Grandmothers and gardening

The grower of trees, the gardener, the man born to farming,
whose hands reach into the ground and sprout,
to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death
yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down
in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.
His thought passes along the row ends like a mole.
What miraculous seed has he swallowed
that the unending sentence of his love flows out of his mouth
like a vine clinging in the sunlight, and like water
descending in the dark?

~ Wendell Berry

Both of my grandmothers were gardeners. Tulla, my father's mother, lived in a granny flat attached to the house where my family lived for 15 years before my parents rustled up enough of a deposit to buy a house of their own.  Tulla was out there every single day from the day I was born, and years and years after we had moved, right up until the time she went into a nursing home in her late eighties.  I think Wendell Berry's words would have resonated in Tulla's soul.  She was a bitter old thing in many ways, and there was more than one occasion where I was bewildered by her bizarre suspicion even of members of her own family at times.  But her garden was her solace and her live, silent companion.  I would pay good money to have one more taste of one of her meals, cooked with the produce that came fresh from her own planting.

As far as I'm concerned we should have let Tulla stay at home and continue gardening until she dropped dead right there on the spot, and then bury her right in the middle of one of her garden beds that was full of worms and dark, rich compost.

When I was born my mother's mum, Grandma, lived in Boronia with Grandpa on a double block.  Their veggie garden was the most badass veggie garden I've ever seen.  That's my auntie, Dawn, on the left there in this photo, with her famous legs.  Grandma is in the middle.  And that's my mummy on the right, carrying me.

That veggie garden was rows and rows.  It was such a commonplace thing 40 years ago.  Everybody grew their own veggies.  I have heard it said that these days there is less than half a week's supply of food in our supermarkets.  The intervening years have been very strange, and now we find it's an act of resistance and a wake-up from an eerie slumber to indulge in the subversive and tiny act of growing some of your own food.

The fatigue that has encroached and retreated in various degrees for over more than a decade has lifted a little recently, and on Sunday I pulled some weeds and lay down some newspaper and mulch in the veggie patch in preparation for some seedling planting next weekend.  I think in hindsight I may have overdid it, as there was a tearful meltdown in there as well, but I don't know I've overdid it until I've overdone it.  It's like being premenstrual for six straight months ... except for the times when I'm feeling fine.  Bizarre.

I think I'm on the right track with the pyroluria/heavy metal detox treatment.  I guess the meltdowns are not surprising when you consider that my body is ridding itself of a toxic cocktail it's been harbouring against its will for decades of high copper, antimony, beryllium, barium, cadmium, thallium ~ things I barely know how to spell let alone understand how I accumulated.

Although the cadmium I know - that's the legacy of 20 years of smoking those stupid cigarettes.  And yet even it is fascinating to realise that the low zinc levels I have obviously suffered from for decades may have contributed at least in part to why it was that I began smoking cigarettes - the cadmium in the cigarettes is a compensation for the effects of low zinc, and provides a grounding feeling to compensate for the spaciness caused by high copper.  Who woulda thunk? 

When I'm not having meltdowns and feeling that horrible familiar vulnerability when the world just crashes in like a tsunami and my body crashes down and I just can't cope, I'm starting to feel good again.  The hellish paranoia that has fogged up my body like my own personal cloud is beginning to go and I will never be able to quite put into words just how glad I am about that :)

In the last 10 years I've noticed a greater desire to begin gardening more, and growing more of my own food, but it's been something I haven't been able to put into much effect.  The gardening bug seems to be one that hits people as they grow older, especially women.  It hasn't been able to hit me yet, though I invite its invasion.  It's hit my auntie though, Tulla's daughter.  I never knew her to have a green thumb before but now, in the past several years, her garden has become a flourishing beauty full of variety, and she a member of her local gardening club.

The propensity towards gardening as you get older I think is a deepening into an understanding of and connection to your roots, both literally and figuratively.  I invite the gardening bug invasion.

Familial Faux Pas

On Saturday night I sat next to my cousin's husband on the couch and we went through old photo albums. It was a really nice thing to do. I don't think he is the type of person given overly much to introspection. Indeed, he hadn't looked at his photos for years and so we went through book after book of photos of a younger him and his younger wife and their two kids as they grew.

For someone who had just carried his wife's body out of a church a few hours earlier along with his sons, he was holding up remarkably well. Denial and numbness are pretty effective at this stage of the game. To help it along, he nursed a straight scotch in his lap as he turned the pages, pointing out different people to the friend sitting next to him. A continually rotating round of people draped themselves over the back of the couch for a gaze too.

It was actually a really nice day, you know, apart from why we were there. It was good to catch up and it was good to reminisce. Losing a family member that quickly (I didn't even know she was ill until the week before) causes you to count your blessings, indeed. Us cousins did at the end of the night make tentative plans to meet up down in Melbourne in October. I like my cousins and we barely see each other any more. Surely it cannot be impossible for us to meet up at least a couple of times a year.

Andrew picked up a loose photo of his brother-in-law Grant (my cousin) with his ex-wife. He explained to the friend next to him who this couple was, and that they weren't together any more.

"I didn't like her anyway," I confided to Andrew, with a broad grin. After I said the words, the sinking realisation set in. Sort of in slow motion.

"That's okay, neither did I," said Grant, smiling at me from behind the couch where I hadn't see him. "That's why I divorced the bitch."

Oh, the shame, the shame :)

"It's alright," Grant laughed later on, as every time I looked at him my capillaries vomited forth 14 litres of blood into my cheeks. "You only said what everyone else was thinking."

Some things are better just thunk :)

Bedtime Stories

This is my mummy, Joy, reading a story to her great niece, Chelsea. Who reminds me so much of me when I was little. Screws her face up the same. Same hair. Same stubborn will :)

This makes me sort of clucky, looking at this. I stayed at Chelsea's mum & dad's place on Monday night. Chelse had three costume changes before Tuesday lunchtime, all centred around the colour pink :)

On Monday afternoon, Chelsea's mum Janine and me engaged in some bartering. I fixed up her computer for her and got the wireless router installed. She gave me a riding lesson. Good teacher, too. And a good horse, Norman. Stopped every time I got unbalanced. Which was, like, once every three seconds.

Janine told me to come back and stay for a fortnight and she'll have me trotting well by the end of it. Think that'll be an offer I'll be taking up :)

Parents and Kids and Birthdays

It's my dad's birthday today. My auntie is over visiting from South Australia and I headed over to my parents this evening to wish dad a happy birthday. It was good to catch up. My auntie bookmarked my blog to read, and I heard stories about what she would like to do to Andrew Denton, which was rather interesting :)

So it was my dad's birthday, and yet he paid for our takeaway dinner (Seven Stars in East Bentleigh. Do yourself a favour). I didn't get him a present either. I never do. He doesn't like to make a fuss. He was just pleased that I graced him with my presence.

Said presence left with more than she came with. Not my birthday, but I was the one to get some soap and lip balm as a gift from my parents' little holiday away down the coast a few weeks ago. How does that work? Do the parenting scales ever balance back the other way?

Actually, the real winner of the night was the dog. Lester took himself off into the spare room and began rustling around in there at one point of the night. Came out with a bag that was actually for him - containing a baker's dozen full of tennis balls my mum had retrieved for him from a fellow tennis-playing friend. That dog can sniff out a bag of balls from 100 paces. He proceeded, as is his delight, to rip up the bag and cover the dining room in a flurry of tennis balls.

He has this cute habit of putting his ball in his food bowl. Not sure what the deal is there, it's like a little security blanket for him while he eats. Lucky he had eaten most of his food because by the end of the night there were nine of the suckers in that one food bowl :)

Happy birthday ... to me :)

This kindergarten photo, age 4, is one of my favourite photos of myself ever. Can you guess which one is me? I was the same age Andrea's son Campbell just turned last Wednesday, and whose birthday we celebrated yesterday. I figure in a post where I am wishing myself a happy birthday, I may as well have a picture of myself as well :)

I have this picture sitting in my playroom. It is a reminder to myself that the same spirit of play I had then is still alive and well and willing and desperate to come out with a bit of coaxing. It has become more clarified to me over the past few weeks that the majority of the work I have been doing in art therapy this year is really just all about creating a place of safety within myself so I can do so. The past few weeks have reminded me about why my past requires me to do this. It's been such a massive year of growth for me. I'm excited about my future.

I love my family and friends and appreciate them even more the older I get. I have been reminded again lately that it is not a matter of luxury but of necessity to surround myself with people who are open to the two-way street of relationship, who energise me rather than drain me. Tomorrow I am meeting up (hopefully) with Andrea in the Dandenong Ranges after my art therapy session. I am going to my parents' tomorrow night, where I shall insist, with the barley rights that belong to the birthdayed, that we have Seven Stars chinese food for dinner. The night after I am getting together with my ex for some Mexican. Next weekend I plan to hijack a couple of friends so that we can go and see a band. I am grateful for all of those people.

The long and the short of it

I dreamt of my auntie and uncle the other night. They departed this mortal coil 10 and 12 years ago respectively but two nights ago there they were again. In my dream I offered to make us crepes with lemon juice and sugar. I went looking in the pantry but couldn't find any ingredients :(

I don't understand why some people leave when they do. It doesn't make any sense at all that a father would die three days before his only daughter's wedding. On the morning of her wedding, my darling cousin sat at the dining table of my parents, her eyes so red with crying that I can see them clearly in the photograph taken from 10 heartbreaking paces away. My auntie got to see her first grandchild, Alexander, before succumbing to the cancer that also took her husband two years prior. Neither of them got to see their second grandchild, Campbell, but my stubborn childlike hope is that one day they shall, that Andrea shall get to hold her parents in her arms again.

It feels so unfair that people should die in their early 60s. But then, death always seems unfair. Even my grandmother's, and yet she died three years later, on her 91st birthday. Took a look at the beautiful flower arrangement someone had sent her, said, "Oh, how lovely" (she was always an avid gardener), and promptly died. Very practical and efficient, in dying as well as living. My uncle fought his death all the way through. I saw him, yellow with jaundice, in the hospital and knew that the D word would not be spoken of out loud. He didn't want to go. My auntie, following on his heels, went quicker, without a whimper, but perhaps with rather greater curiosity about what she would find. But who knows what people are thinking about their own death?

It's been a windy, rainy kind of day today. I felt a cold or some other invisible monster threatening my body when I awoke, sluggish, at lunchtime. From then on it's never been out of first gear and so today I got around in pyjamas till 6pm, drinking green tea, neem tea, black tea. For my late breakfast at 1pm I cooked the dreamed-of crepes, ate them with lemon juice and sugar, in the same fashion and from the same recipe that I have done since I was 10 or 11 years old, making an afternoon tea for my mum and dad of a Sunday afternoon. This morning I used Grandma's white glazed ceramic bowl and ate each crepe as they came out of the pan, fresh off the press, standing up, in some sort of passover homage, but much more akin to a communion. A communion with unseen ancestors. I hope if such things occur that they somehow shared in my eating in their honour. Did they yearn to taste what I was tasting? Did the yellow of the lemons shine brighter for them now that they can't pick them up in their hands, run their fingers over the smooth bumpiness, smell the bitter richness? Perhaps so; or yet again, perhaps they are wondering at my enjoyment of the colour yellow when the yellow they now see makes the yellow I experience some kind of beige. Who knows? When Sting was on the television earlier singing Elizabethan songs with lute accompaniment, everything seemed possible.

Yesterday I saw a man about a dog. The dog was Lester, and the man was George Schofield, animal chiropractor extraordinaire. We chugged out to Yuroke, and into his yard for the first time. This dog whisperer adjusted Lester - who in exchange bit him. Didn't pierce the skin, but bruised it, and goodness, it makes one feel guilty when your dog bites an 89 year old man. I should have known, and I should have muzzled him, but I thought it would be okay. He was rather gracious about it all but I still feel very guilty. It was my fault for not taking adequate precautions. Perhaps next time I go visit him I shall take him a small token of apology, this man who has framed photographs around his shed of happy dogs and their owners. My favourite: "To the only man who I will allow to play with my bum". Signed Bella the dachshund, who surely must require continual chiropractic, being forced by genetics and stupid human breeding to carry around a body completely too big for it's short little legs.

This man is 89 years old. On he goes, strong. Receiving people and their dogs from 10-4 six days a week. What a bloody inspiration he is. Passionate. As I get older, I am increasingly drawn to people who in latter years refuse to be confined by this childish society's conceptions of what it means to be old. Who refuse to be cloistered away because it upsets the deathfear of the rest of us who stubbornly think life is billboard life. Who have spent their life discovering what their passions are, refusing to give away their power to others, instead shoring up their own God-given themness. That inspires me. I read an article in The Big Issue last week, by someone in Beijing for the Olympics, about the large amounts of elderly Chinese she saw out in the parks, doing tai chi, exercising, keeping themselves young. Occupying public spaces without apology. Perhaps because they didn't have the shame level white Westerners carry, the shame of age, of lined skin, they don't hide themselves away.

I shall refuse to hide myself away. Shall dye my hair bright red, like the artist I saw on telly last week, a local woman, 70 years old with bright red hair.

How I wish I could have seen my auntie and uncle venture forth into their 70s and 80s. There seems no rhyme nor reason for the long and the short of our lives.

The grandfather I hardly knew

Genetics are a strange thing, aren't they? How much of ourselves - our tastes and desires, our political proclivities and our personal requirements for freedom - are due to those who went before us?

I was chatting with my Mum on the phone yesterday, asking her questions about my paternal grandfather. I don't know where the questions came from but I went looking online before for some more information about him, a man I barely knew - indeed, who I only met once in my adult years. I found a memorial for him - you can see it here. It spun me out upon reading it to realise anew how much commonality we shared - I had known all of this stuff about him, but my fish memory has served to banish it from my conscious memory. It sent a chill up my spine when I realised that today, as I write, it is exactly three years since he died.

Perhaps it is not also a coincidence that my anarchic tendencies, pot smoking, love of freedom and of trees were all first contained in this man who I hardly knew. My grandfather lived among the Aborigines in the Northern Territory. He flew planes. He was a goddamn go-getter and when I wrote him a letter in 1991 aged 20 - searching for my roots and identity, always searching - his reply was thus:

Dear Sue

What a charming letter and what a surprise. Enough of that Grandpa bullshit - my name is Andrew as every small child up to 100 plus people call me that.

Don't know what Anne - my present wife - would be to you if any. Probably be referred as a cock relation. Anyway I'm off to have lunch with her in a few minutes. We get along fine although we do not live together. A good marriage as we live in separate suburbs. I presume that a perfect marriage would be when both parties live in separate continents.

Kylie [his daughter with Anne] is a very special lady. She and I should be going to Sydney for the week end on the 19th as my nephew's son is celebrating his 21st. His name is also Andrew. I can't go as one of my ex lovers will be here from 15th Oct to 25th on a visit from the Isle of Man. So Kylie will represent me in Sydney.

Like you I have music most times, perhaps not the same variety but it's a matter of one's choice. Am doing the second year of musicology at Monash this year [he would have been 73 at the time of writing].

We should arrange to meet to see how much we have in common, as I also find life a ball. What about lunch on Sun 27th Oct? I can pick you up at your place if you want transport and bring you here. My phone is xxx xxxx and I would love to meet you.

Regards,
Andrew

Perhaps it is timely that now, on the third anniversary of his death, a tear forms in my eye when I realise the extent of what I missed out on. A kindred spirit. My grandfather, being onto his second family by the time I was growing up, was not viewed with much love in our household, when he was ever viewed at all. But I had grasped enough essence of the man to want to meet him for myself. I never was one for believing others' versions of events even back then.

I used to get drunk in Namatjira Park as a teenager, little realising that the trees I was drinking under were planted by my own stock. We did meet back then in October 1991 and we hit it off really well. We had an awful lot in common. I can only hope that the exuberance he displayed all the way through to the end of his life, is an exuberance that I shall regain again sometime soon. I know I had it back then, as a plucky 20 year old full of piss and vinegar, and even now I sure would love to learn how to fly a plane in the Northern Territory :) His daughter Kylie was there when I visited. I remember her saying, "Dad, you are such a cunt!" and I was swimming with the headiness of these strange people, so unlike my own lower-middle-class family. I loved his house, a place of light and dark, with a cellar underneath, full of trees outside, a place full of life and interesting things, an artistic kind of place. I felt so at home there - I don't understand why I didn't see him again. Perhaps I picked up on some kind of "this was nice but let's not get too involved" vibe from him; perhaps it was latent family pressure, even though I kept it reasonably under wraps. Neither my father or auntie would have been particularly enamoured of my visiting Andrew, although I'm sure both of them understood why. I don't even remember telling my grandmother about the visit at all, but perhaps I did (I did like to get sly rises out of my family in whatever way I could :) Life seemed so interminably stodgy to me back then and it often still does now.

When I visited him, his 20 year old granddaughter, Andrew said to me, "Making love to your grandmother was like banging a sack of flour", which, you can understand, stuck in my head and shall stay there forever as a long-term memory. I don't remember if I had the temerity to laugh out loud but I sure hope so.

My poor grandmother. I don't know the situation there but it was obvious they were an ill-matched couple. I'm sure he cheated on her a few times and perhaps it is here that her bitterness began, a bitterness which spread over me and my childhood living, as we did, in the main house while she lived out in the granny flat at the back. It was lovely of her to allow her son and his wife and children to live under her roof - and didn't she let us know, in 100 different small niggly ways. And goodness, didn't she also let me know that I wasn't like her "Chook" - my brother was always her favourite, while my main recollection of her from my childhood is a face pinched in suspicion as she looked at me. Perhaps she saw some genes come through she wasn't too happy about.

They broke up when my father was a teenager. I'm not so sure Andrew was a great father to my dad and my auntie. But I do know that my grandmother coerced her children into going out and spying on him and such. It was not an amicable break, although I think my father did see his father a few times in his teenage years. I know they drove across the Nullarbor Plain together (funny, Mum and Dad are off to do the same thing in a few week's time. How synchronous this post is, coming out of nowhere. I didn't even know I was going to write it, much less shed a tear for the grandfather that, if all the planets were aligned correctly, I would have got to know better.

And by God, I would have been a hell-raiser if I had :) I really wish I had. But gee, I feel like I carry an awful lot of him around in my body. I'm just really glad I've been reminded of it - there's a swagger in my walk that wasn't there an hour ago :)