Calling all wordsmiths!

And now for something completely different...

I wrote a very cryptic short story recently; that is, a short story in which are embedded the clues to a cryptic crossword. If you're a bit of a wordsmith and want to read some fine Australian writing besides, then rush to your local independent bookstore, buy a copy of the current Meanjin, flip to the back, find the crossword grid, sharpen your pencil and, um, blacken the centre square in the bottom and penultimate rows (a typesetting error, I am told) – then solve the puzzle! If you're a bit strapped for cash or live overseas, visit the Meanjin blog Spike, which has reproduced the crossword. Print it out, delete the words 'seventy years', find your favourite pen and away you go...

Today Spike features not only my puzzle, but an interview with the fiendish David Astle, aka DA who sets the cryptic crossword in the Saturday Age. To be linked with the master – such delight!

The answers to my crossword will be posted on Spike on 1 October.

Notes on a Table

 

A friend sent me this piece today, which I wrote way back in 2000 when I was living in a group house - well before kids had entered the picture. I had forgotten about it, but, reading through, it seems nothing much has changed. So I've blown off the dust and present it here, a message from the archives.

***

Our house has the happy combination of a large dining room opening off the kitchen and a pleasant dining room table.

The dining room is the brain of the household. It contains the telephone, the household diary, the newspapers, and the message pad. Most conversations take place in the dining room, and most decisions are made within the walls.

But the wooden table is our household's heart. Like all good hearts, it has been scratched, scorched and scarred by careless users, but is still large and serviceable. It stands in the centre of the dining room. As one housemate moves around the kitchen, another sits at the table and reads or puzzles or doodles. Conversations float between the rooms.

The table is the setting for glorious Saturday breakfasts. Housemates and guests come together to feast. We load the table with croissants and rolls, fruit and cereal, butter and jam. Sections of the newspaper litter the floor. By coffee time we have solved the general knowledge crossword and we can start to unravel the cryptic. Conversations fly as we catch up and gossip and tell stories. Our household is sanctified by our Saturday morning breakfasts.

We have held countless dinners around it. Candles light the room, red wine flows, conversation bounds along. One of us jumps up to consult a dictionary; another wanders to the kitchen and, still talking, brews coffee or reaches into the oven for a pudding.

I have a Scrabble friend who lives in Hobart. When he is in town we play fierce matches. The table stands placidly through the squalls.

Flowers adorn it; papers litter it; magazines clutter it. A cat sleeps under it and is outraged when unsuspecting visitors inadvertently kick her.

In the late afternoon the sun slants across its surface. We drink endless cups of tea and chat about cats and community, and we place our hands where the wood glows with warmth. Our heads propped on our hands, we lament over lost loves. We tell ridiculous stories and laughter bubbles up from deep within. The table is steeped in these moments, and every meal taken at it, every game played on it, every conversation held over it is infused with traces of this joy.

I have lived in houses with eating areas far from the kitchen; houses where the dining rooms are dark and poky; and a house with a fiendish table whose legs tripped the unwary. Never again. I have been converted. My church is a well-used kitchen, and a large and serviceable table.

Originally published in Patmos, 2003.

The scent of violets

The daffodils are blooming; the scent of violets drifts through the air. Late winter, my favourite time, when everything is full of promise. I've planted a yellow gage to replace the ancient rotting plum; I've put in grape vines to clamber up a pergola and shade the back of the house. Tiny buds are forming, once dormant roots are sending out exploratory shoots, the soil is moist and crumbly, there is a hint of warmth in the air. The almond has finished blossoming – as always, impossibly early – and is covered by soft new growth.

This year I long for shady vines and the silhouette of fig leaves against a red brick wall. I'll look for pink peach blossom and sweet ripe fruit; for the lemon tree to rally and grow; for the creepers to haul themselves up and cover fences with flower and leaf. The ruby chard is thickening, the rosemary is covered with soft shoots, and I sense possibility.

Like a sower with seed, I am casting round handfuls of rich manure and watering it in. I am clipping back scrawny growth so new shoots can grow. I am plotting, planning, piecing together a dreamy little landscape: a place of refuge, of gentleness, of love. You will know it by its lush growth and tangled vines; its fruits exploding with juice; its tantalising scents floating through the air and teasing at your nostrils; its flirty little flowers just around the path, bobbing in and out of sight.

At least, that's what I tell myself. Really, it's a mess. Weeds are knee-high; the pear's full of codlin moth; and a child stepped on my Correa and snapped it near the base. For all my plans we'll never get round to them – every weekend is a whirlwind of birthday parties and veggie shopping and piano lessons and minor illnesses and guests and cooking and laundry. Sure, I'll do what I can. I'll shut my eyes to the weeds, to the gaps left by smashed plants, to the beds that need restoration. I'll try to forget that in six months' time, the garden will be whipped by the harsh north wind and baked by the sun. I'll pretend I never cursed the day my ancestors left rainy Cornwall – and that I won't curse all those jobs that I don't do this spring.

And yet, and yet. Despite all this, and against all reason, I hold fast to my vision of being surrounded by growth, of being enfolded by a garden, of sitting and sharing a drink in the evening while friends talk and children play. The voice of despondency mutters away, but I will look for the hope which is drifting past, as elusive and energizing as the scent of violets. And because of that hope, that vision of loveliness, I will work, and watch, and wait.

Small healings

JS Bach's Cello Suites.
Sipping beer, putting up my feet.
Starting to write. Learning to knit.
Taking time to stop and sit
on sunny step with tea and friend.
Managing to tend
the garden. Unexpected fun.
The gentle light of winter sun.
The warmth of it upon my hair.
The hug of grandpa's velvet chair.
Watching laundry dance and flap.
Singing loud. Women's chat.
Emptying the well of tears.
Ten years.

The night we all got parking fines

The week before last, my grandfather died. It's just eight weeks since my grandmother passed away, and in a great creaking emptiness I've been to Perth and back twice now, carting home old photos, some crockery, and my grandmother's tablecloth.

Yet grief has a way of opening up old wounds, and so I find myself reliving time and again nothing to do with them but instead a day ten years ago come September, a day when the hospital called and told me to hurry over there and I called my sister and while I waited for her to pick me up I couldn't decide what to wear so I put on awful clothes that felt all wrong and made coffees for the car and called my lecturer and left a sobbing message on his machine; then my sister and I drove to the ends of the earth, which was what my father always called Bell Street, and plunged down that old familiar hill to the Austin Hospital and parked the car and went inside and met our father and my fiancé and sat with my mother until she died.

I did so much wrong that day.

I felt puffed up and important, as I knew something Big was happening, and I hated myself for feeling like that, for not being able to rid myself of self-conscious awareness. I was impatient, even bored, as we sat for hours listening to each ragged breath, to the dreadful prolonged silence that followed each one and wondering if this, or this, or this would be her last.

I was so exhausted from her years of illness that I couldn't wait for it to be over. I wished the end would hurry, even that it had come months earlier before quadriplegia, blindness, hearing loss and everything else had set in. And I wondered what sort of person I was, that I was impatient for my mother to die.

As the day wore on, nurses she knew well came in to say goodbye and I found myself resenting that even now she made time for them just as she had always made time for everybody so often at the expense of her children; and I felt so petty. As usual, she stage managed us; as usual, it nettled me and I rolled my eyes at my sister.

She asked me to remove the oxygen mask. I unhitched her; but I was scared not to have any back up, so I left the hose dangling loose and the sound of oxygen hissed through the open valve for hours. All I needed to do to stop the hissing was to turn the tap off at the wall; but I didn't. Near the end her drip ran out, but she didn't want any more intervention so we left her hooked up and ignored the machine which beeped every few seconds to tell us it was empty. So there we sat, in a cold ugly hissing beeping room, feeling awkward and waiting.

Deep in the night, she finally died. We sat for a while longer. Then I touched her cooling face and said goodbye. I wanted to stay but I didn't know why or what for and the doctor came in to certify her death and everyone else wanted to leave so I left too. I still feel guilty for leaving her body at the hospital, for not being able to take her home and look after her in death. It's the worst betrayal I ever did. The next time I saw her she was faked up before the funeral. Then the coffin was closed, and we held the funeral; the coffin was wheeled away, and I never saw it, or her, again.

I don't know where the body went; but years later I found out that a box of ashes was kept by the funeral parlour, then placed in a memorial wall. We held no ceremony then; I don't even know when it happened. I still haven't seen the wall, and don't know which niche is hers. There is no plaque. In her death as in her life, we did so much wrong.

But what did I expect? We are ordinary people, after all. And the other thing I remember is that we might have been in a sterile room at a hospital that I hated; we might have been clumsy with exhaustion and tongue-tied by grief; we might have failed to turn off the oxygen properly or talk about the meaning of life or stroke her arm to the end, but for all our frailty, we were not alone. The room was overflowing, positively exploding with passionate love; it was radiant in there. Love filled the room like a pulsing sun that pushed at the walls and shot flames under the door into the corridor; we spent that long last day in a fierce and fiery circle of care. And we did say goodbye, and laugh at her jokes, and talk about important things. She died messy and farewelled, with laughter and tears; and, really, that is enough.

At three in the morning we went outside, took the parking fines off the windscreens, and drove in miniature procession through the night back to my father's house where he strode around gathering up the dried flower arrangements which he had always hated, and threw them out. Then he put the kettle on to boil. While it was heating, he tossed her pretty little sugar bowl into the back of a cupboard, pulled out his big bachelor's bowl from some dark recess, filled it and said, "Well, she won't complain. She's dead." We started laughing at the flowers and the sugar bowl, and the awful ridiculousness of it all. We laughed and laughed until our sides were sore; then one by one laughter turned to tears and we sobbed as if our hearts would break.

And in the days that followed, they did.

My grandmother’s necklace

 

My father's mother had a pearl necklace. Her husband, my grandfather, bought her a single pearl each year that they were married; by the time she died, it was a long string.

My husband and I don't do that sort of thing.

But this morning as I was gazing out the window thinking about the necklace, a light breeze shivered across the damp garden and a silver pearl, lying in the cup of a nasturtium leaf, tipped around and around, rolling like mercury. There was a sudden puff; it teetered over the lip of the leaf and splashed onto the ground, rebounding in a hundred tiny droplets and down again.

Did I think of the necklace and see the pearl? Or did I see the pearl, and think of the necklace?

Either way, how wealthy I am! As long as there are nasturtiums in my garden, I have as many pearls as drops of rain will bead upon a leaf.

A sheepish PS

Sometimes I am so obtuse that it's a wonder I have elbows.

My grandmother has just died and my grandfather is in palliative care; it's no wonder I'm not feeling motivated. Instead of going to the gym I've been cooking and thinking about old stories, such as the time my grandfather cored apples with an electric drill; the time my grandmother discovered canned beetroot and didn't let on; and of course, lots of meals at their house over the years.

For these and other reflections, click on the latest posts on my food blog.