THE EARTHRISE DIARY (December 2013)
© Text, Don Diespecker 2013 (guest writers retain their ©)
I have cherished
the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together
in harmony and with equal opportunities…if needs be, it is an ideal for which I
am prepared to die.
Nelson Mandela, Speech,
Feb 11 1990, after his release from prison. Mandela was reiterating his words
at his trial in 1964.
Yasdi also is properly in Persia; it is a
good and noble city, and has a great amount of trade. They weave there,
quantities of a certain silk tissue known as Yasdi, which merchants carry into
many quarters to dispose of. The people are worshipers of Mohammad The holy
prophet of Islam.
When you leave
this city to travel further, you ride for seven days over great plains, finding
harbor to receive you at three places, only. There are many fine woods
[producing dates] upon the way such as one can easily ride through; and in them
there is great sport to be had in hunting and hawking, there being partridges
and quails and abundance of other game, so that the merchants who pass that way
have plenty of diversion. There are also wild asses, handsome creatures. At the
end of those seven marches over the plain you come to a fine kingdom called Kerman.
The Travels of Marco Polo, transl. Henry Yule
In Recent Times
The democratic South Africa
of the post-apartheid era has certainly been a surprise for many of us who grew
up in South Africa during the apartheid regime. Nelson Mandela was a surprise,
too. There might not be many statesmen or stateswomen who have succeeded
peacefully by being forgiving.
Way Back
In 1956 there was a hotel in Yezd that I remember with a
smile. As a hotel it was a modest place and not at all in the centre of the
city but was more on the outskirts and always gritty with road dust. Yezd (aka
Yazd) is east of Isfahan in Iran. Splendid mountains and the Dasht-i-Lut desert
lie between the city and the Afghanistan border. Anyone who is a romantic
person would want to include Yezd on a journey. The reason I still think fondly
of the place is that I worked there on a site investigation for a proposed
larger airfield. Wiki tells us that the city is 3,000 years old and has a
population exceeding 400,000 and is a centre of Zoroastrian culture. I remember
particularly the big solidly constructed rooms and unforgettably a set of astonishingly
high cement or concrete steps inside the building. I like to think that perhaps
an architect or designer or builder might once have intended a grand staircase,
but that possibility had never been realised. Instead, each one of the steps
was about 2-ft or 600-mm high and beyond the capability of an aged or infirm
person. The flight (if one can call
it such) being also so steeply pitched that anybody proceeding from the ground
floor to the floor above and the roof would need the skills of a mountaineer to
arrive safely at their destination: ascending or descending The Steps was akin
to climbing a ladder placed less than a metre from the wall. Access to the
large flat roof was a bonus: views of the nearby mountains and the Dasht-i-Lut
desert were splendid although there was no safety parapet and sitting close to
the edge was always hazardous. The roof was a place for good conversations in
the cool of evenings made more pleasant by tea drinking and the eating of
pomegranates. However exuberant were those recreational occasions nobody fell
screaming from the rooftop into the street below, at least, not during my
visit. It was, however, the challenging steps that I best remember.
Curiously, when walking from the path that leads from the
house to the belvedere here at Earthrise I casually stepped up to the
belvedere, rather than walk up a slight incline and around the belvedere’s
supporting stone wall, and I suddenly realised the obviousness of what once
used to be the almost metre high wall having subtly become the relatively easy
step up to the belvedere that was now a lesser wall by a good foot (or 300-mm).
I still have another six months to go before I can safely say that I’ve lived
here for 30 years and although I’ve been reasonably observant for most of my
time here and am well aware that high floods have dumped tonnes of loam on
these lower parts of the property, I hadn’t entirely appreciated that the once
‘high’ belvedere stone surround was no longer high except on the river side:
the belvedere has been made significantly lower by bigger and higher floods…
Everything changes. The Diary reader (I know there are only
one or two of you, possibly only one at this time, during the silly season, who
actually read this Diary, or dare I say the bored
Diary reader) so the coincidence of my 1956 leg stretching and my 2013
hamstring tune-up will pass almost entirely unnoticed. J Nonetheless, this
simple physiological experience and the old Yezd experience gave me pause for
thought. I sat in my belvedere chair and watched the river for a while and
thought about floods dumping loam. The flooding last February was the second
highest here (in my experience), the highest flood having come to within about
250-mm of the deck/lower floor of the house in 2001. The February 2013 floods
were about a metre lower. Whenever the river floods, relatively rich loam is slowed
in the torrent and caught by long grass, by plants and weeds when the flood has
peaked and the level is falling. Quantities of loam that were flood-caught and
held by plants will remain undisturbed sometimes for years, depending on the
gardener’s enthusiasm for removing and spreading the ‘new’ soils. Much larger
logs and rafts of debris settle randomly and take weeks or months to remove,
but loam is always welcome. The trouble with loam here, however, is that it’s
making the property higher:
stonewalls appear to be less than they are because their bases have been
buried; high ground becomes a little higher. Once grasses and ground covers get
their roots into rich loam the loam disappears from view: it has become the
invisible and little noticed base of the lawn and is more or less a permanent
geographical addition to the gardens.
The original lawn that we made and cheerfully named Big Lawn was unfortunately scoured and
either largely destroyed or was buried by debris and new loam. The loam is
always a gift of the river and the ‘new’ lawn that grew following the 2001
flooding contained an abundance of mixed seeds (including those of native
violets). I guarantee that if the reader(s) would care to test parts of this
hypothesis they need only dig a test hole or two to discover the archaeological
remains of the original Big Lawn (it included store-bought lawn-grass seeds) at
varying depths. Each flood leaves behind gifts: the current lawn here is a
surprising mix of grasses and ground covers, none of which are the present
consequences of store-bought seeds growing into lawn. That ubiquitous weed,
tradescantia, though fragile, is a very efficient trap for catching and holding
light debris and loam: I’ll give you an example that you can see if you care to
look at the cover of my recent eBook, Happiness:
the greenery atop the wall in front of the house consists largely of stinging
nettles happily settled in flood loam that is now almost 200-mm deep. (I’ll
include the link at the end of this Diary). One of these days I’m going to wear
all the protective gear I can find and clear the loam from this wall top: there
are stone pavements beneath the loam; the nettles are of the Extremely Fierce
kind and their sting will hurt for at least two days… This job has been on my
‘to do’ list for, um, ah, quite some time…
Sorry about this loamy diversion. To return briefly to Yezd:
it’s a fine city, far from the madding crowd and the reader will find beautiful
pictures and much more information Online. My apology for this lengthy opening:
my time in Iran, long before the Revolution, will always be affectionately
remembered. I was reminded of the hotel steps because much of the low-lying gardens
here are now higher than ever. The house remains more or less where it’s
supposed to be, but by clearing land I’ve made it easier for the floods to
leave new land behind here after floods have peaked, fallen and disappeared.
It’s a curious phenomenon and it may take some getting used to…
Of Late
I’ve grabbed hastily these December days, quick chances to
sit outside early in the day. The weather has been peculiarly variable, sunny
and hot for hours, then suddenly cool, cloudy and showery. The garden hardly
seems to know what to make of this, much less do I, unless it’s all due to
global warming and climate change (and I rather think that it is). I even wince
when I see someone interviewed on TV, often enough a farmer who refers to This
Drought, almost as though we all are experiencing very bad or unfortunate luck.
I’m more inclined than ever, in my old age, to respect the views of anybody and
everybody, but our weather and our climate is being hugely influenced and
unsubtly changed by global warming and consequent climate change and all of us
are responsible for that (remembering that we
democratically put our beloved and frequently idiot politicians into office and
that they’re presently and
collectively asleep at the wheel).
There has been a surprising amount of gardening this month
(all of it done by your indefatigable editor): the bank below the water storage
tank still has some hefty longs marooned there; more of the Euro privet on the
lower riverbank near the bridge has been cut back (privet loves pruning);
barrow loads of flood debris has been wheeled to the edge of the riverside lawn
and if the floods will permit, that bank may become strengthened, less undercut
and more stabilised in the future; the circular garden around the old white
cedar at the back of the belvedere has been cleaned and weeded and a small new circular garden now contains more of
the white begonia that has grown on both sides of this passageway for nearly
thirty years (I like to think that midges need these white begonia as markers
for their ‘flyways’); many more of the wall stones behind the belvedere have
been removed and made ready for wall building elsewhere; the Dogs’ Garden, big
and circular, still needs much cleaning and removal of debris, but the stone
surround has been cleared by mattock and now looks almost presentable again:
some of the flood-buried dahlias have reappeared and several roses, also; and
the most difficult job (not finished) is the reclamation of the dahlia garden:
it was flattened by last February’s floods and its steel pickets and masses of surrounding
chicken wire buried. The recovery of star pickets and tangled masses of rusting
wire has been laborious but most of that is complete and I’ve rediscovered
eleven dahlias that have made their re-growth and recovery without my help,
pushing up carefully among the high weeds. Strong winds broke a major white
cedar limb (in the group of trees near the road and the bridge). I offered it
to my neighbor for possible lathe turning or perhaps as a structural support,
but it wasn’t very straight and therefore not suitable, but thanks to Doug, it
was cut to manageable sizes (I always store some wood for winter fires but am
seldom able to keep it: because playful rises of the river and floods generally
sweep the wood away to new destinations). And the lawns have been mowed for
Christmas and New Year! I’ve been asked why I’ve recently spent so much of my
precious time making the gardens look good. My answer is that the gardens
deserve to look better than they usually do (because of their servant, this
gardener) because they deserve to be themselves and to look more or less like gardens. My gardening of them is a
tribute to their being what they aspire to be. In my more rational moments I
like to think that a garden has a pretty good idea of what it wants to be
(i.e., itself) and if I think I can see what
that seems to be, I’ll do what I can when I can to help.
My earliest memories are of the family home in Victoria, BC,
Canada. I started my life there in 1929, a few months before the Great
Depression arrived. I often wonder now (and was never at all sure when I was a
child) how we all managed to get through those Depression years in the early
1930s, yet we did. Dad liked to garden: his parents, especially Dad’s mother,
Elizabeth (who died the year before I was born). I have a fading paper print of
Elizabeth in s summer garden (at Adstock, Buckinghamshire) in 1907. She’s
holding an infant in her arms and there are flowering plants in the background,
many of which appear to be dahlias. The infant was Richard (or Dick, as he
became known) and in later years he was a poet, a playwright, a journalist, a
broadcaster, a soldier and also was my mentor (each of us have been enjoying
the urge to write). In 1908 Elizabeth and Rudolph (aka ‘Louis’) took their five
sons to the far west of Canada and that’s another story, parts of which are
hair-raising and parts of which Dick has written eloquently about and I have
bobbed along in his wake, adding bits and pieces of history, changing facts
into fiction, searching for our heritage.
There were
gardens at Adstock House. When Cape Colonial Elizabeth Bradley met Rudolph
Diespecker, in a garden in Durban in 1890, Elizabeth was living in her sister’s
house, Rose Cottage, and Elizabeth was a music teacher at a splendid girls’
school; Rudolph had been a gold prospector in the Transvaal and then was an
engineering contractor. When the couple married later that year, Rudolph’s Best
Man was the British Consul in Lourenço Marques, Mozambique (and thereby hangs a
tale).
Some time later, when I was tottering around the family
garden in Victoria BC it began to dawn on me that Dad was so keen a gardener
that he regularly won prizes for his dahlias at flower shows: there were many
red and blue ribbons in our house. He also grew vegetables: everything he
planted grew.
Although I don’t waste my time trying to grow vegetables
here at Earthrise (the wildlife loves fresh vegetables and even flowers and
have been sufficiently inquisitive to have eaten and relished my flowering
dahlias. I can only grow a few dahlias and some scented hybrid tea roses here
if I put obstacles between the plants and the passing wallabies, nosy brush
turkeys and sundry other beasties that love to dig up and destroy what I’ve so
carefully planted. The Reader will
see now what I’m on about: gardens have ways of communicating themselves in
compelling ways: Elizabeth’s 1907 dahlias at Adstock, my father, Durbyn’s,
dahlias that he so fondly grew in British Columbia in the 1930s and later in
South Africa, dahlias grown here at Earthrise between 1985 and 2013.
The floods here in February 2013 were impressively high.
I’ve paid particular attention to the ‘dahlia garden’ in a sunny corner of Big
Lawn. The fencing went down at night as the flood swept through the gardens
from two directions, from the Deer Park across the road and from the backflow
at the bend in front of the house. The garden has been overgrown and the
chicken wire and steel supports have remained buried for most of the year. Now
the garden is carefully being reclaimed.
Quite Early On Warm
Summer Mornings
If you visit and then join me on the belvedere (with its
downstream view) be sure to wear a brimmed hat. Earthrise is on the Right Bank
going downstream and there’s a deceptive-looking but sharp bend near the house.
The forested slopes rise steeply here and because the higher parts of the
forest are downstream the early summer sunrise takes a little longer to show
itself at the skyline.
I arrange my chair and put my stuff on an adjacent chair. Then
I sit and settle myself to see properly. The light is growing stronger. I want
to get my posture right and my hat brim pulled suitably low against the coming
glare. In the crowded air between the belvedere and the downstream view the air
is busy with flying insects. They’re almost all small, tiny in fact and they
hang in the invisible light river breeze that I can never quite understand
because the breeze drags leisurely across the river’s surface from this bank,
from the south, as it were, but the south side of this serpentine stream is
densely forested. Somebody will know, but don’t say yet because I like the
mystery of the movement. The surface breeze moves at a fast walk and is seen
only on the surface of the water and just above it at this wonderful time of
the day. Perhaps there’s a relationship between the wee flying beasties and the
busy air?
The fliers seem to be made larger by the magnifying
properties of the rising sun shining through them: sunrise gives them shining white
auras to make them seem larger than they really are. They move leisurely in
front of the belvedere as if uncertain about themselves and that’s all in my
head because they’re surely moving with purpose. Most may be midges, but I
can’t be sure and don’t need to know because leisurely or busily they’re as
light as random snowflakes, small ones, or the light white ash that comes with
wildfires. They even may look like tiny helicopters to some: if that surface
breeze reaches them it has little effect: the fliers hang in the sunrise air
and they move when it suits them to, not when the breeze decides. So there’s
another mystery: how high does that surface breeze rise? I’m sitting probably
three-and-a-bit metres above the stream and I can’t feel any breeze on my skin.
In the foliage at the belvedere’s edge there are spider’s micron-thick silken
strands that I think of as hunting lines (and perhaps they are, but I don’t
need to know). The so-thin strands are gleaming and look thicker than they are
because the air moves them in the light of the rising sun and they waver and
waft as though they were each 5- or 6-mm in diameter: the light and movement
make them look like thin rope and they’re probably as strong as steel, too.
They flash attractively; perhaps that’s what their provider has in mind. If we
were midge-sized or as small as mosquitoes wouldn’t we want to move closer,
dangerously so, to investigate these strung-out brilliant phenomena? And this
morning there’s also a proper-looking spider web hitched between the old bent
tree fern and unseen grasses on the weedy bank. And though it’s too early for
butterflies that move differently and at a different altitude, there are other
small fliers, smaller than small butterflies and much larger than midges or
mosquitoes, that bob, weave, tumble and whirl in this busy zone and at such
speed that it takes my breath away and maybe these super-fast fliers are making
mating ritual moves or are just out for a spin, tearing about in the sky like
exhilarated Spitfire pilots: I don’t need to know; I want only to see them doing
what they’re doing on a summer morning.
The air is also a busy medium for myriad cicadas that go
like buzz saws all day and into the night. When I think about them and their
dizzying noise I realise that I can hear them even when driving from here to
Coffs Harbour and return: there are billions
of them. As fliers the cicadas aren’t quite the magnificent cormorants and they
don’t need to be: they’re big and seem slow and they cross above the river
occasionally, nicely higher than the small fry cluttering the lower fly-lanes.
I picked up another of their wings earlier: it was damaged and decaying on the
ground under the white begonias, but when I put it in the light to dry and
later compared it to another old wing the two wings looked so similar as to
have been mass produced in an aircraft factory: they also are superb objects
because you can see right through them and their black lacy structural
components make each wing a work of art: they always look like Art Nouveau
pieces or perhaps objects looking splendidly lie mysterious productions with
influences from both Art Nouveau and Art Deco, at least to me: it matters not:
they are each fine works, whatever they might look like.
The sun is getting up warmly now and I move my head a few
millimetres up and down so my hat brim will cut the glare. The dark brown or
black river has changed in the light and is now running past looking like
molten metal and the forest is showing its colours and the surface breeze has
disappeared, almost. I’ve not noticed any early birds like swallows that might
feed on miniature fliers and the cormorants haven’t yet flown in to demonstrate
how river landings should be made. What kind of day will the tiny midges and
mosquitoes have? It’s just as well that I’ve weeded and tidied the white
begonia: if you follow my Midgeworld stories (caprices) you’ll know that midges
need the begonias to be clearly visible because the two little gardens mark the
White Begonia Flyways and the wee beasties need them to know where they are
(the downstream views from 30- or 40-m above the belvedere are probably so
stunning that midges may be aesthetically carried away, overcome emotionally
and breezily blown away). Come to think of it, the white begonias also mark the
Artists’ Quarter, the Latin Quarter of Midgeworld. Some of the midge poets,
musicians and creative writers may be moodily sipping nectar in midge bars and
dreaming of growing bigger wings like the arty ones that the giant cicada
percussionists use...
Creative Writing
Below is Jill Alexander’s third memoir piece (the first two
were published in the Diary earlier this year: “The Search” (August) and
“Reunion” (September).
Jill Alexander
It was Thanksgiving
and, as we sat around the table, we had lots to be thankful for. It had been 20
years since my first son, Dougal, and I found each other thanks to the Adoption
Reunion Registry that the Provincial Government had established. Soon after
that memorable reunion I did my own search and found his birth father,
Joe. Now all of us were together
at what had become our annual Thanksgiving gathering.
My daughter-in-law
put forth a suggestion that we go around the table with each of us in turn
saying what we were thankful for. There was gratitude expressed for our new
family, for being together, for good health. When it was Joe’s turn he looked
somewhat embarrassed and said he never knew what to say in situations like
this. We all waited. After a
few minutes, he responded: “I’m so thankful to Jill for the phone call. If it
hadn’t been for that call I don’t know what would have happened to my life.” He
spoke quietly and with such feeling that we all felt the depth of his emotion.
I remembered the
time 20 years before. My newly
found son and I talked at length about looking for his birth father and finally
agreed that this would be a good thing. I was to go ahead with the search on my
own.
It was not difficult
finding the phone number. I had not thought to look in the Vancouver phone book
and that we might be living in the same city now. Both of us were born, raised,
and schooled in Victoria and I thought he would still be living there. However,
I found a listing that I was sure must belong to him.
I sat for long
stretches of time by the phone thinking about what I was going to say. I
worried that he might not want to talk to me. I had conversations where I tried
to tell him that I had something important to say, some good news. At other
times I just sat beside the phone convinced that I would freeze when he
answered. Or worse still that someone else would answer the phone. That he was
married and his wife would answer and I would hang up. Next I worried that if
this happened, how could I phone a second time? I tried the approach of trying to convince myself that this
call really wasn’t that important. This indecision continued for three weeks.
Then one day the clouds parted and I calmly dialled the number. A man’s voice
answered.
“Is this Joe?”
“Yes,” he answered.
“This is Jill.”
“Jill. MY GOD! I haven’t
heard your voice in over 30 years!”
“I know. Listen, Joe
I have something I would like to share with you. Can we get together for a coffee somewhere?”
“Sure. Where?”
“How about the White
Spot on Georgia, the one closest to Stanley Park? Would tomorrow at three be OK? ” I asked?
“Yeah, that sounds
OK. I’ll see you tomorrow then at three.”
I felt quite nervous
as I drove to meet him the next day. The last time I had seen him was when we
were both sixteen and I had told him that I thought I was pregnant. I remember
his reply.
“Well, I’m going to
take off for Uranium City.”
I thought this meant
that he didn’t want to have anything to do with me and I had been utterly
devastated. But now everything had changed and I was feeling confident about
sharing my news with him.
As I drove into the
parking lot I saw him standing at the entrance, waiting. I recognized him
instantly.
We greeted each
other with warmth but with some hesitation and made our way to a booth at the
back of the restaurant. The place
was almost empty. The waitress came to take our order. “I’ll just have a coffee,” I said.
“That’s good for me,
too,” said Joe.
“Joe, we had a son!
He was put up for adoption, but I’ve found him!”
“I don’t know what
to say!” he said slowly. “I looked
everywhere trying to find you but no one knew where you were.”
“My parents sent me
away and told their friends that they had put me in a girl’s boarding school in
another city. They did a pretty good job of creating the perfect cover-up.” I
laughed as I said: “They could have got a job with the FBI!”
Then quietly I said,
“I thought you weren’t interested, didn’t care.”
“No way! I think I
fell apart when I couldn’t find you. I quit school and started drinking a lot.
I went from bad to worse and ended up living in a room on Skid Row. I lived
there for 20 years. Then one day I decided to stop drinking. Got a job on the
tug boats and saved a little money. I ended up buying my own I bedroom
apartment.”
“Did you marry? Have
any kids?” I asked.
“No, never did.
Thought I had ruined your life.”
Then as he said
“Couldn’t forgive myself for that.” He lowered his head and I sensed the
despair he must have felt over the years.
Suddenly, as if
realizing why we were here, his voice changed and he said, “I can’t believe I
have a son! Tell me about him!”
“Well, he’s married
and has two little girls two and six so you’re a grand father, too!” I
exclaimed.
“I can’t believe it!”
Then quietly he
said, almost to himself, “He probably wouldn’t want to see me.”
“He says he’s
curious. Wants to meet up with you. I’m to give you his phone number,” I
suggested.
“I don’t know what
I’d say to him. I’ve never had to do anything like this in my life!”
There was a long
pause before he answered, “OK, give me his number.”
Jill Diespecker Alexander is a retired nurse and business owner and is
presently writing her life story.
About
my eBooks
For those readers who browse
for eBooks, here again are the first of the online books that I’ve begun
self-publishing. These digital books can be found on Amazon/Kindle sites.
(a) Finding Drina is a light-hearted sequel to my two print novels (not
available as eBooks) published in one volume as The Agreement and it’s sequel, Lourenço
Marques. Finding Drina is
written in three parts and in three different styles that also are intended
homage pieces (to GG Marquez, Ernest Hemingway and Lawrence Durrell); thus this
little book is also meta-fiction (novella, about 30-k words).
(b) The Earthrise Visits is an Australian long story set at Earthrise
(about 20-k words): an old psychologist meets a young literary ghost from the
1920s (his girlfriend meets her too) before a second old literary ghost,
unaware of his spectral state, arrives unexpectedly.
(c) Farewelling Luis Silva is an Australian dystopian long story partly
set in Australia, Portugal and France (about 23-k words). A sniper meets an
Australian Prime Minister, an old lover and a celebrity journalist; three of
them meet a terrorist in Lisbon where there is a bloody assassination.
(d) The Selati Line is an early 20th century Transvaal train
story, road story, flying story, a caper and love story sequel to The Agreement and Lourenço Marques, lightly written and containing some magical realism. A scene-stealing child prodigy keeps
the characters in order (novel, about 150-k words).
(e) The Summer River is a dystopian novel (about 70-k words) set at
Earthrise. A General, the déjà vu sniper, the Australian Prime Minister and the
celebrity journalist witness the murder of a guerrilla who had also been an
Australian university student; they discuss how best to write an appropriate
book about ‘foreign invasions’ (novel, about 70-k words).
(f) The Annotated “Elizabeth.” I examine and offer
likely explanations as to why my uncle published a mixed prose and verse novel
in which his mother is the principal protagonist and I suggest why the book Elizabeth (published by Dick Diespecker
in 1950) is a novel and not a biography, memoir or history (non-fiction, about
24-k words).
(g) The Overview is a short Australian novel set at Earthrise (about
32-k words) and is also a sequel to The
Summer River.
(h) Scribbles from Earthrise, is an anthology of selected essays and
caprice written at Earthrise (about 32-k words). Topics are: family and
friends, history of the Earthrise house, the river, the forest, stream of
consciousness writing and the Earthrise dogs.
(i) Here and There is a selection of Home and Away essays (about 39-k
words). (Away includes Cowichan (Vancouver Island), 1937 (my cabin-boy year),
The Embassy Ball (Iran), At Brindavan (meeting Sai Baba in India). Home essays
are set at Earthrise and include as topics: the Bellinger River and floods,
plus some light-hearted caprices.
(j) The Agreement is a novel set in Mozambique and Natal during
December 1899 and the Second Anglo-Boer War: an espionage yarn written around
the historical Secret Anglo Portuguese Agreement. Louis Dorman and his brother,
Jules, feature together with Drina de Camoens who helps draft the Agreement for
the Portuguese Government. British, Boer spies and the Portuguese Secret Police
socialize at the Estrela Café (about 62-k words).
(k) Lourenço Marques is the sequel to The Agreement. Mozambique in
September 1910. The Estrela café-bar is much frequented and now provides music:
Elvira Tomes returns to LM from Portugal and is troubled by an old ghost; Drina
and her companion return with a new member of the family; Louis faints. Joshua
becomes a marimba player. Ruth Lerner, an American journalist plans to film a
fiesta and hundreds visit from the Transvaal. Drina plays piano for music
lovers and plans the removal of an old business associate (novel: about 75,000
words).
(l) The Midge Toccata, a caprice (26,105 words).
(m) Happiness is a short novel set at Earthrise. The ‘narrator’ is
again the very elderly ex-ATA flier who unexpectedly meets and rescues a bridge
engineer requiring urgent hospitalisation: she gets him safely to hospital in
his own plane. She also ‘imagines’ an extension to her own story, one about a
small family living partly in the forest and on the riverbank: the theme is
happiness. Principal protagonist is a 13-years old schoolgirl who seems a
prodigy: she befriends a wounded Army officer and encourages his plans. Her
parents are a university teacher and a retired concert pianist. The family pets
can’t resist being scene-stealers in this happy family (65,390 words).
These eBooks may be seen on
Amazon Kindle websites. This link will enable an examination: Amazon.com- Don Diespecker
Cheers
for Now
Having relocated the birdbath to a shady part
of the belvedere and next to an old red salvia, I placed my early morning chair
within a couple of metres and settled to see the river for a few minutes before
completing the Diary. A small honeyeater arrived and pottered about in the
fragile-looking salvia. The flower heads of the red salvia are all higher than
the twigs they are set on and the bird spent some time dodging between and
barging through silken (hunting?) lines and took some nectar by doing a humming
bird impersonation. The he had a delicate drink from the birdbath and flew off.
Nice.
Best wishes to all Diary readers and a Happy
New Year, from Don.
