An inhalation (also a postcard)
Helen Garner is famous for writing postcards. Also, Annie Lamott told me years and years ago1, that she keeps a one inch picture frame on her desk, and when the words won’t come, she picks it up and imagines writing just what she can see in it, one small thing.
All day it has rained. Beautiful gentle rain. Perhaps not quite as much as we hoped, but in the north of the state they’ve had good falls and here, well every tree is breathing deeply, sucking in the rich mix of minerals which only falls from the sky. The silver birches have lost their leaves. The fruit trees are ragged. But the oaks and the poplars are starting to light candles, the gold in their canopies the clearest signal to the shortening days. Above me, birds flashing silver through the tightened air. They are small(ish), grey, their tail a sharp triangle, with a slash of underwhite. I count twenty, thirty, Dusky woodswallow, that most ordinary of birds.
But back to my postcard: the Boss is out of action with a long delayed knee replacement and I am his inadequate replacement. This would be daunting, but when we realised we would be feeding sheep, J delayed his op (again) until we could time it so C could be home on university holidays. J goes into hospital on Tuesday, I pick C up from the airport on Thursday. He was quite tired (from extracurricular activities), but he is also 21. Early Good Friday the two of us were out feeding sheep. Later, I am picking up J from hospital. C is fixing fences. He’s checking waterholes. I am making mistakes. I am doling out the drugs. I am smoothing sheets. I am bringing cold packs. I am cooking. I am washing. I am saying it’s all under control.
It’s not.
The beauty of a postcard is it’s just a snippet from a day. A little moment.
So what can I give you? Out feeding, my son and I sit in the tractor and look at birds. We watch the robins, the fire of their bellies impossible against the blonde and grey of a dry autumn. We watch an eagle swooped by a half a dozen crows. We watch wallabies follow the feed trailer, skinny and desperate. We check the weather forecast (again). We’re on the cusp of change, sitting in uncertainty. It rumbles underneath us.
At the end of every day I feed the very old thoroughbred mare. I walk down to her paddock and clouds bank to the east. The light falls and is caught on the tails of the woodswallows. No longer ordinary, they are a glory. They are an inhalation. What is ahead falls away, what has been shrinks in importance, and I stand still, open my mouth and let the light that bounces from their tails fall onto my tongue.
MM
Reading etc
I picked up Alice Oswald’s poetry collection Falling Awake. I bought it for the title and because when I opened it, there is a poem that drips down the pages in celebration of dawn. Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional is colouring my dreams with her evocation of the Monaro and (quite frankly) it feels like reading a long held fantasy about what it would be like if you could just drop your life off and become a hermit. I downloaded David Goodwin’s memoir Servo as an audiobook. It’s about his years working as a service station attendant in Melbourne’s outer suburbs. It’s great - like being able to people watch as I potter about my day without actually having to see any people. Here’s DG in the Guardian to give you a taste. I watched Maggie Smith, Laura Linney and Kathy Bates in The Miracle Club and I can’t remember what streaming service it was on, but it was a perfect Sunday night movie. On the substack front. I love Andie from Blue Milk, and her latest I waited for summer to end, is everything I want in a newsletter - tiny snippets of her month woven around her curious, intelligent navigation of the world. Then I fell down a Vanessa Bell rabbit hole (I’m still down here) following Sarah McColl in her brilliant Lost Art (another newsletter that is always so deeply thoughtful and takes me somewhere new). Finally, Susan Lever reviews Charmian Clift’s The End of the Morning (edited by Nadia Wheatley). It’s lovely review and has me wanting to read the essays. Also, I found out that Charmian Clift is Gina Chick’s (of Alone fame) grandmother. What a pedigree.
Right. Stopping now. The day awaits.
I mean, she didn’t just tell me, she told everyone who reads her Bird By Bird and feels that perhaps they could figure out how to live one more day and write one more thing.