JOURNAL
documenting
&
discovering joyful things
The winter garden diary
I have been keeping a garden journal: notes and thoughts and ideas jotted down throughout the days as I try to bring my tired and beleaguered courtyard garden back to life after months of neglect and the hottest, driest summer on record.
Would you like to come outside with me? Step into my tiny courtyard and and let’s roll through the seasons from winter to spring…
25 May: Today’s garden tasks feel like a home demolition:
Pull out the valerian plants that have spread and smothered their neighbours. Do the same with the fishbone ferns and chickweed.
Pull down the potato vine that covered and shaded the pergola, a casualty of the hot summer
Pull out the two old lavender bushes that had become bushy and dry (my hands smell like dusty potpourri)
Also to go: one dead blueberry tree; one dead camellia; one dead rosemary bush; two dead clematis vines
Heavily prune one of the fuchsias: all the leaves have burned off but there is still green in the wood, so there’s hope
Cut back the passionfruit vine that tumbles over the fence from the neighbours on one side and is now strangling the Japanese maple, one of the standard roses, and the pomegranate tree. At the same time, cut back the hardenbergia vine on the same side that has joined forces with the passionfruit to choke as much of the garden as it can
On the other fence, cut back the jasmine that has similarly swamped the Japanese maple, standard rose, climbing rose and crepe myrtle
Go through the whole garden, aerating it with a fork
Feed the soil with some compost and turn it all over
Give it a really good soak with the hose. Still waiting for rain
26 May: It’s late in the season - weeks after Mother’s Day - but I decide to put some of the bulbs my children gave me into the ground, just in case. When I dig into the soil there are slaters, and no worms.
28 May: Garlic! I’m chatting with my friend Lee, a garlic farmer who wants to teach women in at-risk communities how to grow and harvest garlic to feed their families and earn some extra income. She tells me now is the time to plant them, and advises me to ask for “seed garlic” rather than culinary garlic at the farmers’ markets. Nobody has any (or none they’re willing to sell), but I find a big basket of garden garlic at CERES and buy several bulbs. I plant the cloves in circles around the roses at the front and back of our house, because I read that garlic growing near roses deters aphids.
8 June: I don’t understand why the two fuchsias, positioned only two metres from one another and receiving equal food, water, shade and sun, grow so differently. One is verdant and glorious, dark green leaves framing stunning coral flowers with such enthusiasm it is positively tropical. On the other, the leaves have wilted and burned. When I cup the leaves in my hands they fall from the plant and crumble to the ground. There is no sign of disease on the plant or in the soil around it… I don’t understand.
9 June: The garlic bulbs I planted last month are shooting skyward, already 10 centimetres above the ground in little circles around all my roses.
15 June: Pruning fruit trees means seeing several moves ahead, and I have never been good at chess. I need to find someone in-the-know, and actually watch them as they decide what to cut and what to keep. Also, when will my pomegranate fruit? It’s been five years.
16 June: One of the hardenbergia vines has died. In fact looking around the garden, none of them are looking good. A lot of the leaves have dropped and those that are left look sick. Should I try to revive them? The hated bamboo fence is also looking a lot worse for wear. Hardenbergia has wound around it, thickened, and pulled the fence from its framework. It is buckled in several places. I’m tossing up between rehabilitation and removal.
22 June: I cut down the hardenbergia that died. I have to extract the broken pieces from the fence piece by piece, since it is too tightly and thickly wound to unravel. I manage to cut it back to a stump but can’t for the life of me get the roots up or the stump out. It doesn’t even budge.
6 July: The garden is properly asleep. I’ve pruned and prodded, aerated and hosed, fed (gently, because it’s winter) and fussed. And now there are bare walls, stumps and brown earth where once was green joy. I put some rows of flower seedlings into the sun-drenched beds at the bottom of the garden, to get a head start for spring, but almost everywhere else the focus is rest. I’ve always heard that sleep, fresh air and good nutrition are the best ingredients for recovering from illnesses, and I hope the same will be true for my little garden.
7 July: I make a call and pull out all the other hardenbergia vines - sick-looking and neighbour-strangling every one of them. Actually I don’t pull them out because I can’t. I cut them down to the stumps. Without the hardenbergia I can see just how damaged the bamboo fence really is. It buckles in some places and swings freely in others, falling over my fragile flower seedlings, breaking them off at the top. I pull on gloves and heavy boots and just tear the entire fence down.
13 July. Still no worms. I feed the soil, mulch it, and bid it goodnight. The pile of dead vines and tree-branches takes up the entire grassed area of the garden. It’s about the size of a small SUV, or a Solstice bonfire. I call the Council and book eight separate “green waste” pick-ups, since they’ll only take what I can fit in our one green wheelie bin.
4 August: I think I have solved the mystery of the fuchsia. It was the hardenbergia! I was separating out some of the stock and sea holly seedlings that were growing too close to one another after I planted them last month, when I came across a root, running horizontally about 10 centimetres underground, that didn’t belong to anything. it was thick - about as thick as a man’s thumb - and as I started to pull it up it just seemed to never end. I followed it inch by inch, carefully extracting it from under the flower seedlings, to try and find the source. Finally I followed it all the way to the stump of the hardenbergia in the bottom corner of our garden, next to the pomegranate tree and beside the gate. I dug down at the base, deep, deep, and found another root. This one was almost as thick as my wrist! I followed it backwards and it spread in another direction and I pulled it, piece by piece, out of the garden bed. I repeated this again and again until, finally, the whole hardenbergia stump lifted out of the ground. It looked like a squid! A rock-solid stump with powerful roots radiating out of it more than a metre in every direction like giant tentacles.
As I was pulling out a hardenbergia close to the house, I had to completely uproot two of the winter roses and disturb a flowering daphne, but I still hadn’t reached the end yet. I pulled harder, and that’s when I noticed my fuchsia - the fuchsia that had almost died in autumn - wobbling. The hardenbergia root was directly under the fuchsia, stealing all its food.
3 September: Robert, who painted our whole house for us a few years ago, comes back and paints the brick wall that had been behind the bamboo fence. A soft white. It’s blinding in the sunlight, but hopefully over time vines (not hardenbergia!) will grow up and cover it.
7 September: The calendar says Spring although the weather begs to differ. Our school hosts a Father’s Day breakfast in the courtyard, and it is only 3 degrees. I start thinking about a future fundraiser to purchase braziers! Still, I’m sure the weather will warm up soon, and it is finally time to start planting.
White and pale pink clematis, alternating with white, pink or red roses, all the way along both fences
Three apple trees (dwarf so they won’t overwhelm the little garden), in pollination-friendly varieties
Two fruiting grape vines (bare rooted and dormant) to cover the pergola
A new hydrangea to replace the one that died last season
Seeds sown into old egg cartons and sat under the sun on the dining-room table: bee-friendly flowers like nigella, sunflowers, dill, lupins and more. I’m still looking for comfrey
I plant strawberries under the apple trees
22 September: Signs of life! Every morning I saunter into the dew-wet garden with my tea in hand, watching my breath form clouds in the air, looking for signs of life. Today I found some! Green buds on one of the apple trees, and red buds on the Japanese maple. The very first bluebell is a shocking blue, and there are buds on the sweet pea. The flowers I planted are doing so well now that I have to separate them again, although there are no blooms yet. I put my mother’s elderberry plant into the ground and promise myself I’ll keep it trimmed to a shrub. Nothing on the grapevines yet, but there’s some kind of swelling. Something is happening.
9 October: Here is a list of blooms that are making my little garden a fragrant rainbow of joy:
Foxgloves
Delphiniums
Sweetpeas
Poppies
Fuchsia (both of them!)
Wild strawberries
Lillies of the valley
Clematis
Valerian
Hellebores
Columbines
Alyssum
Apple blossoms
And one red rose
And last weekend when I was digging, I found something even better. Worms!
A new project: the Travelling Card Club
On Saturday morning I made a visit to the post office box and in it I found a lovely, newsy letter, folded inside the handmade card I’ve photographed at the top of this blog post. The writer, Carole, had been reading my blog and decided to respond in the old-fashioned way, by paper and pen, to share snippets of her life.
At the end of the letter, she added a little post script that gave me an idea. This is what she wrote:
“ps. Re-gift the card. Most of my greetings I sign on a signature tag. If everyone did that, I wonder how far they’d go. It would be fun if after a few years it cycled back to me.”
And then I thought, let’s try it! We’ll send this card around the world, regifting it from one person to the next, and maybe, just maybe, it might even return to Carole! Here’s what I suggest:
If you want in on this, share your postal address with me, using the confidential form below
I will post the card to the first person on the list, that person can send it on to the next person in the list, and so on
When it’s your turn to receive the card, write your first name, city and country inside it. As each of us does this it will fill up, kind of like stamps in a passport. Then contact me for the next address on the list so you can post it on
When either the card is full or we’ve run out of names on the list, the last person can post it back to me and I’ll then send it home to Carole
What do you think? Do you want to join the Travelling Card Club? Pop your address into the form below to be part of this. (If you can’t see the form, click the title of this blog post to view it in your browser).
UPDATE: With more than 120 people on this list, I’ve decided to close it for the time being.*
But I’ve decided to have several Travelling Cards going at the same time! If you’re crafty and would like to see a card of yours travel the world via the Travelling Card Club, simply pop a handmade card into the post for me (remember to leave it blank on the inside) and I’ll send it on its way to the people on this list. My address is PO Box 469, Carlton North, Vic 3054, Australia.
*If I receive enough Travelling Cards, I’ll reopen the list so others can join in.
Our different dreams
A week or two ago we briefly indulged the dream of buying this old house and moving to the country. It was nestled amid an ancient orchard, the ground covered in daffodils, snowflakes, jonquils and anemones that had been allowed to grow and spread for more than a hundred years.
Also on the property was a 160-year-old cottage with a thatched roof where I imagined my parents living, and an old farm shed that had been converted into a yoga studio, that was just begging to be turned into a place to host creative workshops and classes for likeminded souls.
There were 150 acres to play with, as well as a bore with water that was so fresh it was sweet to drink, and in my dream I was already sowing seeds and planting trees to bring back diversity to the soil and draw down carbon. I was purchasing truffle-inoculated oak trees; and Cream Legbar hens for blue eggs and Plymouth Rock hens for brown eggs; and a little herd of Anglo Nubian goats for making chèvre.
My imagined life on the land was magical.
It’s funny how the same dream can look so completely different, depending on who is doing the dreaming.
As I wandered through this old house, I could feel it calling out for someone to love it. For a gentle hand that would remove the birds’ nests from the ceiling and restore the rusted old Aga stove to working order in time for cold wintery days, and tend to the fruit trees and roses and orchard like Mary and Dickon in the Secret Garden.
“Me!” I all-but shouted, waving my hand in the air. “I’ll do it!”
I pictured dances in the old shearing shed, and long lunches under the grape vines outside. A gigantic kitchen garden and a medicinal herb garden next door. The children racing over to Nanna’s and Pa’s house after school every afternoon. Horses. A puppy.
But where I saw potential, my husband saw a money pit. Endless weeks and months, probably years, of spending our every spare minute and every spare cent on bringing this old farmhouse back to life.
Our weekends would be tied to this land; we could probably never afford to go on a holiday again; our choices of schools for the children would be curtailed; and he’d have to drive more than an hour each way to get to work.
My dream was cosy, botanical and gentle; Mr B’s was exhausting, expensive and stressful. I suspect the reality would have been somewhere in the middle.
Would the dream have been worth the sacrifice?
We see the world very differently, he and I. Sometimes, this fosters disagreements but mostly, we complement one another. He helps me to be practical, and I remind him that sometimes, it is fun to let yourself dream.
As promised, the "tea stories" zine
As promised, I’ve made a little zine, celebrating “tea stories” from all over the world. A heartfelt THANK YOU to everyone who shared their stories on this blog post, as well as those of you who emailed me privately. And especially to Nanette via Instagram, who posted me a box of Dutch Tea and Lady Grey Tea all the way from The Netherlands, when I told her I didn’t know what Lady Grey Tea was.
I had seriously so much fun making this zine. I decided to embrace my inner-90s self, and made this thing completely old-school. I painted the pictures below then glued them in, drew others in by hand, cut old ads out of magazines, and hand-wrote most of the stories. So what you see here is something truly handmade, warts and spelling mistakes and stickytape-lines and all.
What I learned as I hand-wrote all of your stories, was that our mutual love of tea, while it is undeniably delicious, isn’t really about the taste at all. Tea is about taking a moment: it’s about self-care, it’s about slowing down, it’s about comfort, it’s about mindfulness… and more than anything, tea is about the people we love. Whether shared with our loved-ones or sipped in their memories, tea connects us and comforts us.
(I suspect that if coffee is more your beverage of choice, or hot chocolate, the same could probably be said of these drinks, too. Maybe one day I’ll make a zine for you.)
So, here’s the zine I made you: simply click the arrows on the right to flip through the pages, and if you want to make it bigger, hover over the zine and you’ll see an option to view it in “fullscreen”. (If all the pages in the flip-book aren’t showing for you, you can download a readable PDF here). I really hope you enjoy reading Tea Stories as much as I loved making it.
Download and print this zine
If you want to download the PDF and print this zine for yourself or your friends, simply click the button below. The file has been laid out so that you can print it back-to-back. It will print this way onto 10 sheets of paper, which you can simply fold in half, together, to have the whole zine laid out in the correct order. (It’s designed to fit onto A4 paper so if you use US Letter or Foolscap, you may want to trim it slightly.)
Once you’ve made up the booklet, if you want to post it to friend (perhaps with some of your favourite teabags tucked inside), you can simply fold it in half again to fit a standard letter size (although it will be fat).
OK I’ve got to go, I think I hear the kettle singing.
Naomi xo
In which the author goes to a country wedding, steps in a puddle, and gets philosophical about the passing of time and a misshapen moon
We were at a country wedding on the weekend. It was a perfect, clear and crisp winter’s day and the couple were married in a short ceremony under a simple canopy in the watery sunshine. Afterwards we moved inside to an old farm building with wonky, handmade bricks paving the entry-floor, wreaths of greenery and fairly lights wound around the exposed beams, and a huge, roaring fire in one corner to which we all instantly flocked, hands out.
It wasn’t a big wedding. Most of the people there were family or life-long friends, so there was an easy, informal camaraderie to the room. No set places or awkward conversations with strangers at the table.
At the back of an old wooden stage, a DJ played the kinds of tracks you hear at every wedding, everywhere, and the children, an assorted gaggle of cousins ranging age from five to fifteen, busted their best moves. My two, as the youngest of the group, were often the ringleaders, dragging their older cousins back to the dance floor whenever they showed signs of waning. Later, after the bridal waltz, the grown-ups joined in too, couples dissolving into laughing groups with children riding on shoulders, as we all stumbled through the half-forgotten moves to Nutbush City Limits, YMCA, and the dreaded Macarena. Actually I think they played that one twice.
As the afternoon lengthened and the night grew dark around us, our little party carried on, a bright oasis of laughter and music, shining out from the middle of the otherwise empty fields.
One of the uncles was the first to fold, slumping in his chair beside the table, chin on chest. People posed behind him, bunny-ear fingers hovering over his head, but he gently snored, oblivious. Next to go was Ralph. I sat him beside a table to adjust his shoelaces for half a minute, and in that time he simply lay down, put his thumb in his mouth, and closed his eyes.
Then he opened them again and said, “Mummy, I’m too hot.” I carried him out to the entrance room, stepping carefully in my heels over the wonky, ancient brick floor, and eased the two of us down into an armchair. It was much cooler out there but I put a coat over Ralph and watched the party through the swinging glass doors, as he fell almost instantly asleep.
People came and went, pausing to smile or kiss his dark curls, but mostly it was just Ralph and me, his soft breathing, his sleeping body keeping me warm. I soaked it all in, painfully aware that this time for us, him sleeping in my arms, was not a forever thing.
Recently my friend Sally shared online about the joys of being a parent to her two grown-up girls. She talked about how there is a lot of airspace and celebration given to the precious moments we share with our small children, but less about the changed although still beautiful relationship that comes when they are adults. I was glad she shared these stories - I’m always glad when I hear stories about parents with older children - because I know that my own “precious moments” with my little ones are limited. “Our children are only on loan,” Sally’s mother told her, and she told me, and I wonder if my own compulsion to share these moments with you is because I am trying, through my words, to freeze them in time. As if by writing them down I am forced to be more mindful of them, to appreciate them, before they are gone forever.
Inside the function room, the DJ began playing Walk the Dinosaur. I couldn’t see the stage from my little armchair but from what I could hear, every guest at the wedding aside from me, Ralph and the sleeping cousin was up on the stage, dancing and singing along. And not one of them could hold a tune.
When it was time to leave, my husband gathered up coats, bags and our daughter, and I eased myself clumsily out of that chair, still holding the leaden weight of my not-so-little boy, and clutching a coat over his back to keep him warm as we ventured into the winter night air. I made slow progress back to the car, trying to pick out footsteps in the broken and bumpy unlit path, wearing heels, and carrying a heavy, sleeping child.
Once off the path there was no light at all aside from the stars and we got lost, turning first one way and walking a hundred yards or so before realising our mistake and turning in the other direction, then finally inching our way down over a ditch and into a paddock, to where the parked car gleamed dully in the distance. I shifted Ralph’s weight in my arms, clasping a wrist in each hand to stop him from slipping… and then with a yell I didn’t realise had left my lips until I heard it, stepped into a puddle of mud half-way up to my knees.
Ralph woke to my yell, and we stood there precariously, me holding still him up but unable to get out of the puddle, since my shoes were sunk so deep in mud that they stayed behind whenever I tried to lift my feet out. When my husband came to rescue us, I needed to hold onto his shoulders with both my hands to leverage myself (and my shoes) out of that puddle.
Back on dry land, I poured mud and water out of my shoes as though they were goblets, and hobbled in my swampy, stocking-feet over to the car. The children woke themselves up just enough to find the whole scenario extremely amusing, except that from time to time Ralph would pause the laughter and remember his part in the episode, saying, “Mum, you could have dropped me!” in shocked and accusatory tones.
The moon rose on our drive home. Both children slept in the back seats, and Mr B and I kept up a quiet conversation with one another, more to help him stay awake as he drove, than because either of us had anything particularly important to say. While we chatted, the moon came up big and yellow, a lumpy kind of almost-full-but-not-quite moon. A floating quince in the sky. I watched it as we sped past shadowy trees and black hills that rose and fell beside the road, my mind drifting away from my wet feet and back to the upholstered armchair where Ralph had slept so angelically in my arms, until the city lights ahead stole the moon’s glamour and signalled that we were almost home.
I paused at our front door - a heavy, sleeping Ralph once again resting his head on my shoulder - and smiled up at the quince-moon as it quietly watched us from the eastern sky. I wondered what we looked like from up there. All the moments and events of our short lives, both momentous and minute, weighted equally and witnessed in silence. Weddings, funerals, dancing shoes, swampy shoes. Lovers uniting, marriages ending, mysteries solved, questions forming.
If I think my time with my children is all too short, this must be laughable to the ancient moon, for whom ten years or twenty pass like a breath.
Early the next morning I stepped outside the same front porch, my own breath making mist of the air around me, and watched a hot-air balloon rise in exactly the same patch of sky where the moon had bid me goodnight a few hours earlier. The dawn was very still, and the balloon seemed to be suspended for a moment, not drifting. With its yellow and cream stripes, being almost-but-not-quite round, it looked as though the quince-moon had swathed itself in a coat and defied the very laws of space, refusing to orbit and instead choosing to pause, at least for a little while, in our company. As if maybe she cared.
And then with a loud “pschhh” and a flash of orange flames, the pilot trapped more warm air under the balloon, and it began to rise, slowly floating away from me and into the east. The spell was broken, the moon was gone, and I went inside to make breakfast.
What if we walked?
It is a ten kilometre walk to the children’s farm and back, and we don’t have a car today. Before France this would have been out of the question. But now, with the resilience they brought home in their suitcases alongside the medieval Papo figurines, sweet little jumpers from the Monoprix, and a collection of Barbapapa books, the children say, “What if we walked?”
So I pack a lunch box of chopped apple and pear, crackers, and these banana muffins, and we set off.
Follow the route towards school and then turn off at the park, sticking to the paths because the long grass is soaked with dew and the day is bright but only three degrees right now. Our breath forms clouds in the air to guide us, and nobody wants cold, wet shoes and socks at the start of a day (the end of the day is a different matter, apparently).
At the railway crossing, we stop to let a train go by. The children put their hands through the railings and wave to the train. Before the train hurtles past, we can see the driver stand up in her cabin and wave back: a big, whole-of-body, over-the-head wave, and a beaming smile to go with it.
We see a beautiful but decrepit old house, one that once probably nurtured families and echoed to tiny, thumping feet and the laughter of children. A long time ago, a colour-loving person had planted a pink-flowering geranium beside the front gate. But now the windows are boarded over, the paint is peeling, some of the cladding has fallen away, and the posts that support the verandah are rotting.
As we walk on, we make up a story about its haunting. I try for something chilling and deeply tragic, but the children are convinced the demise of the house had been hastened by hungry monsters, aliens and flying dogs. They build their outlandish story with relish, growing more ridiculous by the sentence, giggling and shouting over one another with excitement. I blame Captain Underpants.
Under the overpass and onto the Main Yarra Trail, where water is tumbling over rocks in a happy gurgle and bellbirds are calling everywhere. I tell Ralph to move to the left if he hears the ding of a bicycle bell, but he says he can’t tell which ones are the bikes and which ones are the birds. He makes a good point.
We tell ourselves, this could be Dinan! Here we are, walking alongside a river again. We climb out onto a wooden lookout and say, “These are the ramparts at the ruins.” Further on, a wall stretches up, up, on the other side of the path, as tall as the Dinan chateau beside the wild apple orchard. This wall is covered in graffiti but we try to ignore that, and tell each other, “Those are the castle walls.” A road bridge up ahead plays the role of the viaduct that connects Dinan to Lanvallay.
We are chevaliers again, and tired legs discover a last burst of energy before we reach the children’s farm.
In fact we are so excited to reach the farm and find our friends that we don’t notice the oak tree but, on the way home, we stop at it in wonder.
It is ancient, and most of its golden leaves have already dropped, set in a circle of stones and stretching its branches almost all the way to the river. The children climb over the stones and play in the fallen leaves but I am overcome with a powerful sense of stillness.
The sun is turning golden as we make our way home along the river, the children collecting leaves and nuts, fanning them out in their hands like cards at a poker table, to inspect the intricacies of Nature’s design. Ralph finds a giant fern frond broken on the ground, and holds it aloft like a sword.
Back on the back-streets, they discover a small pile of smooth, round pebbles, so we start a game of Hansel and Gretel, counting out steps between stones and taking turns. That game lasts a good kilometre or two, all the way back to the railway crossing.
The day is warm now - 17 degrees! - so Ralph takes his shirt off and struts those streets as though he’s at the beach. (I am carrying jumpers, shirts, hats, gloves, picnic lunch, water bottle, and other various accoutrements in my back pack. Thankfully a friend has taken our coats in her car, and drops them home for us.)
We find a park we’ve never seen before, rows of trees glowing in the late afternoon light, and promise one another we’ll return one day because there is a playground in the distance “that looks awesome!” We also pass a bakery that we hadn’t seen on the way out, so Scout suggests that next time, we should pick up a baguette.
The children say, “We feel sorry for our friends who drove in the car, because they would have missed all of this.”
Tea stories
Yesterday I was out at a charity function, all dressed up and two glasses of champagne in, when I saw what every parent dreads: the babysitter’s number come up on my phone. “Ralph has hit his head and it’s a deep cut, I think he needs to go to hospital.”
An hour later, I sat next to a rather sorry-for-himself Ralph in the emergency department*, holding his little hand and nursing the babysitter’s blood-soaked scarf on my lap. And as the night descended outside, a very kind ED nurse brought me a cup of tea.
I had never tasted anything better in my life.
There is something magically fortifying about tea, I think. Especially in times of emotional stress. Tea is the liquid equivalent of a “you’ve got this” pep talk. It fills your body with warmth as it goes down, bringing parts of you back to life when you need to get moving or thinking (kind of in the same way that, in old adventure novels, people are given brandy or whiskey when they come in from the rain and cold or after discovering a murder victim. Except that in my case, that would probably put me to sleep). Tea is also permission to take a moment. To stop, to exhale, to remember these tiny moments of self-care.
Even when the tea is made from a teabag and served in a cardboard cup, and drunk in the paediatric area of a hospital emergency department.
That’s my tea story today - I imagine you have some, too, and I’d love to hear them! If you want to share with this community, tell me your tea story in the comments (if you’re reading this via email you just need to click on the blog post heading so you can view it in your browser to see comments).
I bet it would make a warming, fortifying read to have all of our tea-stories together. If we see enough stories, maybe I could make a little tea-inspired zine for you to download, with the stories and some illustrations like these I’ve included here, of the teacup and tea plant? What do you think? Does that appeal?
I’m off to put the kettle on.
* Ralph is fine. He was sent home with his cut all glued up, and his biggest challenge is remembering not to exert himself physically or mentally for a day or two.
100 Scottish words for rain
I heard recently that there were more than 100 Scottish words for rain.
Musical, melodic words like spindrift (spray whipped up by the wind) and aftak (an easing or lull in a storm or rain). Hilarious, fun-to-say words that you’d swear were made up, like drookit (absolutely drenched) and daggle (to fall in torrents).
And words that seem to be plucked straight out of a Scottish novel, transporting you through time and space to a place where “wild” still holds meaning, and ghosts in tartan haunt your imaginings. Yillen (a shower of rain, especially with wind), uplowsin (heaving rain), smirr (a fine rain drizzle), and goselet (a soaking, drenching, downpour).
The day we hiked to the falls that tumbled into Loch Ness, rain settled in a smirr only ten minutes after we’d started out. But walking through it was not a misery, but a joy. Ralph was fairly sure he had spotted the Lach Ness Monster (“or maybe it was a turtle head”) in the cold waters, and we watched the tiny waves through the trees and raindrops for signs of monsters, dinosaurs or turtles.
When we reached them the roar of the falls, swelled by melting snow, was almost primal. We had to shout to be heard but still the wind snatched our words and swept them into the spindrift before hurtling them into the lake below.
I bent my body into the wind and stood on the platform overlooking the brutal, yellow torrent, inside the spray. What is the Scottish word for rain that falls up, not down? The spray lashed my face and I was drookit in seconds, dripping and frozen and truly, joyfully alive.
There is a tiny drop of Scottish blood in me, on my mother’s side. My great-grandmother was born in Scotland, with the surname Calder. Calder is a highland clan that once was powerful up near Inverness. It doesn’t have a chieftain any more, but it does still have a motto:
“Be mindful.”
The time spent navigating memories
It’s a slow process. I don’t just mean the making of the #100DaysInDinan project: combing through old photographs for inspiration, sketching a rough idea onto my antique postcards, going over it in pen, painting it. Then finding old pages from magazines, tracing onto them around the envelopes that had held the postcards for a century, folding them into place, then copying addresses onto paper and pasting them onto the front of the envelopes…
All this takes time, and perhaps in retrospect one a day was too ambitious.
But the real time is spent navigating memories. As I paint I walk my memories like I walked those old, cobblestoned streets, a hundred times over, during the 100 days we lived in Dinan.
As I sketch the outline of a fresh baguette, I am back there again, standing outside Boulangerie Banette with my children, tearing the still-warm loaf into into smaller pieces to share, and the smell is the best in the world: nutty, malty, a hug.
Scout announces, “I can’t go a single day in the world without this bread,” and from that day on, our baker Mohommed keeps one or two baguettes aside for us - and often throws in some free croissants and Nutella crepes - in case they sell out before we get there (which they often do).
Now as I paint I am climbing the steep hill to the castle ruins in the village next door and I can feel the muscles in my legs burning all over again. (And oh! That wicker picnic basket is heavy! Why did I think a picnic blanket was necessary? And did we really need that much water?).
My memories tumble onwards, gaining momentum like my children rolling down a steep and grassy hill on a sunny day, squealing with laughter. I think about the friendly grey cat at the ruins that had so enchanted Ralph. He sat among the wildflowers inside the crumbling castle walls and patted the wild cat while it purred like a tractor, and I dug into the bottom of that heavy wicker picnic basket for the hand sanitiser I was sure I’d packed somewhere. We learned that French cats don’t much mind if your French is somewhat lacking.
I paint my feet in canvas shoes, dangling over the canal on a quiet jetty. As I do it, I taste again the honey and walnut cake I’d baked the day before, and carried with us on our walk. I remember throwing crumbs for ducks that wouldn’t come, and watching the tiny bubbles and rings in the water made by unseen fish coming up to feed.
On comes the summer’s day we spent in nearby Saint Malo, digging and splashing in the beach all day and then running the whole three kilometres back to the bus stop just in time for the last bus home… only to discover the timetable had changed the day before, and we were trapped. So we trudged the three kilometres back into town and found a little hotel. We ate bananas dunked in yoghurt for dinner and it was hot, so hot, so we all slept in our underwear on a big bed. I left the window open all night and watched the moon rise slowly over slate rooftops and terra cotta chimney pots as my children slept.
It slows me. I start with an anecdote but all too soon I am lost in a fully-fledged memory, and follow that path deeper and deeper into the wilds of nostalgia.
It washes over me, a longing to be back inside those slower days once more. I was mindful then, truly mindful, consciously taking in everything: watching it, feeling it, tasting it, and appreciating it. Committing it to memory as best I could, not wanting to miss a thing, not wanting to lose any of it.
So when I paint and I am slow, I don’t mind. A hundred memories is taking me more than a hundred days to record, but this project has become exactly what it set out to be: a process in gratitude.
Camping People
Do you ever go camping?
I need to preface this blog post with the confession that we are not Camping People.
This makes me a little bit sad, because I really want to think of myself as a Camping Person. In my head, Camping People are super-evolved. They know how to pare back their living requirements to the bare minimum, ridding themselves of the clutter that threatens to overwhelm the rest of us on any given day, and bringing only what they can carry, leaving behind only footprints in the sand.
Camping People cook delicious one-pot meals in cast iron… (pots? Dutch ovens? What are those things called?) over picturesque fires, with mushrooms and fennel they foraged in nearby pine forests, or mussels they pulled from rocks on pristine beaches. For breakfast they eat bircher muesli they had pre-made in individual mason jars, which they kept cool overnight by submerging them in an alpine-fed stream, Famous Five style. After dinner they uncork the wine, and tell hilarious stories to one another in the glow of the fire. They drape hand-woven rugs around their shoulders as the chill draws in, and they look good in beanies.
We are not those people.
We tried camping, one time. I won a beautiful, canvas tent in a competition, and off we raced to a campsite among the trees in the mountains. I remember it had been a lean week, so I only had $90 in the budget with which to purchase four inflatable beds, one pump, four sleeping bags, two lanterns and four little folding deck chairs, all from K-mart.
Let’s just say you get what you pay for. The pump didn’t work so we had to blow up the beds by mouth, and they deflated during the night to leave us sleeping on cold rocks. Only one of the two lanterns worked. The sleeping bags made up in bulk for what they lacked in actual warmth, and we froze, huddled together on the deflating beds in our winter coats, through the long, six-degree Celsius night.
I had forgotten to bring the instructions for pitching the tent, so we had attempted it earlier that day amid dust and wasps, tripping over pegs and ropes and arguing pointlessly, while a motorhome the size of our home in Melbourne rolled up and parked within touching distance of our tent (we couldn’t even stretch the ropes out fully or we’d have had to peg them into the side of the motorhome). A marathon runner pitched his one-person tent in front of our car, climbed inside at around seven at night, and commenced a rumbling, avalanche-causing snore that continued with impressive consistency until sunrise the next day.
I couldn’t get the kindling in the brazier we’d hired from the campsite ranger to catch alight, despite or perhaps because of the well-meaning aid of the children who plied it with green wood and leaves, but it didn’t really matter anyway because my K-mart budget hadn’t stretched to anything with which to actually cook a meal.
(On the other side of the camping ground, actual Camping People were stirring paella on a little gas cooker, while a teapot suspended over a neat little campfire and children roasted marshmallows on sticks. Later they pulled out camp-chairs that looked like armchairs, and drank wine out of enamel cups. I watched them from the shade of my lopsided tent, through narrowed eyes.)
Because it turns out that, at least for most of us, the amount of stuff needed to actually feed, clothe, shelter and maintain basic hygiene for a family of four is actually a LOT. I mean seriously, there’s so much stuff in camping! Definitely more than we could fit into our tiny Toyota Corolla, even if the budget had allowed me to fully prepare. (The tent alone weighed more than 44 kilograms and filled the entire boot of the car. What’s even up with that!?)
After that one night we hurried back home: filthy, freezing and forlorn. My husband called some friends that same afternoon and gave the tent away, and I donated the sleeping-bags to charity (with a note attached that said “for summer”). We swore we’d never go camping again.
And then we did.
One of the lessons we learned as a family, while we were in France last year, was the importance of taking time out, and switching off, together.
So we cleared the calendar for three nights over Easter. The budget didn’t stretch to much (thanks in part the the aforementioned stay in France) and so, with some trepidation, we decided to try camping again.
It was definitely easier. Not perfect, but easier.
We took the ‘glamping’ route, the best part of which involved someone else pitching the tent, and packing it up afterwards. Oh and floorboards, pre-made beds (with doonas and blankets), a little bar-fridge to keep the milk cool in the absence of any alpine-fed springs, and even a heater!
Of course, we were still covered in dirt most of the time, the campsite showers had scary creatures on the walls, and the campsite ‘kitchen’ was so rusted over I couldn’t even boil water, let alone cook paella. We ate a lot of dim sims from the local take away shop.
And fish ‘n chips on the beach, under a high, full moon.
Actually, it wasn’t that bad.
The children splashed in the icy sea-water, building sandcastles and a conical abbey of sand that they called le Mont Saint Michel. We explored seaside villages and manicured gardens. Old-fashioned hedge-mazes and sun drenched pathways to remote lighthouses.
In the evenings, we read our books and drank hot tea - and later red wine - wrapped in soft blankets. When it was time to turn off the lantern, the moon painted Chinese calligraphy in the leaves and branches of nearby trees on the canvas walls.
I could hear the soft breathing of my family, all asleep but me. Distant waves kissing sand. Night birds. And, on the final night, the winds of a gathering storm.
Maybe this is how Camping People feel.
