It’s late summer, the last day of January. My world is rimmed in greens and framed by blue. It’s the sort of day where you can feel the earth swell, the sort of day where it’s impossible to remember why all the things written on my list are important, the sort of day where I must go to the beach and float pressed between sea and sky. And this, I have every intention of doing, but not only is it the last day of January, but it is the last week of our 19 year-old offsider being home. So though the perfection of the day presses I want to cook him dinner, wash his clothes and just be around before he leaves for the year. The beach will wait.
It’s cool in this old house, we need weeks of hot weather before the stone heats up, but out every window I can see all the growing things pushing out new shoots. Butterflies drift over the lawn. Swallows shoot beneath the shady eves and then later when I walk outside I see them lining the electricity wires that stretch from the house to the sheds. We have one ambitious pair raising another clutch, but mostly our swallow population are getting ready to go. The youngsters skim the cut grass between the house and the stable, their wings strengthening here in the shelter of all the big trees.
On Sunday night I’d pulled a bag of lamb shanks out of the freezer and now they are defrosted, ready for the stove, for despite the warm weather they are a favourite of C’s and not something he will be eating much of in North Queensland. I pick rosemary from beside the woodshed, pluck a bay leaf from the trees rioting in new growth by the aviary and then sear the shanks in olive oil and sea salt. Lest you think it idyllic, let me add that blow flies hurl themselves against the torn fly screen and then buzz drunkenly around the kitchen.
Dinner on, I push out the laundry door, the washing basket heaped with wet clothes, on my hip. A flash of bird passes, I pause and a pair of Silvereyes land in the old Cecille du Brunier rose. They are alarming as if there was a hawk. I look around, there is only me.
Silvereyes, Zosterops lateralis, tiny olive green birds with a blush of yellow and a distinctive white ring around their eye. Further up the coast from us, where the paddocks are braided with grapevines, they are not popular. But here I welcome them, with their bell-peeling chatter.
I shake C’s jeans out and peg them on the line, then a bright red work shirt, the cotton soft and worn and all the while the little silvereyes call tseep tseep. There’s a scuffling sound behind me, like a mouse or lizard caught. I turn, and there, in the laundry window, between the glass louvres and the wire, is a tiny bird. It must have flown in the open laundry door. I tell it I’m coming. I tell it not to panic.
Against the window I reach for the tiny bird. It’s so small I could crush it like a moth. I pull it gently from the wire, releasing the sliver of its nail. It beats in my hand, a presence without weight. It’s a baby, just out of the nest, its plumage not yet dark but its eye is bright and watchful. I take it outside and have this sudden urge not to let it go. It’s parents scold me and I loosen my fingers and it rises from my hands, lighter than the air, and flies to the shelter of the mulberry tree. Its parents follow and the tree is lit with sound.
*
Later I walk along the beach. There is a sea mist of shifting intensity. The sea is deeply blue and green, the small cresting waves shine suddenly brilliant when the sun breaks through. We have had a series of small but very intense storm cells out to sea. The sand is littered with seaweed and scattered through this up the long beach are the drowned bodies of young Fairy Prions Pachyptila turtur. I’ve never seen one so close (they are capable of hydroplaning for goodness sake) and I pick up the tiny body, marvel at the sharp shape of its wings, its grey legs with webbed feet for swimming are folded back, stiff in death. I wonder how it died. The sea is silent, benign. I walk into it and there’s not even the sting of cold.
*
As the day cools the three of us sit out on the veranda. The sandstone is warm and the evening kind. We are looking out onto green lawn and then beyond to green paddocks and beyond that to green hills. The sky has softened to the palest blue and the late summer light is golden. What did you learn today? C asks J and they are suddenly talking about fencing wire and the various grades of it. I let the wash of their conversation lap against me. I’m back holding that tiny silvereye, I’m plucking it from the wire, its legs like the runner on a cucumber vine, its body closer to air than earth.
Afterwards I’d gone to my small collection of bird books and looked them up. I learned that the Tasmanian Silvereye migrates nearly 2000km to the mainland each winter. That tiny bird. I learn they’ve been traced to the same place year after year. I also learn that some of them don’t go at all and wonder, what memory do they lack, what instinct do the ones who stay possess? Perhaps, when I see them here in the winter, when the trees are bare and the world is grey, I’ll salute them for a different sort of courage.
Our talk on the veranda turns to what the year holds. It’s as if we have all been marking time, growing fat in the goodness of the season, waiting for the summer to draw in. This is my second year of watching my youngest leave. It should be easier. But it’s not. He’d come home after a year away. A year learning to work in a team. A year several thousand kilometres from home. Now home chafes and even that, when you are nineteen, is good. Watching him, talking about fencing wire of all things, I feel him in the palm of my hand, the tiny weightless body of him when he was first born. I realise I’ll wake at 3am with a jolt and think of him and his sister and that it will take me to sunrise to open my hands and relinquish them all over.
MM
Reading
In 1899 at her family’s homestead near Encampment Wyoming, Lizzie Web Nicols was given a birthday present for her sixteenth birthday from her not yet husband. It was a Kodak camera and for the rest of her life she took photos. Her collection, of over twenty four thousand negatives, is now held at The University of Wyoming and provides an astonishing documentation of small town domestic life. There’s a catalogue and an essay and a small selection in The New Yorker and I can’t stop thinking about the photos. My friend sent me Melissa Manning’s Smokehouse. I have no idea why I have such resistance to reading books set in Tasmania because as soon as I pick them up I’m totally swept up. This one no exception. This essay, Confluence, is my favourite kind of writing - historical, lived, fragmentary, immediate. Honoree Fanonne Jeffers on Toni Morrison’s one short story Recitatif is wonderful. The story has been republished as a short stand alone book. This newsletter (thanks Z) by novelist Brandon Taylor makes me feel like a foreigner in the land of Online. His discussion on why Wordle is special is so smart, but perhaps because I’m not a digital native I did not relate. There is no way that I will ever have ‘a word’ I start with every day. I’m not playing to compete against all the other people out there. Instead I embrace the randomness and intimacy of letting a word drop into my head. If you don’t know what I’m talking about go here.
Listening
I spent a day last week cleaning the kitchen to Kate Morton’s The Lake House and can highly recommend if you need something to look forward to on a long drive/cleaning frenzy/insomnia. I also listened to Literary Frictions interview with Honoree Fanonne Jeffers about her extraordinary book The Love Songs of W.E.B Du Bois. I have picked this book up twice in the book shop and put it down because it’s 900 pages. But after listening to this conversation I know what I’m spending my book voucher on.
Writing
I’m (still) writing an essay about writing a newsletter. It’s not going well yet. Stay tuned.
I just love the way your writings make me feel normal Mags. Sending u hugs from the sisterhood of women who relate xx
Oh Maggie, this brought a tear to my eye. My eldest 20yr old daughter is leaving home for the first time on Monday and packing up her bedroom this week so the middle daughter can move into the big room for year 12. It's my first time experiencing this bittersweet moment and you've captured all the emotions in your amazing writing. Thank you for this, it's so comforting to know I'm not the only one going through this xx