fade, bleached by the sun. Instead of those impossible 1950s blues and purples that always remind me of my grandmothers, they look like they have… Continue Reading
Fires & Floods
When we booked our tickets for this trip, the fires had just started. As September rolled into October, family marked themselves safe on Facebook, and the Australian media began rolling… Continue Reading
The Bones
I wrote this before the fires began, before the wolf came, as promised, to our door. * We will give our children the bones The bad bones, hollow, poorly formed…. Continue Reading
Strawberry Plants
Strawberry plants throw out arms, long skinny things that carry a brave little cluster of leaves, sent out to try somewhere new, to another, nearby location, where it can then… Continue Reading
What If You Don’t Like the Earth?
My four-year-old daughter, after a lengthy interest in pregnancy and birth, has now turned her considerable attention to death. I thought I might have had a couple more years up… Continue Reading
On Lessons We Learn from Pets
The boy, of about nine, maybe ten, was crying. He ran around, face to the sky, searching the trees as the light faded, screaming, ‘Spikey’. His parents, flustered, hapless, helpless,… Continue Reading
Remember What Was & Who Went Before
I have never really given much thought to Totensonntag, Sunday of the Dead, which falls every year on the Sunday between the 20th and 26th of November. It seems like there are… Continue Reading
A Mother’s Country
I wrote this as part of a chapter for the non-fiction project I am writing (and will probably finish in 2025). It was the second half of something and it… Continue Reading
Late August
Finally it’s raining. I used to hate the rain, but then I inherited a garden full of hydrangeas. I remember, when I was a kid, Mum would always sigh with relief… Continue Reading
Pa.
Back in the summer, when Mum and Dad were over helping us get settled in the new place, planting trees and watching the kids, Pa took his tumble while trying… Continue Reading
Thread
I’ve not been home in three years. Life, here, has continued apace – another baby, a new house, a new job – and Australia has remained patiently in my heart,… Continue Reading
Clusters of Intensely Coloured Years
I have been wondering if homesickness is nostalgia in another guise. When I miss home, home as the place in which I was born, the place which holds most of… Continue Reading
To Give a Little Colour
At some point during trips away, usually in the latter third, I begin to feel a sense of refreshment in regards to home. Home as in where-I-lay-my-weary-head home. The one… Continue Reading
Golden Moments
The reason we hopped a plane four weeks after I gave birth, was to attend my sister’s wedding in Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam. There are few other things that… Continue Reading
On Driving
There are certain things that comprise a functioning adult life, and these things differ depending on where you come from and where you live. Most of my functioning adult skills… Continue Reading
The Kindness of Strangers
And so it seems the key to travelling solo with a small baby is relying on the kindness of strangers. Luckily, babies are kindness magnets. People smile at them and… Continue Reading