The swans are singing. I leave the door open and the wind carries their song across the water and into my room. Before I went to bed I’d walked the dogs along the edge of the bay. We’d followed the path and the only light is the stars and the green hum on the horizon of the southern lights. School holidays have finished and the bay is quiet again. The swans, who have spent the summer on the far shore, are back in front of the shack. There is maybe a hundred or more and in the dark they sound like an orchestra. As we walk along the shore they are aware of us, that is the dogs and me. I hear a deeper sound, an alarm, but they don’t startle, instead they talk, a percussion, the beat to me a foreign language.
I’m at the shack because I have have HAVE to make some miles on the editing of my manuscript that you are all looking forward to reading. It’s here, sitting on my computer, but finding the time and the urgency to get it done is a struggle and I’d decided I needed to remove myself from all the distractions of home. My time away has coincided with my friend visiting. I have known this friend for the longest time. Her arrival has been a delight. She’s on long service leave from a teaching job that has siphoned off a portion of her soul. She’s here with another burnt out teacher. When they were planning their trip to Tasmania they’d messaged and asked if they should book into the famous Bay of Fires walk. Absolutely not, I said. Come up to the shack and you will walk and I will work. And this is what we have done. I’ve delivered them to starting points of walks or picked them up from their finishing points. It’s been so strange not to do the walks with them, but they are long and my back is not yet strong enough. So they pack their lunch and disappear to explore. I chip away on the edit, transcribe hours of doctors letters and write an essay about writing a newsletter. Every evening we light the fire and cook dinner. There’s an intimacy to old friendships, a shared life that’s sits quietly behind the busyness of whatever the present may be. It’s another sort of language.
*
There’s a poem I’ve been thinking about all week. It’s from Barbara Kingsolver’s How to Fly (in ten thousand easy lessons) and it’s called After. The poem describes the poet’s leg breaking and the slow months of mending. The moment of the leg breaking is like the fulcrum on a seesaw and the poet goes backwards and forwards between the place of before and after. It’s the last stanza that I copy into my notebook.
I say yes. I pretend my courage has tentacles
that still reach for the light as they did before, before
careless chance took its poke at me. Say yes, but feel
curling tight in my chest the anomene of after.
*
When our week is up I suggest my friends drive home via the little town of Derby. There’s a sauna on a lake I say, you should go.
We all go. How silly to have thought I wouldn’t have gone. The work of words can wait.
The lake is still. We strip off our clothes. My friends go straight into the sauna and I stand on the edge of the dark lake and then jump into the deep water.
This water is quiet, so different to the energy of the ocean and, at the moment, not terribly cold. I climb out and open the door of the sauna. It’s hot, so hot. My skin springs open, the sweat bleeds from me. The stove spits and the stones blister. It is a place of intimacy. We sit in the heat until it is too hot, then plunge into the lake. Over and over. We laugh at our age, at the skin that sags now. We embrace it! I’ve sat in other heat boxes. Swum in so many different bodies of water and known my body in those places. But this is a new more vulnerable body I now inhabit. When I jumped into the lake I said Yes and the word held me in the plunge.
At the end we take a few photos, knowing it will not catch a hint of the thing we have done, whatever is in our phones, will not be what our bodies felt.
*
Back home, the evening chorus is of frogs instead of swans. I feel lucky. My back has healed, my only mark is a small scar where a surgeon cut into me and pulled out a fingernail of disc that had settled on my nerve. That his precision, the technology, meant, three months on, I could leap into a lake. I also think that though the scar is small, my mind is caught on the fulcrum of the before and after. So I lie in bed and think again of the plunge I took today and how the embrace of water caught me in my fall.
MM
Reading
Not much. I have nearly finished Melissa Mannings Smokehouse, which I see won the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Fiction last week - so huzzah for her! I read this essay on loving someone with schizophrenia and honestly it’s one of the best things I’ve read on mental illness (it was via the splendid Jessica Stanley’s newsletter). I also read Fiona Wright’s review of Bernadette Brennan’s bio of Gillian Mears Leaping into Waterfalls. I know I have posted about this book before. But this review is extraordinarily good. So worth reading.
Listening
I have just started the utterly delightful Olive, Mabel and Me; life and adventures with two very good dogs. It is worth it for the soothing sound of Andrew Cotter’s Scottish burr alone.
Writing
I have a little piece out in Country Style this month on my own very good dog. I finished the essay on the curious experiment of writing this newsletter. You can read it here.
Thanks Maggie, I so agree with your words about old friendships and also our bodies over time, kind regards Trish
How beautiful; your words on friendship sang to me - that language of long-held connections. So glad to have stumbled upon your words. Thank you also for reminding me of Barbara Kingsolver!