Written 1 May, 2020
This morning the pot belly with the long-lasting, hot-burning ironbark wood, a few pieces of the ton I wheelbarrowed in from the jetty, is making the room cosy – 18 inside, outside 10.
In the city, this would be ho-hum, but here it’s a triumph. The mundane is fun here.
Yesterday morning, one minute it was like this:
And suddenly, like this:
(The noise is the generator to give us power; I was too excited by the storm to turn it off).
We had been just about to step into the boat for another rush trip to the city- again meds at the Darlinghurst Post office. We couldn’t go anywhere, only home.
At 4 pm, we all sat on the sofa in a row and watched the launch of my friend Libby Hathorn’s new book, No Never. She’d written it with her daughter Lisa, who read the book aloud. Her daughter Georgia, who’d inspired the book, shouted all the “No, never”s charmingly, though sometimes from behind a sofa. Jessica Rowe, who’d been a little girl with Lisa once, launched it.
Lisa and Georgia, the original inspiration for No Never, when she refused to tidy up her lego.
Libby Hathorn at her launch.
Tomorrow, we’re due to pick up our food order from Homer’s Kitchen, Brooklyn, though they’ve just emailed to say there’ll be no meat, chicken or fish in our box. Their suppliers had run out! But we can’t become vegetarians- can we? As celiacs and me with Sjogren’s, dairy makes K fall asleep, and worse, and me, lame – and worse…..
They rang back and said we’d get the chicken drumsticks. after all. Another customer must’ve changed their mind. My bare cupboard phobia was hugely relieved. I remember, a long time ago, the poet Kate Lewellyn telling me that without potatoes in the house, she felt under siege. I feel under siege without chicken.
i promised to spend the afternoon writing the novel, charming myself up as I must do, but first i sneaked a peek at Facebook and discovered this from Shelley in terrifying New York:
Today was good. We didn’t go for our walk because my hip was against it. We watched the serialisation of Sally Rooney’s “Normal People” and this was about it for me. Tomorrow we shall return to the Park and me to my novel. How is the generator holding up?I loved your description of what you learned to do to start it up, and the dialogue between you and the ornery millionaire.Do you find people, utter strangers, tell you all about their lives? How do people know we are storytellers, even without our saying a word about it? Maybe they just know we are listeners.
She added a little later:
The Oxford University virologists are going ahead with the covid vaccine that works for monkeys. They are starting human trials in May. If a vaccine came out, is there any way your body could take it?
Sending Love,
Shelley.
Thank you for remembering, dear one. I’d have to ask my endocrinologist, but it seems to me that the fallout from a vaccine might be better than what the tragic world is showing us, the fallout from catching the disease. But who knows?
I go back to work and finish at 6, so had to rush out to put on dinner. GG and K help cheerfully,. They’ve enjoyed their afternoons, him writing his play, her immersed in Netflix. And tonight, racing down the steps in the dark at 7.15 for herbs for a salad, thinking of nothing more than whether to pick thyme or tarragon or both, a reminder came of the wilderness all about me. Something about a gravity of silence nearby startled me, and there, perched on the steps railing, was a tawny frogmouth owl. It seemed to pull out of the air all the sounds around, the crickets, the kookaburra’s last mockery for the day, the wind roaring through the thousands of trees on the opposite bank, the plopping of fish, the sucking of holes in the mud where tiny crabs hide. The owl stared at me and I stared at it. Awed, it was me who moved first, I fell back on my bottom, and dropped the torch. By the time i’d picked it up, the owl had silently disappeared.
I hadn’t taken my phone, so here’s its picture from the web:
