Posted in Fifty words
9 October 2020
Miss you already, my fifty word habit. One last kiss as I say goodbye to you, slumped on the couch in your tight party clothes before being hustled out the door by the designated driver, poured onto the back seat and driven deep into the night on dark, rain-soaked streets.
Posted in Fifty words
8 October 2020
The seeds we germinated, the trees we planted are no longer ours. They flourish – I hope – in that garden we built from a paddock of kikuyu. The garden beds are tended by other people now – I hear – and they live in the house that we built. It shelters others now.
Posted in Fifty words
7 October 2020
The children are asleep. The tumult and the shouting have died, but that anthem is awakened in my mind. The only one I would sing at school assembly, avoiding saying g-o-d, yet loving the swell of the music and emotion. Contrite. That’s a word you don’t often hear these days.
Posted in Fifty words
6 October 2020
My father’s favourite phrase – family motto even – was ‘Sufficient is enough’. While there was no arguing with its assertion of synonymity, I always found its lack of breadth of vision disturbing. Today I would rather quote another phrase that my father liked using: ‘You can’t be unlucky all the time’.
Posted in Fifty words
5 October 2020
A moth is stuck in my room, veering towards the window then lurching away. Can’t you hear the wind calling you moth? Can’t you hear the trees shaking, the air whipping its way along the street? Don’t you want to leave this room and be carried on the calling wind?
Posted in Fifty words
5 October 2020
A kookaburra sitting on a mound of dirt watches me, as I watch it through my kitchen window. Yesterday glossy black cockatoos watched us as we watched them, then a tawny frogmouth. Hard for us to spot it, silent as a branch; easy for it to spot the lumbering humans.
Posted in Fifty words, Tapitallee tales
4 October 2020
As we come down the hill our guide stops us. He can hear sacred kingfishers. He points. ‘Two pairs. Fighting for territory.’ Now we see their small bodies darting rapid rings around one big old tree. ‘It takes 180 years for a tree to develop nesting holes,’ our guide says.
Posted in Fifty words
3 October 2020
From the top of the hill I see sea haze blurring over the water. Then Bombo Beach is on my left and I try to catch glimpses as I rush past with the traffic, of its greens and blues I have no names for, solid colours that shape-shift the waves.
Posted in Fifty words
2 October 2020
A chance sighting of a bank of cyclamens, a crowd of pink in deep shade on the twisting road between Sapri and the Greek ruins at Ascea, returns to me now. I won’t tell the cyclamen in its windowbox about its wild Italian cousins, for fear it will lose heart.
Posted in Fifty words
1 October 2020
Amongst my mother’s things I find an envelope of photos for me. One is of a small girl, a pigeon perched on her head. Trafalgar Square, 1962, and the pigeons were famous then. She holds her hands out in anxious excitement. My hands. I almost remember that jacket, that smile.
