Friday, 27 May 2011

Home Rhythms

Before Tea
~ A.A. Milne (from When We Were Very Young)

Emmeline
Has not been seen
For more than week. She slipped between
The two tall trees at the end of the green...
We all went after her. "Emmeline!"

"Emmeline,
I didn't mean --
I only said that your hands weren't clean."
We went to the trees at the end of the green...
But Emmeline
Was not to be seen.


Emmeline
Came slipping between
The two tall trees at the end of the green.
We all ran up to her. "Emmeline!
Where have you been?
Where have you been?
Why, it's more than a week!" And Emmeline
Said, "Sillies, I went to see the Queen.
She says my hands are purfickly clean!"
***

Like Emmeline, I have returned. I've been at a conference for three days this week.  Eaten too many Mentos and sipped too much brewed coffee.  Had the odd panic attack at 3.00 pm wondering if the Strong Silent One had remembered to collect the children from school.  (He had. Just. With texted reminders.)

Been caught up in that completely artificial world of a big hotel with shiny lobbies, exclusive parking, uniformed serving staff and corporate pen and paper sets. 

Back to earth now with soccer, netball, ballet on a Saturday morning, a tedious grocery shop in the slowest queue and now mounds of laundry demanding attention, plus embarrassingly long cobwebs hanging from the cornices in two separate and highly visible places.   No-one whisks the dirty dishes away or aims to make my stay as pleasant as possible.   The lounge chairs are covered with chess pieces, books, stray bits of paper and the cushions are on the floor.

 It was nice to be away from the routine for a while but comforting to be back.   Homes, like hotels, have their own rhythms and nothing beats the steady cadence of family life.

Photo by me: Cook's Cottage, Fitzroy Gardens, Melbourne. December 2010. 

Tuesday, 17 May 2011

Empty {office} chair

The Chairs That No One Sits In

Billy Collins

You see them on porches and on lawns
down by the lakeside,
usually arranged in pairs implying a couple

who might sit there and look out
at the water or the big shade trees.
The trouble is you never see anyone

sitting in these forlorn chairs
though at one time it must have seemed
a good place to stop and do nothing for a while.

Sometimes there is a little table
between the chairs where no one
is resting a glass or placing a book facedown.

It might be none of my business,
but it might be a good idea one day
for everyone who placed those vacant chairs

on a veranda or a dock to sit down in them
for the sake of remembering
whatever it was they thought deserved

to be viewed from two chairs
side by side with a table in between.
The clouds are high and massive that day.

The woman looks up from her book.
The man takes a sip of his drink.
Then there is nothing but the sound of their looking,

the lapping of lake water, and a call of one bird
then another, cries of joy or warning—
it passes the time to wonder which.

***


We are still at home. One child still unwell and the other sniffing, but recuperating. The front porch has been swept. The footpath raked. Flyscreens have been vaccuumed and the insides of windows wiped. I've applied the final cost of Dulux Magnolia to a refurbished hall table and made a second sticky date cake. None of these were on the list of important things to do.


(I'm secretly loving this enforced domesticity with the cosy sounds of sparrows in the garden and the hum of the central heating inside. The postman shall be along shortly on his motorbike and the sun will shift its warmth from one side to the other of the house. I'll boil the kettle again and set out plates of vegemite on SAO biscuits once the children wake from their morning slumber. Such is the gentle rhythm to our days.)

Monday, 16 May 2011

Novels

To A Lady Who Said It Was Sinful to Read Novels

Christian Milne  1773–1816

To love these books, and harmless tea,
Has always been my foible,
Yet will I ne’er forgetful be
To read my Psalms and Bible.

Travels I like, and history too,
Or entertaining fiction;
Novels and plays I’d have a few,
If sense and proper diction.


I love a natural harmless song,
But I cannot sing like Handel;
Deprived of such resource, the tongue
Is sure employed — in scandal.

***



Well, the youngest and first to fall ill has gone back to school today but now the other two are in the infirmary with fevers. So I am still on Personal and Carers Leave three days running. This has enabled me to catch up on washing and ironing, rake leaves, clean the refrigerator, cook leftovers and indulge in a bit of reading. Things I normally put off.

Novel reading is also an excellent invalid pastime. Charly is working her way through the Harry Potter series, while Ro-Ro and I are reading the Lemony Snicket 13-part journey through a Series of Unfortunate Events and Wanna is re-reading the Princess Poppy series and her beloved Pearlie books. Our imaginations are healthily engrossed in magical fantasy worlds while our fragile bodies recover.

Books are indeed the sugar to sweeten the medicine and the greatest cure for misery.

Sunday, 15 May 2011

Infant Sorrow
~ William Blake
My mother groan'd! my father wept.
Into the dangerous world I leapt:
Helpless, naked, piping loud,
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.
Struggling in my father's hands,
Striving against my swaddling bands,
Bound and weary, I thought best
To sulk upon my mother's breast.

Signs of a Long Winter

Crochet
~ Jan Mordenski

Even after darkness closed her eyes 

my mother could crochet. 

Her hands would walk the rows of wool 

turning, bending, to a woollen music.
The dye lots were registered in memory: 

appleskin, chocolate, porcelain pan, 

the stitches remembered like faded rhymes: 

pineapple, sunflower, window pane, shell.
Tied to our lives those past years 

by merely a soft colored yarn, 

she’d sit for hours, her dark lips 

moving as if reciting prayers, 

coaching the sighted hands.

***

One child home with a cough last Friday. A trying weekend of fevers and general malaise.  Two children home with coughs today.  Both padding around in flannalette and stretch knit cotton for comfort and snuggling under crotchetted rugs watching Play School (which has ageless appeal and is especially soothing when you are sick).

We've had a weekend of administering Ease-a-Cold Kids chewable orange zing burstlets, Panadol and Nurofen -- none of which they like the taste of, and all of which need to be administered with the promise of a jelly baby afterwards -- and applying greasy Vicks chest rub, disposing of an avalanche of tissues and keeping energy levels up with seasonable mandarins and bland invalid food. 

Meantime, I'm still having problems loading photos onto the computer which is extremely dislocating for a blogger who likes to rely on her own images.  Not that I've had time to take photos of late either in between playing nurse and catching up on the backlog of work at my paid employment ... on those odd days I turn up.  

This is showing signs of being a loooong Winter.

Monday, 2 May 2011

Noiseless Patient Spider (with cough)

A Noiseless Patient Spider
~ Walt Whitman, from Leaves of Grass, 1867.

A noiseless patient spider,
I marked where on a promontory it stood isolated,
Marked how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launched forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be formed, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

***

Well, we survived the school holidays at home.  The rubbish skip is full of garden waste, a few old pieces of furniture have been sanded back and one side table and stool have been half-heartedly painted Dulux Magnolia to match the walls. I can't bring myself to distress them in order to achieve a 'shabby chic' look and I'm not sure what to do about the rest.  I'm uncertain about following photo tutorials and the briefest of blogger instructions about the use of diluted French Grey paint, walnut stains, polyurethane, sealers and Danish Oil.  How do they know which to choose and what effect will work best?  Ah well, I'll go by trial and error, I s'ppose.  Some other time though.  I've been tentatively rooting about in the Strong Silent One's shed and it's in a diabolical state. I can't find a thing I need (like fine-grade sandpaper for example) but there is no shortage of the most extraordinary pieces of hardware, tools and tins of dangerous-looking fluids and pastes.

I'm also staring at old dining chairs which need recovering and am resisting the temptation to attempt amateur upholstery.  There are some very clever people in Canberra who could do it more professionally than I, armed as I am with only with the old fabric as a pattern and no experience with a staple gun at all.  It would surely end in tears if I tried.  We moved our sticks of furniture around over the Easter break and dragged the hired digital piano upstairs again so lessons could be better supervised. We are still procrasinating over a decision about buying a piano for the children to learn on.  But the more alarming development was that I seriously considered buying a cowhide rug to put in the sitting room where a piano might reside.  Apparently PROIN leathers in the US is the place to go via Ebay and with the Aussie dollar rising high against the greenback, I was tempted until good sense prevailed.  The children were terrified at the prospect of a dead cow on the floor, and some of the hides were a tad confronting, legs and all.  It would have been a brave decorating decision.

While the children have gone back to school for Term Two, I've been at home these past few days with laryngitis and bronchitis curled up watching Pride and Predjudice and Mansfield Park, like a noiseless patient spider.  I recently purchased the DVDs of Persuasian and Sense and Sensibility from a heavily tatoo-ed salesman at JB Hi-Fi which made us both smile.  An early Mothers' Day gift to myself.   Bring on Sunday.

Illustration: IM Lowry, Flickr