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A great big thank you to the universe, a great big thank you to everyone who called this morning, and a great big thank you to you, because the love and support you all sent in our direction last night … Continue reading
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As I begin to resign myself to the move back to Australia, the welfare of my beloved Girls remains my major concern. A very kind man has asked for photographs, so he can show them off to of his animal-loving … Continue reading
While I to work on our Sri Lankan feast, I wanted to show you what happened at the Manel bowl this morning.
Animals – you gotta love ‘em.
After their breakfast this morning I took The Girls for their walk down the lane to do their thing, and exercise their olfactory senses, at least. Their delight was manifest in every squirming fibre of their being and we were enjoying a companionable time together, when I heard the strangulated vowels of an unhappy cat.
There was Princess Podi, standing at the open gate, yawling as though we’d taken off for Outer Mongolia. Even The Girls looked up, momentarily, from their ecstatic snuffling. I called and spoke to her, of course, and she came bounding down the lane after us, but stopped at the letterbox, four feet drawn together at attention, body arched in a bow, and began voweling again. No amount of coaxing her to join us on our walk would convince her to venture beyond the letterbox, but as long as she could see us, and hear my voice, she did subside a little, sitting within her tail, at the foot of the tree, shielded from view by said letterbox.
Apparently she was unhappy about running into the neighbour’s cow, grazing on the bright monsoon-fed grass growing on the side of the road.
The girl herself, displacing the bills on my desk
You would be forgiven for thinking things were on the up and up here since my Six Sixes on a Friday meltdown back at the beginning of May. And indeed they are.
And what seemed like the last straw at the time:
I won’t show you a photograph of the mould hanging off the steering wheel like moss in the enchanted forest – gross! But look at what’s happening at the Gene Pool today:
Christine’s post in response to Jake’s challenge this week started me thinking about pets, and my relationship with them. I’ve been thinking about it all afternoon, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I would be unable to live anywhere that would force me to forego the pleasure, and companionship, of a pet. Throughout my life – wanderlust notwithstanding – they have been the constant. Further, while I may enjoy my own company and love to be alone, there’s a predicate to that assertion of independence: with my animal beside me, or waiting for me when I come home. Let me introduce you to the animals in my life, and perhaps then you’ll understand how it is that I have come to these conclusions.
Ruggles was only six weeks to my toddler status when we first met. For a while I was bigger than him, a fact, which I’m sure, I exploited mercilessly, in the manner of older siblings. You will understand his satisfaction then when the unfortunate Rosemary arrived one Christmas to take his place at dress-ups, and in the pram. Good naturally (or was it because he was permanently on duty?) he would escort us as I sallied forth from our Willow Tree House by the dam to take the air, wheeling that battered perambulator up and down the dusty driveway, as far as the cattle ramp, down by the road. He was my playmate, my first friend. He was the first being on whom I consciously lavished love. (Of course I loved my parents, and showered them with hugs and kisses whenever cheeks were proffered for that purpose, but parents lavish love on their children, not the other way around, during those years of self-absorption.)
Almost 20 years later, returning to Canada to set up house after a year in a van in Europe, a little grey striped tabby singled me out at the ‘pound’ to be followed, miraculously, by her matching number in solid colours, an unwanted bundle of joy from a neighbour’s litter. Why was it that, even in Toronto the Clean, it wasn’t mandatory to have cats (and dogs) de-sexed in those days? Thea, the tabby, was an aerialist, routinely climbing up and down shingled or brick walls, leaping from roof to roof, from our third floor attic flat. Gaia, as you can imagine, was more rooted to the hearth. It was R’s first experience of pet-fatherhood, and those two girls were shameless; they quickly turned him into their slave. Luckily they did the same to his sister, whose house they invaded when we returned to Australia in 1983.
Amber and her friend (and eventual adoptive brother) Red ruled our lives in Sydney, going to live with their father after the divorce. Like many childless couples, we had the romantic notion of ‘letting her have a litter’, which she did, insisting on the tent under the sheets as her birthing room. A little lilac girl was driven all the way up to Queensland to brighten the lives of her grandparents, but that didn’t turn out well. Never fear, several years later my little sister Nangi and I came home to look after them. Ma was a terrible snob, and was heard telling that understanding animal that she wasn’t nearly beautiful enough to win her over. But Ma hadn’t counted on the fortitude of that very Buddhist cat – the more the old lady turned away in disdain, the more comfort that little moggie gave in return.
And you know the Misses Kotte: Maggie, Mischief and Podi the cat.
The evening storm will arrive, like clockwork, turning off the light of the sun right on time. The clouds have been building all afternoon, the air more and more oppressive until just to breathe brings a fresh layer of condensation to the skin. Under the fan, still, not thinking about the discomfort, not daring to anticipate the actual time of release, and then, wham!
The great clash of a timpani, hollow, vibrates through the air, through our bodies, like a whisper down the spine. An instant’s silence, a quick inhalation of surprise. A terrific gust of cold, blessed, cold air, before the lone drum becomes the demented drumming of Ravana’s entire army on the roof . I can’t see the lightning, it must be overhead. The sound of the Niagara falling over my head is almost obliterated by the crashing cascades erupting from the gutters, overflowing in long rills in its haste to continue flying earthward. The thunder now a bronchial tama tama, tama tama, then another Versuvian eruption. The rain so dense I can’t see through its veil to the coconut tree at the end of the lawn. Lakes forming in the courtyards, the air full of rain, swirling indoors. Tama tama, tama tama, tama tama, crash, cannon fire, incessant Zeusian cacophony.
It’s begun to unsettle the usually phlegmatic Miss, stalking on stiff legs in an aimless circle back to her place over my feet. Maggie has her tail between her legs, her ears plastered to the sides of her face. Podi slinks away – to the dark safety of the linen cupboard, if she can prise the door open, otherwise under my bed – it’s the lowest, most den like.
It’s moving away. No. False alarm. The thunder is rolling back towards us from the other side of the house. Lighter now, more tenor in its timbre, it’s easier to hear now above the renewed assault on the roof.
The air is full of water. A halo around the light under the courtyard eaves.
As it moves away at last, darkness becomes late afternoon again, the cold air travels off with the storm. Podi emerges from the bedroom, tail at half mast, stalking to one of her thrones, feigning nonchalance, belied by a frenzy of cleaning, cleaning. The Girls venture onto the balcony to smell the smells brought down from the clouds.
The sky becomes a study in greens, greys, purples, charcoal laced with yellows toward the west, like old bruising. So still. Quiet. Already the temperature has risen a degree. The lake in the bamboo courtyard still a good three inches deep, almost lapping at the living room doors.
The bird’s are back, calling, checking with each other, from tree to tree. The occasional flash of lightning, a muttering rumble follows, other roofs still dripping, though mine now dry - gutters cleared this morning.
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After last week, when it seemed almost every other file had a photograph, and a memory, appropriate to our “Through” challenge, I thought it was likely that I might find it more difficult to satisfy the criteria in future. Indeed, … Continue reading
Arranged in a Row - The Noses Have It
Ten small images arranged in two rows
In Buderim I arranged the images into two columns
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An arranged corner beside the stairs where I always like to arrange some flowers to bring out the colour in the ten small images arranged in two rows.
A couple of recent posts by other WordPress bloggers got me thinking of the past – my past, that is. One (Manipal) comprised a black and white photograph which might have been drawn directly from the pages of ‘past as an idyll’; the other, a little getting of wisdom from a young woman who calls herself sued51 recalling a couple of things she ‘had to endure’ because of financial circumstances as a child. Inspiration for a quick Saturday Blog, I thought.
The more I remembered, and wrote, the more foreign my (way back in the) past life seemed to become. It wasn’t interesting to me in a Norman Rockwell, or John Howard white-picket-fence-type of nostalgia to drag the past into the present, but that it seemed to now belong to a discrete place in time, with a specific culture, and sometimes, customs and traditions. It was interesting, too, to feel that somehow my story was becoming a little less personal – more biographical than autobiographical – and that this slight disengagement with the self allowed my life, for the first time, to become integrated into the corresponding time in my parents’ lives, and beyond.
Examining some of my memories in this light has taken up most of the day, and in truth has been a little disconcerting – the monster that is ego being the most obvious culprit, but also the sadness that the distance in time precludes my saying sorry to people who are long gone from our world.
Many of you will have memories like this. I wonder where you’ll go, if you delve deep and try to flesh them out with some of the details of your bygone past?
With Ruggie, and the doll Rosemary, who suffered a terminal injury ‘down there’ and couldn’t be fixed, even at the Dolls Hospital at the Strand Arcade, in Sydney.
I have an emotional (as opposed to literal) memory of Ruggie coming into my life – a squirming bundle of black, all muscle and wagging tail. After the untouchability of Tiger – the ginger Tom who refused to go with the Masons when they sold the farm to Papa, and survived being caught in a rabbit trap, to continue hunting on three and a half legs – he was the cuddliest most wondrous tactile being I could ever have dreamed of. It was I who called him Ruggles, all over me like a rug, I suspect, but I can’t remember that.
I know I was small when he came. I can remember Ma tucking me up one night – it was after I’d graduated to a proper bed, complaining that the dog was almost as big as me now, there wasn’t enough room for the other cuddlies – it would have to be the dog, or the pink elephant and the other toys. All were discarded, never to be treasured again. I had Ruggie, who could ask for more?
I can remember sitting on a big, overstuffed pillow from the veranda, which Papa would tie to the handle bars of the rotary hoe (precursor to the little grey Massey Ferguson tractor), me perched there between his arms as he trudged steadily up and down the rows of grapes, ploughing his perfectly straight furrows, me chirping away merrily (I was chatty in those days) and the puppy Ruggie leaping around us, wanting to forage, and wanting to be part of this noisy conversation too.
Ma told how she never worried about me wandering around the farm “with all that water” (the dam and our sometimes flowing irrigation channels) because I always had Ruggie to look after me. And apparently he bore out her faith in him one day, tearing into the house, barking his head off till she followed him to the water wheel where she found me, propped up against the side of he channel, wet from head to foot, saved, she swears, by my huge black guardian. I can’t remember that.
I spent a lot of time at the water wheel, and around the sluice gates at our channel junction. There were myriad creatures to discover in and around this watery word. I remember the frogs, the loveliest green/yellow/black colours (which somehow escaped, every time I caught them and Papa made a Frog House for them); and slimy leeches, as big as a cigarette; dark-chocolate crickets; tiny black water snails, with their perfect conical shells; and, if you were very quiet, very still, a dark, river-green yabbie would venture from his hole to feed on creatures I couldn’t see amongst the reeds. I’m not sure what Ruggie liked best about being at the channel – probably just being wet, he was a lab after all.
Later, after Ruggie died, when I was perhaps nine, nearly ten, I learned to ride the water wheel. At first I was content just to keep my balance: stepping over the blades as the wheel rotated with the flow, measuring the water released into our farm’s many little channels. Ultimately, the game was to dance on the flashing black blades, forcing the wheel to drive more and more water down toward the thirsty trees. Ruggie would have hated it, prancing and barking around on the bank, pleading with his eyes for me to play some other game in which he too could participate. I wonder if I’d have obeyed? By that time I would definitely have been bigger than him, and it was so much fun – and yes, dangerous.
Ultimately, something did stop the game: I was seen. I don’t know by whom. Thrashed, I was, by the disappointment in Papa’s eyes, as he explained that my game had upset the quota system by which every farmer got his share of water released into the channels; now he knew why there had been so much trouble. How ashamed he must have been. Thrashed too, by Ma’s tongue, as she played out her fears at the top of her voice. Oh, the responsibility of being a child, keeping oneself safe so as not to upset the mother.
So Papa built me a trapeze, suspended from a protruding willow branch, swinging way out over the dam. I was never keen on the game of letting go, at the highest point of the swing’s trajectory, and bombing into the murky waters of the dam. No, there were unfathomable mysterious depths of sludge down there, hiding places for who knows what. So by the time I met Jilly (my first real human friend) it was all flying angels and other acrobatic tricks. I wanted to run away with the circus, if it would ever come back to town.
The winter of 1956 was wet. For a child accustomed to the occasional rainy day associated with twelve and a half inches of rain a year, it seemed to rain all the time, that winter. One day, stuck on the verandah, bored and feeling sorry for myself, I looked out into the garden to see Ruggie – going berserk, it seemed. Transfixed in horror I watched as he ran, obsessively, round and around the tree in the centre of the lawn, making a terrible, braying noise. Papa was out, he had the car. By the time he arrived my darling friend lay panting and frothing in my arms, beyond help except the mercy of the Vet’s needle.
Years later, our neighbour admitted that he had set a poison bait for him, saying he was the ringleader of a pack of dogs which terrorised his sheep. Until the day she died, Ma would, I’m sure, have continued to deny his culpability, me too. But, on reflection, he did go to the bait place, didn’t he? And for hours every day I abandoned him – away at school. He wasn’t a dog who liked to sit still. It kills me to say so, but Mr. McCann was probably right, and we never said we were sorry for the mayhem Ruggie must have created among this man’s sheep.
