I’m in Sydney, sitting at a table in the Marrickville Library1. The woman in front of me is eating soya crisps and reading a book on surrealism. The man next to me jiggles his legs in an anxiety dance while his thumbs fly across the screen of his phone. The barista calls Michael, in a clipped impatient tone, and I feel the rustle of air as Michael stands behind me to fetch his coffee (yes there’s a cafe IN the library). Across the road a crocodile line of school children file into the huge catholic church. On the footpath, an old man, his thin bare legs white and vulnerable, shuffles along leaning on his cane, even as a young man in a sleeveless shirt, his steroid plump muscles popping, strides past him glancing at his reflection in window. Behind them both a pigeon struts.

I’ve spent the morning working in the library and now I’m waiting for my brother to pick me up for a late lunch and while I’m waiting I’m thinking about yesterday when I caught the ferry across the harbour to attend the memorial service for a wonderful man who’d lived a long and good life. The service was held in the neighbourhood where I’d lived in my first years as a widow with two small children.

I’d walked up the hill from the ferry. It seemed the once ordinary suburb filled with modest homes, small cottages, Californian bungalows, was in the process of being transformed into a suburb of palaces. I reached the street where we used to live and stopped. I didn’t have to walk down it, I could go another way. But I turned deliberately, stepped along the still familiar footpath until I reached the house where I’d started to learn how to raise two children. It was not so different. Though on either side, renovated “once-cottages” muscled their way against the boundary. I peered through the front fence. There’d been a modest makeover. The little tiled veranda where I parked the pram was gone and, instead of a brick court yard and a red bottlebrush tree there was sandstone pavers and a fancy sauna and hot tub along with an outdoor shower. A little piece of scandinavia in a northern beaches suburb. Behind the timber hot tub was the room where I first understood my mother was going to die.

I stood in the humid air, bent over the better to peer through the hole in the fence and, held in a state of suspended disbelief that time had passed, found myself astonished I was still inhabiting the same grief bearing body as 21 years ago. Behind me, a pair of rainbow lorikeets hung upside down, squawking as they feasted on yellow blossom. Aware of the time, I straightened and walked on.

The service was beautiful. My eyes watered, as child, grandchild, great grandchild and friends stood in front of us and gave us a tiny piece of the man they’d loved. It was a reminder of the power of one person’s kindness in making a difference.

Later in the evening I walked back through the suburb to the ferry. Overhead, hundreds of flying foxes took off into the night.

On the ferry, the swell hinted at its latent power. I let the images of the day slide through my fingers, all the memories drawn up by visiting the little house, then the witnessing of how loved this man was by his family, the power of an ordinary life well lived. Sea gulls played in the slipstream made by the boat and I sat outside watching them flip and dive, enjoying the warm wind, letting the tears, which had welled all afternoon, slip down my face to leave their salty trace.

*

And now here in the library, surrounded with the hustle of people’s lives, I think of a beautiful poem which is copied out and stuck to the corkboard in my study. I read it most days. It’s Danusha Lameris, Haunts, and in it the poet is walking past a house she lived in many years ago. She lists the differences in the garden, in the house itself and with her we go back time to when she lived there with her husband looking after their child, a child who needed twenty-four hour care. Now she walks with a different man, and many years have gone by, but held in that place is the memory of how she loved.

The poem is tender and fierce and never once when I have read it have I thought of myself. But today I do. I think of myself in the little house on an ordinary street in a still ordinary suburb. I remember my out-of-control toddler, my ethereal, fragile seven year old, the ancient Jack Russell, who kept me company as I learned the strange contours of our new family. And I see myself twenty-one years older, peering through the gap in the fence to the place where I parked my child’s red stroller, to the bedroom, which held perhaps the truest tears I’ve shed.

On the familar street I turned away and thought of all the ways this life could have been lived if I’d stayed in that little house. Instead my children are in the far flung world finding their way seperate to me, stuffed full of big skies. I wish I could have comforted that young mother on the bed mourning the impending death of her mother, grieving the still recent death of her husband, with the poet’s words

I would have said, then, 
it was torture to love someone you couldn't save. But 
What did I know? How lucky it was - how lucky 
it always is - to love someone at all. 

And so, sitting in the library waiting for my brother, I whisper the lines to my young self and layer them like a blanket over her stricken soul.

Somehow I know she heard them*.

mm

Other Things

This extraordinary interview with Chloe Zhao (director of Hamnet) on creativity, vulnerability and the power of midlife.

Jessie Cole writing in The Guardian about the unspoken truths in her family. So beautiful.

On my way across Bass Strait I listened to Lost Lambs. I heard it described as a pure sugar rush of a novel - and it is. The Flynn family is coming undone. Bud and Catherine married young, abandoning their rock star and artistic ambitions, find themselves mired in a midlife, while their three daughters - the youngest, a genius, the eldest a beauty queen, and the middle child sandwiched between the two in love with an online terrorist called Yourstruely - are spinning toward disaster. There’s conspiracy theories, tech billionaires, the wonderful Tibet (best friend to Abigail the beauty queen) and perhaps my favourite unlikely love interest, Miss Winkle. This book is funny, with genuine snorty one liners and the American narrator isn’t too annoying. Also, there’s a happy ending which, quite frankly I need at the moment. Here’s another review.

Read an advance copy of Sarah Walker’s The Water Takes and it’s not out till the end of March, but how on earth will I remember to recommend it then? So here it is now, jot it down. It’s told from the perspective of Pam, a seventy year-old cranky woman who finds herself responsible for a child when the apocalypse comes. For a debut novel it’s assured, imaginative and had me hooked to the end.

Loved How to Speak Love in a Storm, from the On Being newsletter.

A poem for one of you, I’m not sure who, but here it is: Mary Oliver’s, Heavy.