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 :)