The Earthrise Diaries

Friday, January 31, 2014

THE EARTHRISE DIARY (January 2014)

THE EARTHRISE DIARY (January 2014)

DON DIESPECKER

Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes’ chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. I reflected on the subject of my spare-time literary activities. One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings.

Flann O’Brien: At Swim-Two-Birds

…I am in a strange place, really. Yesterday I gave the keys of my car to its new owner. One week earlier I gave the keys to my home to its new owner. I have two medium-size suitcases one with winter’s clothes and another with summer’s. Gifts fill the corners: organic Australian honey, Madura tea and Murray River pink salt, my staple gifts when traveling…

…And having said all that I stand on the edge of a sense of freedom I have not felt since I walked out of school on my last day. I remember that intoxicating surge of freedom and possibility that filled every cell of my body. ‘I am free;’ that’s what I said. And here I am about to leave Australia with no keys: nothing to open when I come back, except two medium-size suitcases and my two arms when I see my children and granddaughter again.

Sharon Snir, prior to flying to Israel

January 28 2014. I’ve been working indoors for too many long periods of intense writing, re-writing and pitiless editing. In long breaks of several seconds I’ve also watched my days slipping by like the movie images of calendar’s leaves blowing away in the wind. The pile of new and unread books is still in place: I have managed one and a half reads of only one book, James Salter’s Last Night (brilliant stories) and a half-way read of Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life. My worktable, like much of my house, is cluttered (the house urgently needs the skilled attentions of the butler, the housekeeper, the cook, the scullery maid, several footmen and a parlour maid) and I lose pens and my scattered notes written on the backs of used envelopes and buried beneath books, files and the blessed computer on my worktable. You would be appalled to see how I write inside my house. The Inside drama is entirely my fault, my choice and my being driven to complete set tasks by nobody else but me. The gardens need attention; recalcitrant fishers need to be deterred from invading my territory (I need another brace of gamekeepers). I’m not getting enough exercise; I’m entirely at fault and misguided. There are times when I write longhand sitting outside by the river, but I have increasing difficulty both in later reading my scribbles and scrawls and in focusing on the writing in front of me because what is in front of me is so often compelling that I slip from one reality into another and writing from (river and forest views), within the river reality and then writing something unrelated to the views whilst sitting in the outside reality is much too hard. And it’s summer and the river and riverbanks in this area have been busy with swimmers, paddlers, drinkers, fishers, picnickers, canoeists and kayakers and those drifting on air-mattresses: summer holidays are not the best times for reflection, for thinking, for writing. I do know some secluded places in this environment, but then the same difficulties would apply: a chinking stream deep in the forest is a place of beauty and so attention-demanding that any writing other than Note-taking is out of the question. During this time of hectic scribbling and editing I’ve also managed to busy the email traffic, too: I stay in touch with family and special friends and special family friends (those who write willingly and cheerfully). The good news is that I’ve completed two of my own (digital) books this month: The Special Intelligence Officer, and The Letters from Earthrise. The first of these two texts is based on much historical research: the narrative describes the roles of my late grandfather, who was a District Commandant during the Guerrilla War (1901-1902) and more sinisterly, ‘The Special Intelligence Officer’ (so named in Cape newspapers of the time): it’s a dark story. The Guerrilla War was the last phase of the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902). The second book is an anthology of most of my writings published in the Australian Gestalt Journal (AGJ) between 1997 and 2005 and the reader may be relieved to learn that much of the writing in that text is laid back and light. The word ‘Letters’ refers to quite lengthy and regular columns (in the newspaper sense) that were featured in the AGJ and there are additional essays and articles containing Gestalt notions in some of my fiction and non-fiction. The AGJ is now defunct, alas, but despite the difficulties of archaeological digs in the computer to recover old files, it was a great pleasure to again present those ‘old’ writings. There are literary discussions of now ‘old’ texts and experimental pieces that could never have been published in other similar Journals of that time: the AGJ was at the cutting edge, one might say (and not because I was the Consulting Editor for much of that time, but because the AGJ was progressive and different, rather than ‘academic and old-fashioned’). As I re-edited my old narratives I became increasingly aware (as we old Gestalt therapists say) that the world has changed dramatically since the early issues of the AGJ.

And I’m very pleased to add that the caprice, The Midge Toccata, now has an attractive new cover: it was designed and painted by my young cousin (technically my first cousin once removed, but I think of all my relatives as my cousins), Katie Diespecker, in Agassiz, British Columbia once removed. Thank you, Katie. This month has been a satisfying writing and publishing month: The Midge Toccata, and the Special Intelligence Officer are both in the Kindle store; the 15^th eBook, The Letters from Earthrise (almost novel length at 70,000 words) should be there shortly.

Merely A Monologue

When I’m up and about each morning I generally wander around the ‘gardens’ while the dew is still on the plants, especially on ‘Big Lawn’: I put those words in quotes because the gardens were so damaged by last February’s floods as to be unrecognizable as gardens; the lawn has ground covers, tropical chickweed, native violets and, also, some varied grasses here and there. Any lawn at Earthrise is a green sward continually changing: floods cover parts with mud and loam; the deposits left behind bear gifts of seeds from far away; some parts of these flighty lawns disappear in floods and are replaced by new plants… Whatever else a lawn at Earthrise might be, it is also a nice green reminder of the only constant in the universe: continual flux, continuing change. Perhaps future scientists, school children and philosophers will beat a path to Earthrise simply to be able to stand on Big Lawn and to do that several times a year in order to record, to map the changes, to take photos. I could sell tickets for ‘Lawn Viewings’ and ‘See Amazing Big Lawn: Most Changeable Lawn In Universe.’ I could provide scones and strawberry jam and cream and cups of tea…if I had nothing else to do. And I remind myself that there are also Hidden Lawns here, lawns that have been colonised by tradescantia, by bracken, by well-anchored and almost indestructible clumps of broad-leafed sub-tropical grasses. An ambition is to liberate these lawns from the past.

In recent times I habitually took brisk walks from here down to the Richardson’s Bridge, there to use my eyes to see daily changes on the water: ripples, swirls, tiny bubbles or flotsam on the always dynamic surface of the river and I would photograph some of what I could see. Richardson’s has a separated walkway on the downstream side of the bridge’s deck and it’s relatively safe from passing traffic that might otherwise tip you into the river or knock you over the trees for six. If you look at the Bellinger’s surface at sunrise during certain months you may discover interesting phenomena that have always to be searched for. The rising sun shining obliquely projects through water in the shallows to reveal colourful shapes and somewhat enlarged details of the always-undulating surface. This experience is rather like that of looking down at a ‘screen’ comprised only of river stones on the bottom of the river, but it is an unforgettable and moving phenomenon, an underwater movie continually allowing you to see an enlarged dynamic and colourful view of the surface of the river. The sun also adds reflections to the surface: those of surrounding trees and nearby tall grasses and the viewer must necessarily change his or her focus entirely to see those: the wavering images are ‘static’ if the air is still: they are also distorted views, as reflections, because the river is wavering, running, sliding, distorting what your eyes want to understand. In winter there are silken threads anchored to the exposed river stones, some of them drifting in the air, loosely. To stand on the walkway at Richardson’s is an education and, like the best education, the watcher will be encouraged by what s-he sees to also ponder and to speculate: why is it so; what does this mean; how might I explain that in simple prose? The river is often an exciting visual mystery. Might I become a River Guide in old age?

Flooding changes caused unplanned additional work: particularly the endless clearing of debris consisting of untangling long heavy logs, branches, uprooted clumps of ‘foreign’ grasses, vines and man-made fragments and removing these (when possible, and in pieces) by wheelbarrow to partly repair the Riverside Lawn (where dried flotsam still hangs in branches on the riverbank and where the defensive stone wall has been breached; and where the upstream side of the lawn has been savagely eroded by the shifting river in full flood; and also a place for the ‘extra’ river stones stored for 25 years in an ‘unnecessary’ wall next to the belvedere). There remain a variety of jobs big and small in the ruined gardens. After last February’s floods it was essential to nurse the old (1987) Honda in and out of the front gate and mud-buried driveway, sometimes working with a spade to ensure safely getting back up the rise to the carport. Driving up the hillier parts of Darkwood Road where the old verges had been transformed into deep mud (and praying for traction), was wearing. Filling in the adjacent road ditch at my front gate with heavy stones was essential just to get on to or up from Darkwood Road was another time-consuming challenge. These kinds of post-flood essential chores were enormously time-consuming and all my ‘scheduled times’ were stretched, manipulated, cancelled or abandoned when necessary. There are still logs (too big to move) jammed or partly suspended between Big Lawn and the ancient river bank near the carport: my long-handled axe blade bounces laughingly from these unwanted timbers.

Following decisions to reduce time-consuming chores and to increase Writing Time I’ve been obliged to re-cast, to modify, and to ensure that long hours at the keyboard would be preceded by and also followed by Outside breaks: I have an abundance of 10-minutes or 20-minutes or 30- and 40-minutes breaks available to me for physical work, for necessary exercise. I take time off at night to read or to watch that interesting educator, TV. In quieter times and before another flood upsets the apple cart, I hope to resume my reading (my best experiences of reading, particularly literary fiction and non-fiction, are always outside near the river). Reading inside is quieter, and the house is relatively still: reading outside is more exciting because the river is a big, lively and noisy companion, and birds sing and cicadas beat and the reader must keep an eye out for falling branches, thus the ‘reading outside’ experience is always lively.

Meanwhile, my cousin Jill, in Vancouver, is experiencing some 'Inside Work'. She writes:

I am in the enclosed office that has glassed French doors allowing me to see into the living room and if I turn my head to the left I can see the dining area and the open hatch into the kitchen. There are four strong and pleasant young men ripping out the kitchen and the bathroom off the hallway. This hallway leads to the bedroom, walk-in closet and 2nd bathroom called an en-suite bathroom as a door encloses this area. This en-suite area and office are safe for now from all this renovation activity. The second bathroom will be done later when the kitchen and small bathroom are finished. Down on the first floor, John Steel is busy working on their (Gill and John) newly purchased apartment. John is doing all the painting himself. He is good at this. Gill, who has a designer’s flair, has been designing their kitchen, as well as giving us ideas. I must say it is rather fun sharing ideas and time frames on projects together. At the moment though I would not call this ‘fun!’ We take off for the cabin in about 1 1/2 hours, so an escape is a good thing. Brian returns tomorrow night for his various work projects and I stay down two extra days. Signe will join me on the Wednesday and we will come back together late on Thursday. Nothing is where it is supposed to be here. I decided I needed something to eat. As I can’t get into the kitchen, I have made do with an apple. After I located the apple, I had to locate a knife to cut it. As everything from the kitchen went into the bedroom, I knew that somewhere a paring knife was hiding. Finally I found it and am now munching on a juicy Gala apple.

The cicadas are quieter now, more occasional, as though they’ve grown tired of the same old same old and are perhaps planning holidays and leisurely hanging out by the river... I hear their surprisingly half-hearted bursts and choruses when least expected: sunset, sometimes when it’s dark and perhaps when a cicada mob is stirred by one of the musicians enduring a bad dream and they all chorus together for security reasons; who knows? The drongos, too, are a little quieter: they’ve been flapping about close to the house, closer to the water this season than I’ve ever seen them previously: they too may be appreciating the turning of the season and might be visiting nearby colonies, or taking sabbaticals before heading north again. The drongo ‘song’ is excruciating, but their sleek plumage is beautiful to glimpse when they fly close by.

The notion of quiet is one that includes natural sounds such as birdsong and the river’s ‘song’ and the past two days (except for the cicada reminders) have been good to hear because we’re at the end of summer’s second month and the schools have started their new terms and the families have departed more or less silently, their shiny vehicles filled with sunburned people, and with a dog or two, with paddles, air mattresses, fishing rods, hampers, eskies. Those extraneous penetrating sounds (at all hours of the day and night) from other humans may have reduced appreciably, but I’ll wait and see, and fill the waiting time with keyboard work and the background sounds of cicadas and birds more distantly, and the radio sounds of proper music largely replacing the background noises.

I’ve been especially aware of trees this month. Many of them seem to have been stressed: they crack, break and sometimes fall (branches fall more frequently than whole trees). High branches from old trees along the roadside here have fallen into the road outside this address and that always seems a responsibility when I discover them and do my best to clear the mess with either a machete or an axe. A heavy branch on the road is a real hazard. It takes only a couple of seconds to smash it’s way through other foliage, ruining nearby trees, threatening traffic and it takes much longer to reduce the timber to bits and pieces and then to finally remove it all. There have been several such falls in the gardens and nearby forest and two from the old bloodwood next to the house: a large branch fell and clipped the edge of the roof and wrecked a bleeding heart tree; another, less big, hit the roof next to my bedroom and made me jump: fortunately it struck horizontally and did little damage. In the garden on recent hot windy days and some of them also cool and wet, there have been branches big and small to pick up and to remove and an old White Cedar (they’re unrelated to Australian Red Cedars) has dropped a couple of major limbs. Yesterday (Jan 28) when I was gathering small sticks and branches after a windy spell I was so intent on seeing the ground, eyes downcast, that I almost walked into a metre and a half of goanna. The handsome goanna stood its ground and looked coldly at me: I did immediately and effortlessly my High Back-flip With Partial Somersault and so avoided becoming an afternoon snack for the hunter (for readers unfamiliar with these Australian creatures, goannas attack, destroy and eat big snakes and as far as I know, goannas don’t consider live humans a delicacy).

Earlier I’d found the beautiful pink lilies in front of the house (that always flower in January) were dying and decaying and being consumed by determined striped caterpillars. What an ugly mess! Will these cleanup caterpillars become winged butterfly beauties? Yesterday I was surprised to see that there were two of these peach-smelling flowers on proud stalks: survival of the fittest! The last of the Christmas orchids has shed its white blooms along the path to the carport. There are great clumps of flowering wild ginger plants at the front gate and now, too in the Dogs’ Garden. The red salvia slips that I planted are all bright red, the cannas have benefited from recent heavy showers and to my surprise one of the dahlias (Dogs’ Garden) has risen from beneath the flood mud and debris and begun to flower! It might just be ‘Mrs Rees’! Behind the determined dahlia there’s big bunch of wild ginger (I think it’s called): big leafed, long flower stalks with a cluster of pale yellow flowers having long orange stamens: they look like orchids. This circular walled garden looks good, but this great clump of impressive orchid-like flowers is yet another gift of the flooding river: I had nothing to do with it; the plant simply heaved itself out of the flood debris and arranged itself as if for a Flower Show. In the nearby trees along the old fence line and high above the gardens and the roadside, bunches of yellow cassia flowers catch the eye in the shade. The barks shed by the eucalypts are all down now, dry and crackly. The front stonewall of the belvedere is clear of the irrepressible Madeira vine and I’ve just found four snake skins in the clefts of the wall. The forested slopes continue displaying their flowering bloodwoods although the flowers have passed their best and are browning. The air has a different feel to it now and the light is softer despite the temperature being 27 or so. I very much enjoy the light of February, perfect for Outside Reading, and February is hurrying on its way.

About my eBooks

For those readers who browse for eBooks, here again are the first of the online books. 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 20^th 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 Intelligence Officers, 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 about talking insects (inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories). This book has a splendid new cover designed by my cousin, Katie Diespecker (fiction, caprice, about 26,100 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 (novel, about 65,400 words).

(n) The Special Intelligence Officer is part family history as well as a military history and describes the roles of my late grandfather in the Guerrilla War (1901-1902). The Guerrilla War was the last phase of the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902). The title of the book is taken from Cape newspapers of the time: Capt Rudolph Diespecker was a District Commandant and his responsibilities included intelligence gathering that led to the capture, trial and execution of a Boer Commandant who was wrongly framed as a ‘Cape rebel,’ when he was legally a POW (Gideon Scheepers was never a Cape rebel, having been born in the Transvaal (the South African Republic,) one of the two Boer Republics (non-fiction, about 33, 270 words).

These eBooks may be seen on Amazon Kindle websites.

Thank you, Jill and Sharon, for permission to include your words. Best wishes to all from Don.

Tuesday, December 31, 2013

The Earthrise Diary (December 2013)

THE EARTHRISE DIARY (December 2013)

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).

The Phone Call

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.

jillalexander@shaw.ca

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.

(g) The Overview is a short Australian novel set at Earthrise (about 32-k words) and is also a sequel to The Summer River.

(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).

(l) The Midge Toccata, a caprice (26,105 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.

Saturday, November 30, 2013

The Earthrise Diary (November 2013)

THE EARTHRISE DIARY (November, 2013)

Don Diespecker

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina

Monologue

The editor at 132 months

It’s been quite a month: a significant number of severe storms along the coast, particularly, and on two occasions, hail. This will hardly be news for any Diary Reader in Australia because the storms have been almost continuous along most of the east coast for thousands of kilometers. Readers elsewhere will perhaps nod sagely and note that Global Warming and Climate Change are now making themselves felt everywhere on Earth. Lots of words (happily, mostly fiction) are being written at Earthrise; son Carl visited after returning from running the NYC Marathon (within hours, his brother, Nick, sent links from Ottawa that enabled our seeing static views of Carl in the race); the computer Mouse (the Mouse that prefers an Upper Case M) suffered a setback and stopped the machine in its tracks, said difficulty was sorted and a New Mouse installed. I began writing this Diary opening at a time when the river was painfully low, the ‘lawn’ dry and desperate-looking and covered with crisp brown leaves distributed by hot winds. Too much sitting at the computer writing is not good for anyone’s health, especially mine, and I’ve been averaging more than 2,000 words each day of fiction writing (and, yes, drafting a novel that grows by about 15,000 words a week is a joyful experience). Getting up and tottering about or wringing the hands or clutching the brow is also good and healthy; gardening and mowing are excellent aides during needed breaks and walking always helps. There are still decorative displays of flood debris in the gardens closest to the river and instead of wildly attacking this bizarre cleanup and finishing it (writing has priority), I apportion the cleanup jobs as being 10-minutes, 20-minutes or 30-minutes exercises and each one becomes a happy achievement rather than an onerous task. Mowing is a movement meditation. The mow always begins out in the centre of Big Lawn where the Dog’s Garden is and where Their Tree remains festooned with debris above where they sleep the Big Sleep. Mowing begins as a circular cut made wider and wider and becomes simply so much Ordinary Work that the mower becomes a tireless part of the Mow.

I begin this Diary with a description of a typical walk that coincides with the start of the storms here and the arrival of much-needed storm rain and showers.

I remember the time I went boldly out the front door and a snake was playfully hanging in my face and there were no untoward eventualities other than some hectic sidestepping and back flipping and a soaring increase to my blood pressure. I go slowly down the new front steps, looking and listening. The local birds are singing like mad. Perhaps it’s because of the rain, the new greenness abounding, everything moving at high revs. This is the Earthrise spring in 2013: droughty and as dry as a chip one week, then Crash Bang Rain and Big Hail, the next. Even the eucalypts are splitting and shedding their barks early this year and the jacarandas too have flowered early. But it’s the birds that are significant: they sound happy, dare I say. Why else would they sing so melodiously? They’ve been doing that for days now, ever since the electrical storms and the thundery showers started. There have been such heavy showers that they broke into the ABC RN weather forecasts and even ensured their getting a mention: “a flood watch for the Bellinger River” (this famous river, this meandering jewel, this serpentine stream bending light; our river, my river). I duck my head and wander through beneath the house and as I come down the track to the lawn level I see the air busy with wee flying beasties and although I can’t be sure quite what they are, that’s unimportant. What’s important is that they’re busy, using airspace, doing their flying thing and probably happily so. To wonder whether flying insects are happily flying is perhaps not a frequent practice in the local community (I’m guessing) but I do it frequently because this is perfectly OK for storytellers and I tend to see myself these days as a teller of stories, some of them true and even newsworthy stories and some that are fictions inspired by being precisely where I am in the world. Perhaps that’s also an Old Age thing? I see too that the air is again showing many silken strands catching the light, some of them anchored, a few drifting in the heavy morning air. These silken strands as we all know have fashionably skinny diameters to be measured in microns yet the rising sun makes them appear to be more than they are. I think of the anchored ones as hunting lines: as webs trap flying insects so might single lines perhaps achieve the same result but don’t quote me because this may merely be a fanciful notion. On the other hand why else would a quite small insect make astonishingly strong silken strands that must be like steel wire cables in the Small Insect World? And it’s early enough also to see a slight river mist rising downstream in the cool wet air. When I reach the road and can see almost clearly beyond the trees and their canopies the sky is pale blue. I come quietly to the bridge. The road surface is loose with broken stones (perfectly normal up here) and no matter how lightly and carefully I walk, some vibrations apparently reach the creatures below in the river’s shallows. When I peek over the edge of the bridge a half meter long eel winds sinuously through the bank weeds on its way to cover beneath the shadow of the bridge and a few meters further along a small school of moderately sized fish, mullet I think, dart away as though my almost silent arrival has been as loud as the vibrations of a passing truck. We humans are excessively noisy. I’m reminded of stalking trout early or late in the day: there is an advantage to be had when you come up behind them because they often hang midstream in faster water: they face upstream in fast or in white water, watching for incoming food, either in the stream or in the air and where their environment is dynamic and noisy. Heavy storm showers have made the river rise quickly; and it’s starting quickly again to fall so that the concrete ford alongside and downstream of the Plain’s Crossing Bridge is reappearing, drying, encouraging the eye to move to the water alongside where very small fish (not the mullet that were of catchable size) are also darting in the shallows and they’re as alert as any trout I’ve seen in colder rivers than this one. Because I live partly in the forest the appropriate place from where I can see straight up to the sky without trees obstructing my view is the far-side (east) approach. There is clear blue sky, at least for a while. I stroll on, camera in hand, its carrying cord tight around my fingers. The storm gutters on each side of the road have bee running and partly now are filled or filling with debris from the roadside and it’s this filling up of the otherwise deep roadside ditches that enables vehicles some purchase when they have to move over to allow passage to vehicles moving in the oppose direction. I have to remember to tell you that all these minutiae are details I feel I need to come to terms with because the story I’m writing is also in parts the true story of what I am able to see when I walk along the road. When driving, the road and the roadside world are seen differently, if you see what I mean and one has to be able to appreciate both views. The driver of any vehicle must necessarily see straight ahead most of the time on this road that is barely single-lane in places and a dodgy almost-two-lanes in others; the walker can pause and then see through windowed foliage what the driver may never see: glimpses past huge clumps of bamboo, my across-the-river neighbor’s picturesque gardens in chiaroscuro light and shade, gardens at their early morning best. The walker also will be more aware or aware in a very different way of loose stones along the road (we are, up here, Beyond the Bitumen and the ‘road’ is crushed aggregate only, well pot-holed, not often graded and compacted, and seldom if ever compacted to optimum density). Here now is a real-life example of a childhood injury fitting into the current drafts of the new story I’m writing. One afternoon in 1940 or 1941 I was riding my pushbike at the side of the bitumen road in Pilgrim’s Rest (the old gold-mining village in the Transvaal). A worker on his way home from the Central Reduction Works passed me going in the opposite direction. Precisely as he passed opposite me one of his car tires caught the edge of a stone on the road and propelled it violently to strike me on the right ankle. The driver was unlikely ever to have known this, but the shock and sudden pain was intense and I’ve remembered it for more than 70 years. At the time I was amazed that there was no break and no permanent damage. That long-ago incident came in handy when I was drafting a short scene in the novel, “Happiness”: one protagonist, during a rehabilitation exercise (having been wounded in the right foot and ankle by shrapnel in Afghanistan), is pushing a bicycle (and using it as a walking frame) along Darkwood Road (i.e., in the road next to Earthrise) when the wheel and tire of a passing car flings a stone that strikes him on the ankle: he stumbles and falls heavily &c &c. I remembered well my own accident as I describe this scene in the draft. The driver in my story who had pulled out to pass the stranger is mother of the principal female protagonist in the story and she provides first aid and in ensuing scenes it becomes clear that this meeting will have been a happy one and the start of subsequent happiness between the ‘victim’ and a family that befriends the soldier; and so forth.

On another matter entirely: a few more words about birds this November. Each time I walk along the road I see small finches alongside me hopping along the top strand of the barbed wire fence that is the boundary between Darkwood Road and the long Happenstance paddock. Perhaps this is just a coincidence; perhaps not: the little birds seem very aware of me plodding along the dusty road and it’s as if this is a game of sorts for the birds. Noticing this innocent scene also constitutes research if I mention it somewhere in the draft novel. It’s just an observation, something seen in passing that might support some of the prose I write elsewhere in a fiction. Or it might even be serendipity? Wikipedia has something to add here: Serendipity is an aptitude for making desirable discoveries by accident. Horace Walpole so named a faculty possessed by the heroes of a tale called The Three Princes of Serendip. Naturally I enjoy serendipitous experiences and highly value them when I’m properly aware of them.

While walking I pass the horses and the new foal in the above- mentioned paddock. The foal is getting used to me stopping and gazing, and my seeking a photo. This reminds me that I’ve written a scene set in this paddock and it now needs some repairing (rather than redrafting) because the fictional paddock has accommodated an aircraft taking off and flying out of the valley and I need to arrange to have the fictional horses elsewhere. I need hardly say that flying out of this valley from a paddock may be possible for certain pilots flying particular machines and that such an operation would be dangerous in the extreme: overhead power lines, high trees to 50-m, extremely tight turns, lots of horsepower (sorry) to climb powerfully and fast). Why not simply exclude the horses from this fictive airfield that’s really a big paddock and so remove all difficulties, do I hear you cry? Because, dear Reader, I want the fiction to approximate the reality, if that’s at all possible. Yes, it’s a novel, a fiction, and that hardly matters; nonetheless, I feel the need to explore umpteen different bits of research to determine whether my fictional aircraft scene has veracity (and that’s all part of the fun of writing).

Having recently included in the Diary the photo of a flowering jacaranda, I’m also aware that the jacaranda is in my neighbour’s paddock, rather than at Earthrise. I might be exploiting my neighbour’s tree, paddock and the horses, so I’d better be more careful lest I’m presented with an Invoice or a Lawsuit (and what if the story is a success, sells like hotcakes and major movie companies fight for the right to make “Happiness” into a Big Motion Picture)? I’ll have to watch my step…

Seriously, though, I’m not giving away Secrets of the Craft: it seems entirely reasonable for a writer to write what he or she knows, is familiar with to some extent and can also describe more or less competently. On my walks I take photographs, particularly of the river in its different moods and in the present story now being drafted, the river (almost) as character in the narrative plays its part, too. Believe it or not, I generally learn something new every time I walk for exercise, observe and photograph: noticing Potential Literary Stuff is often what I do; it’s part of my life.

A little more on birds: I’ve been pleasantly surprised this month by a shrike thrush that daily sings close to the house. Sometimes these grey quite large songsters potter about on the decks here hunting insects in nooks and crannies: they sing magnificently in a strong complex voice. My bird guide has considerable information, e.g., “The name “shrike-thrush,” a conjunction of the names of two dissimilar families, is not an ideal one for these birds, but until a more suitable alternative becomes popular (perhaps “gudilang” from the Aboriginal) it is preferred here to the alternative “thrush” which suggests even more strongly an untrue relationship. Shrike-thrushes, though plain in plumage, are remarkable for the richness and purity of their songs. Of particular note in tis respect is the tropical Brown-breasted (or Sandstone) Shrike-thrush, whose liquid notes are heightened by echoes among the sandstone gorges.” There is much more, but have a look Online if you’re curious. I think, and can’t be sure, that the species doing a gig here is the Grey Shrike-thrush. Its voice has a: “Wide range of melodious calls based on “pip pip pip pip ho-ee;” harsh “yorick.” There! That’s what the book advises and it certainly rings a bell for me. (See Peter Slater’s A Field Guide To Australian Birds. Volume Two. Passerines. Rigby: 1979).

On an oppressively stormy Sunday afternoon, November 10, I glanced up from the keyboard toward the tail end of the rapids and the rocky bank opposite the house: a big fluffy bird had a talon hooked through a silvery fish and was dragging it laboriously over the stones and away from the water. The big ball of fluffy feathers looked like a young sea eagle or osprey; the fish looked surprisingly big and was perhaps an old perch. I grabbed the camera and craftily eased through the front door, bent over the rail along the deck and tried to get a picture but couldn’t without becoming obvious and interrupting both the bird’s meal and it’s lifestyle. The fish was a good 300-mm or a foot or so long. I couldn’t see either head or tail clearly. The bird held tightly to the fish while glancing about and only started using it’s beak to tear off mouthfuls when it was sure that nothing was about to disturb the kill. I was relieved that nobody appeared for a swim: it was baking hot and the storm was imminent. Nature red in tooth and claw and all that, it seemed.

Creative Writing

My guest writer this month is Sharon Snir. I’ve included below an excerpt from a longer piece of writing describing Sharon’s home.

Dog Days

Sharon Snir

PK arrived as an 8-weeks old puppy and became our sixth child. For the first few years he found more ways to escape than we thought possible. No sooner had we built a new fence and closed another exit than he would find another way to roam the streets and visit his canine pals. He was our ever-loving loyal companion for fifteen years. Deeply loved. He was my footrest for the three years I wrote my first book, The 12 Levels of Being and he allowed us to walk over and around him as if he were a breathing rug, especially in the last year or so.

On his last night, I brought my pillow down and lay on the wooden kitchen floor beside him. His back legs could no longer raise his body. I placed a towel under his rear end because I knew he was humiliated when he could not control himself. It is painful to see a dog in shame. Arm over his old shoulder I whispered that it was time and he would be all right.

We all gathered around him in the morning and called our eldest daughter, Sheli in Israel to be part of the end. The vet, a very kind and compassionate man arrived at 8 am. Each of us thanked PK for giving us such unconditional love. We all placed out hands on him as he turned his head as if to say good-bye to each of us. Orly sat guard over his body wrapped in a pink sheet. We carried him up together, covered him and said a few words. Our three boys and Oren dug a deep hole in the back of the yard. We placed a piece of wood near him and mourned for a few years. I missed him with all my heart.

Five years later Oren and I finally agreed we would buy another dog and tiny sweet Chino arrived. He was my baby and I love him beyond words. Never in my wildest imagination could I have believed I would do with him what I am about to do. After Daddy died we inherited Beau and after a little time of getting used to each other Chino and Beau became dear and wonderful friends. They sleep next to each other, eat from the same bowl, walk together and with the exception of the times I allow them upstairs, where Chino lies on our bed and Beau on my meditation rug, they are together all the time.

The time has come to move on. I feel ready to leave this wonderful home but there is pain too. For Oren his need to return to Israel is obvious to those of us who know and love him. It is time to reconnect to his spirit that has patiently waited for his return to the land of his birth. We are going back for a few months to see and touch and taste and feel the healing energy of Israel. And with that decision comes the pain. Not in leaving the house or even Australia, though leaving our granddaughter for a few months will be hard, but having to find a new home for my Chino and his adopted brother Beau, my father’s beloved dog who, rescued at the eleventh hour by my sister, Donna, we inherited when Dad died. And now: to actually hand him over to another family and say goodbye. He is an amazingly intelligent dog: wise and very chatty. We have talked telepathically since he was a baby and I have told him. He knows. He is not particularly happy about it but he understands. That does not make it any easier for me. All I want to do is hold him, smell him and tell him I love him. He came into my life when I was not laughing very much. Oren had retired and life was not flowing easily. I needed a dog and Chino was my fluffy angel. I called him my substitute grandchild.

In a few weeks I will leave this home and close the door for the last time. Will I turn around and shed a tear? I’m sure I will. I’m sure I will look back and say ‘thank you, thank you, thank you’ for being our sanctuary for the past twenty-three years.

As for the future: I have no idea how it will unfold, but one thing I am sure of, it will be an adventure, a great and wonderful adventure. And I’m ready.

Sharon Snir is an author, psychotherapist and consultant living in Sydney, NSW, Australia

Sharonthru12@gmail.com

Afterword

I was completing this month’s Diary when a tree branch broke from an old tree next to the house. The crack came from high above, from one of the old eucalypts next to the front steps. The break was loud and clear and was immediately followed by a loud swishing noise: either the top or a big branch was arriving from on high, crown first. Had it fallen butt end first the heavier part might have come through the roof close to where I was working, but it had not and when I went out to have a look I knew the house and I had escaped disaster by a mere couple of meters. I separated the remains with a machete and had to cut the main portion of the branch in three places before I could drag the remnants from the area. Very heavy green branches 150-mm or so in diameter and falling from about 40-m will punch through galvanized steel sheeting as if through paper. Luck or chance here plays its part and has done for almost 30 years. Maybe I’ll be fortunate and lucky a while longer. Being able to write at all is a blessing and one’s writing capabilities benefit from good health and the writer being more or less in one piece. I always reflect solemnly and gratefully on near misses because I’m attempting to publish such writings as I can whilst the going’s good.

Another fast month begins to dwindle and summer rushes in. The weather now is atypical or dramatically new: it once was very different here in spring. I’m assuming that there will never again in our lifetimes be ‘steady, predictable and quite ordinary weather in each season.’ As much as I admire our meteorologists and their fine abilities to accurately forecast the weather, I’m hoping for even more accuracy in the future, viz, one or two minutes warnings on my computer screen that lightning strikes are imminent in the area where I live. I write this tongue in cheek, of course, but wouldn’t it be great if such a facility were available to computer drivers? This month the power has several times failed and then come on again within a couple of seconds; but a couple of times the power has remained off for the more expected extended period, once when I was drafting the story mentioned above. Scary weather is no accident and Global Warming and Climate Change are well and truly upon us. And wouldn’t it be salutary if our politicians could determinedly address these phenomena positively, rather than behaving like mad babies? Fortunately this Mac is able to save what’s being worked on (though I sometimes lose ten or 20 words I hadn’t managed to save before lightning zapped the electricity supply or infrastructure). Losing a long multi-chapter file would be a very bad experience and not at all good for one’s health. Remember how that kind of thing happened only a few years ago and happened to a variety of computers?

We can but hope.

The cicadas have been tuning up and practising their repertoires. The eucalypt barks have been splitting and clattering to ground almost all month: the shedding now seems complete and the trunks shine pristinely in the Wet. The local birds sing as beautifully as ever (whilst putting up with severe thunderstorms, lightning strikes and heavy showers). Darkwood Road and its verges continue slowly to be improved and drivers and riders daily dodge potholes and loose stones and pray for their windscreens. And everything changes; it always has and always will.

With best wishes and Season’s Greetings to all Diary Readers wherever you may be across our stormy planet, from Don.