Last night the wind was howling in between the rows of olives, swirling around the base of the pines and rushing through the gums. This morning when I woke the rain was tumbling down and chestnuts lay sprawled over the ground in the corner of the yard ready to be picked up and roasted. Grey cloud hangs heavy around the mountain and the birds pick over the soft, chocolatey soil. It's a perfect beginning to the last day of Rohan's holidays and my easter break.
One of my favourite films is Reality Bites and I love that line where Ethan Hawke says 'So I take pleasure in the details. You know...a quarter-pounder with cheese, the sky about 10 minutes before it starts to rain, the moment when your laughter becomes a cackle'. Last night a friend posted about the 100 happy days challenge on Facebook and asked who was going to do it with her. I said I would as it reminded me of that line from Reality Bites - the idea of taking pleasure in the details. The idea of the 100 happy days challenge is to take the time to pause and appreciate the happy moments of life, rather than letting life rush past. It's not about putting on a facade of happiness in the face of soul crushing unhappiness, something that is akin to putting a band aid on a gaping, festering wound. Instead, the thing that appeals to me about this challenge is the notion of taking the time to pay attention to the things that make you happy and to catch yourself in a moment of happiness, to press 'pause' on the play button.
I'm not good at signing on to things though, so I'm not doing the official sign up or taking on the challenge to instagram every moment. Instead, I'm just going to put 7 images for the week on my blog here - one a day, 7 moments that represent a pressing of the pause button and the catching of the moment when a laugh becomes a cackle.
Monday 21 April 2014
Sunday 6 April 2014
The details that matter
Maybe it's the fact that I was struck down with a viral bug and had spent 3 days sleeping that made me overly sentimental. Maybe it's the fact that on this farm, I feel history alive all around me, with each footstep I make in a paddock seeming to reverberate through the ages. Whatever it is, I found myself swirling with thoughts of connecting and stitching the past into the present.
I'd been reading a wonderful book 'Saving St.Brigid's' by Regina Lane in which she charts the fight of a local community group against the might of the Catholic church as they battled to save their local church and community hall. The Lane family lived down the road from where my parents lived at Tower Hill and where all my siblings spent some of their early years. I never lived there but I've got the ghosts of memory imprinted on my brain from their tales, and as I read Regina's book, names, places, incidents seemed like ones I could have been there for. In the book, Regina also finds her connection with her place again, and there are pages of her book that I've dog-eared so breathtakingly beautiful I find the sentiment within them. Lane writes:
Facebook and Skype might have made communication easier, but with the pace of our lives, you don't share these seemingly meaningless, but telling, details. And in the process something is lost. When you live the restless life, moving from one place to another, you learn to detach yourself from these things - from the details of the everyday lives of those you love (p. 155).
And in this paragraph ideas were thudding through my head - a social media junkie from way back, I wondered how I substituted it for the meaningful connections with those around me. Here, at this farm, we have begun stitching more meaningful connections with family and friends as we share in the journey that is our growing to understand more about this land and our life on it.
Knowing the details that matter is important and so this week I sat down, wool and crochet needle in hand and began making a baby blanket for a friend. Her mother made a blanket for her first baby, and with her mother no longer here to craft a blanket for her second baby, I take up the needle. I crochet in rounds, stitching a blanket for her, for the baby to come and for a way to keep her mother's presence alive. It's easy to laugh off knitting and crochet as passe, old-fashioned skills that are out of place in our modern, disposable world. Yet, in these ancient forms, there lies a narrative and a history much bigger than our own.
On Saturday afternoon, I wandered out to the peach tree where branches hung heavy with fruit. A few weeks back the fruit looked like it would be no good, sap pouring out at gaps on the rounded flesh. A friend told me they thought they would still be okay, but I was doubtful. In the last couple of weeks though the peaches have taken off, bigger, rounder, plumper, the sap holes healed and the flesh ripe and juicy, pock-marks the only remnants of what had been before. I couldn't eat them all in one go though and set about searching for a guide on how to preserve them. On the SBS website I came across Matthew Evans and a guide on how to preserve peaches. Jars sterilised, I tenderly placed pieces of flesh in, covered them with water and sugar and set them in a pot to preserve. I sent my mum a photo and she sent me an email saying that I must have my Nan's talents for cooking. In those days the act of preserving would have been commonplace, but now, I become one of many who seek to reclaim some of these connections to the past, to ways of eating, saving and storing the food we grow.
As I write this, I'm sitting here staring out the window, watching the birds. Wattle birds, rosellas and currawongs feed at our makeshift bird feeder. A wattle bird sails towards the one, lonely persimmon on the tree. Watch it wattle bird, you may be cute, but that one persimmon is mine, all mine. Suddenly I'm wrenched out of the past and back to the present :)
I'd been reading a wonderful book 'Saving St.Brigid's' by Regina Lane in which she charts the fight of a local community group against the might of the Catholic church as they battled to save their local church and community hall. The Lane family lived down the road from where my parents lived at Tower Hill and where all my siblings spent some of their early years. I never lived there but I've got the ghosts of memory imprinted on my brain from their tales, and as I read Regina's book, names, places, incidents seemed like ones I could have been there for. In the book, Regina also finds her connection with her place again, and there are pages of her book that I've dog-eared so breathtakingly beautiful I find the sentiment within them. Lane writes:
Facebook and Skype might have made communication easier, but with the pace of our lives, you don't share these seemingly meaningless, but telling, details. And in the process something is lost. When you live the restless life, moving from one place to another, you learn to detach yourself from these things - from the details of the everyday lives of those you love (p. 155).
And in this paragraph ideas were thudding through my head - a social media junkie from way back, I wondered how I substituted it for the meaningful connections with those around me. Here, at this farm, we have begun stitching more meaningful connections with family and friends as we share in the journey that is our growing to understand more about this land and our life on it.
Knowing the details that matter is important and so this week I sat down, wool and crochet needle in hand and began making a baby blanket for a friend. Her mother made a blanket for her first baby, and with her mother no longer here to craft a blanket for her second baby, I take up the needle. I crochet in rounds, stitching a blanket for her, for the baby to come and for a way to keep her mother's presence alive. It's easy to laugh off knitting and crochet as passe, old-fashioned skills that are out of place in our modern, disposable world. Yet, in these ancient forms, there lies a narrative and a history much bigger than our own.
On Saturday afternoon, I wandered out to the peach tree where branches hung heavy with fruit. A few weeks back the fruit looked like it would be no good, sap pouring out at gaps on the rounded flesh. A friend told me they thought they would still be okay, but I was doubtful. In the last couple of weeks though the peaches have taken off, bigger, rounder, plumper, the sap holes healed and the flesh ripe and juicy, pock-marks the only remnants of what had been before. I couldn't eat them all in one go though and set about searching for a guide on how to preserve them. On the SBS website I came across Matthew Evans and a guide on how to preserve peaches. Jars sterilised, I tenderly placed pieces of flesh in, covered them with water and sugar and set them in a pot to preserve. I sent my mum a photo and she sent me an email saying that I must have my Nan's talents for cooking. In those days the act of preserving would have been commonplace, but now, I become one of many who seek to reclaim some of these connections to the past, to ways of eating, saving and storing the food we grow.
As I write this, I'm sitting here staring out the window, watching the birds. Wattle birds, rosellas and currawongs feed at our makeshift bird feeder. A wattle bird sails towards the one, lonely persimmon on the tree. Watch it wattle bird, you may be cute, but that one persimmon is mine, all mine. Suddenly I'm wrenched out of the past and back to the present :)
Wednesday 2 April 2014
Falling for green
In almost the blink of an eyelid green is returning to the farm. After what seemed like almost endless days and nights of hot weather, the last couple of weeks have seen us waking up every day to the mountain shrouded in fog. Dew falls lightly from the branches of the pine trees, sprinkling my shoulders as I duck under them to take Indy out into the paddocks.
And then one Wednesday night, it arrived. Rain. Not just a light shower, but proper, tumbling down rain. Rain that you could hear tapping on the laserlight of the verandah and which pooled in hollows in the driveway. I woke up that Thursday morning and sat at the kitchen table, clutching a mug of steaming tea and gazed out at the endless grey, as the rain continued to fall. I don't think I can recall a time I've felt so happy to see the grey. Normally I complain about it and long for patches of blue sky, but I think there's been too much blue sky this summer and so it was wonderful to see some rain.
Within days, it seemed as if the farm was swooning, head over heels in love with the rain, the dew, the colder nighttime temperatures that allowed droplets of water to rest and soak into the ground. Between the olives where only weeks ago it was dry, cracked and brown; patches of green are emerging. In the orchard, fruit trees that were tired, lifeless and wilting under the heat, begin to come back to life, their leaves swollen and on the citrus trees, tiny buds appear. In these moments I begin to see the rhythm of life on the farm. The Indian summer which has stretched out and dried everything begins to fade away and the land breathes a sigh of relief as moisture starts to creep back in.
We grow accustomed to waking up with the trees and mountain shrouded in fog. Already it doesn't lift until after 10 some mornings and we begin to get a sense of what winter will be like - I'm beginning to think that by the middle of winter I'll be yearning for sun - but not yet. Out in the paddocks after the rain, I use my gumboots to dig under the surface and the ground is morphing, becoming a rich, velvety chocolate rather than a dry, dusty brown.
I begin to dream of woollen blankets, coats, scarves, gloves. On top of the fire in the kitchen lie a pair of fingerless gloves, with interchangeable mitten tops that I bought at a market. I bought them on a day when it was nearly 30, when the idea of wearing mittens seemed laughable. Now, I look at them and know it won't be long till I'll be dragging them on before I head out for my morning walk in the grove.
With the arrival of cooler weather and the return of green, comes a new list of work to be done. The mower which has lay idle since the great mowing incident (hmmm I don't think I ever wrote about that on here did I? I'll get to it one day), will need to be dragged out again and once again my weekends will consist of the meditative pleasure of mowing up and down the rows in the grove, backwards, forwards, backwards, forwards. As the trees spring back into life I need to give them some care and attention and to the side of the house a whole mini vineyard has emerged - tiny grape plants pop up out of the soil in neat, symmetrical rows suggesting that at some point they were organised, and tended to with love and care. We begin planning for their growth, the emergence of another secret from Innisfree, and a new lot of learning to be done.
In the meantime, we like the farm, are falling in love with this new season that is upon us. I stare out the windows watching the parakeets and rosellas picking at seed on the makeshift bird feeder and smile as I look beyond them to the rows of green.
And then one Wednesday night, it arrived. Rain. Not just a light shower, but proper, tumbling down rain. Rain that you could hear tapping on the laserlight of the verandah and which pooled in hollows in the driveway. I woke up that Thursday morning and sat at the kitchen table, clutching a mug of steaming tea and gazed out at the endless grey, as the rain continued to fall. I don't think I can recall a time I've felt so happy to see the grey. Normally I complain about it and long for patches of blue sky, but I think there's been too much blue sky this summer and so it was wonderful to see some rain.
Within days, it seemed as if the farm was swooning, head over heels in love with the rain, the dew, the colder nighttime temperatures that allowed droplets of water to rest and soak into the ground. Between the olives where only weeks ago it was dry, cracked and brown; patches of green are emerging. In the orchard, fruit trees that were tired, lifeless and wilting under the heat, begin to come back to life, their leaves swollen and on the citrus trees, tiny buds appear. In these moments I begin to see the rhythm of life on the farm. The Indian summer which has stretched out and dried everything begins to fade away and the land breathes a sigh of relief as moisture starts to creep back in.
We grow accustomed to waking up with the trees and mountain shrouded in fog. Already it doesn't lift until after 10 some mornings and we begin to get a sense of what winter will be like - I'm beginning to think that by the middle of winter I'll be yearning for sun - but not yet. Out in the paddocks after the rain, I use my gumboots to dig under the surface and the ground is morphing, becoming a rich, velvety chocolate rather than a dry, dusty brown.
I begin to dream of woollen blankets, coats, scarves, gloves. On top of the fire in the kitchen lie a pair of fingerless gloves, with interchangeable mitten tops that I bought at a market. I bought them on a day when it was nearly 30, when the idea of wearing mittens seemed laughable. Now, I look at them and know it won't be long till I'll be dragging them on before I head out for my morning walk in the grove.
With the arrival of cooler weather and the return of green, comes a new list of work to be done. The mower which has lay idle since the great mowing incident (hmmm I don't think I ever wrote about that on here did I? I'll get to it one day), will need to be dragged out again and once again my weekends will consist of the meditative pleasure of mowing up and down the rows in the grove, backwards, forwards, backwards, forwards. As the trees spring back into life I need to give them some care and attention and to the side of the house a whole mini vineyard has emerged - tiny grape plants pop up out of the soil in neat, symmetrical rows suggesting that at some point they were organised, and tended to with love and care. We begin planning for their growth, the emergence of another secret from Innisfree, and a new lot of learning to be done.
In the meantime, we like the farm, are falling in love with this new season that is upon us. I stare out the windows watching the parakeets and rosellas picking at seed on the makeshift bird feeder and smile as I look beyond them to the rows of green.
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