Connecting lives, stories and experiences

Sunday morning was 'gloriously grey' as I wrote to my friend Maryann in a message. Cloud hung low on the mountain and it seemed that even nature didn't want to wake up and start Sunday. By mid morning the sun was creeping through the clouds and the day felt like it was starting properly. After a few weeks of moving heavy furniture, prowling around on the overgrown farm, using equipment, clambering over fences, I haven't sustained any injuries - sure a few bruises, a nasty case of hay rash but nothing broken or bleeding. So this morning began with broken toes, one maybe two. How did I obtain these you ask? (Too bad if you didn't, I'm going to tell you anyway). Was it in some act of farming gymnastics as I climbed over a fence or carted water or did something that required heavy lifting or moving? Nope. I broke my toes, wait for it, getting out of the shower. Idiot. Head full of thoughts of what I needed to get in town, I turned and ignored the lip on the bottom of the shower - smashing my toes and hearing a nice little crack. They went red and black almost instantly and as I sit here typing this, I swear I can feel my pulse in them. For the first time, but I'm sure not the last, the great el clumso has struck on the farm.

All of which had me thinking of sedentary pursuits for a Sunday- or if not sedentary, then at least indoors and unpacking type pursuits. I grabbed my gear for today, and in a hint of farming cheesiness chose the free shirt Annemaree had been given overseas and decided I needed.

It seems on Innisfree I become more tragic by the day.

Ah well, you can't fight it so you may as well go with it. Which is why when I was in town, I bought some butter and turned my thoughts to farm baking. I blame Enid Blyton as I'm sure my fascination with food comes from the magic faraway tree and tales of the food they would eat there. Or maybe I associate farm and food with Leo & Anne, friends of mum and dad's who lived on a farm outside of Warrnambool (well Anne still lives there, Leo having died a couple of years ago). Whenever we'd go to visit them, Anne would get out her tins and inside were all sorts of lovely farm food treats tenderly enclosed in greased, waxed paper.  My favourite was her coconut raspberry slice and while I've got the recipe it never tasted as good as Anne's, when munched in a kitchen and drunk with tea made from rainwater.

Today I wasn't making coconut raspberry slice, but instead was thinking scones. More precisely, date scones. I'd seen a recipe in the Country Style magazine I'd bought at the shops the week we bought the house - an heirloom recipe, sent in by a reader and shared with others. Why not give this a whirl?

As is normal for me, I couldn't follow the recipe. Why follow it when I could make a couple of minor additions? What's the worst that would happen? ( A disastrous gloopy mess, but I could live with that). So into the heirloom date scone recipe went the ingredients of hipsters, chia and flax seeds. All in all, they turned out okay for my first bit of oven baking in this new house (although I am cheesily horrified to discover that I took my photo on a red tea towel and hadn't realised the one in the mag was of similar colouring!).

Maybe farm life is making me overly sentimental (yes), but there is something nice about the way that our move has enabled us to connect lives, stories and experiences. Since having the farm, we've shared more with others, both family, friends and strangers. My parents cast their thoughts back to their married life at Tower Hill with small children, and earlier, to their lives growing up in Grassmere and Tower Hill. Rohan's parents share their memories of life at Wattle Glen and of what life was like for them. While times and contexts have changed,  in this sharing of stories we learn more about our parents and more about the things that have shaped us.

Now its time to hunt down that coconut raspberry slice recipe.....