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<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Easter Sunday- the day when Donald Trump said he thought we\u2019d be going to church and celebrating the end of the plague.<\/p>\n
\u201cWouldn\u2019t that be sweet?\u201d he’d said.<\/p>\n
Overnight I hear that 2000 people a day have died for four days in the US, many of them in New York, many in the hospital Shelley overlooks, and can see into.<\/p>\n
Early in the morning on the phone, my middle brother, who lives in the mountains of Queensland, exploded with laughter when he heard we\u2019d caught no fish.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s impossible. That river\u2019s full <\/em>of fish.\u201d<\/p>\n He paused. He inherited my mother\u2019s handsome looks, and he was her favourite. He was allowed to colour in the outline illustrations of not just colouring books but \u00a0proper story books, whereas I was banned because, no matter how hard I held the pencils,\u00a0they had a wild life of their own.\u00a0He was even allowed to colour in my Pixie O\u2019Harris book about fairies; my\u00a0<\/em>book; I still remember standing resentfully watching while he coloured in\u00a0my\u00a0<\/em>elves and\u00a0my\u00a0<\/em>toadstools and my<\/em> fairies. What was the magic that kept his pencils inside the lines? \u00a0So \u00a0at least I know why I resent him- because of that book. But why is he mean to me?<\/p>\n \u201cAnd do you still have all that mud?\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s impossible for him to keep the scorn out of his voice.<\/p>\n \u201cYes, still got that mud.\u201d<\/p>\n I want to add that I could get rid of it if I raked it, but it\u2019s home to thousands of tiny crabs, and raking makes them decamp. I gaze down their hole homes and see their little terrified eyes glinting up at me. I don\u2019t want to make them homeless.\u00a0 But he\u2019d think that a proper person would rake and bring back the clean, golden sand.<\/p>\n A month ago, in the long-gone days before the plague, he\u2019d borrowed a friend\u2019s house in Bar Point, about 2 km from here, on the Hawkesbury proper, not on a muddy creek, but with deep water and yellow sand.<\/p>\n \u201cYou should\u2019ve bought a house there. No mud, proper electricity. Fish everywhere. And no worries about storing rainwater. They\u2019ve got a huge dam of the purest, most beautiful water.\u201d<\/p>\n Families are like museums. What you were in childhood, you are \u00a0all your life. I was the silly little sister. I am still the silly little sister with a house in the wrong bay, who can\u2019t catch a fish on a river full of fish. Who resents, decades later, colouring in in a book about Fairies. I’m glad I didn’t tell him in a well-engineered fish trap, we’d landed a river rat.<\/p>\n After our chat, I\u2019m crankily determined to catch a fish. It\u2019s a rising tide, the sun is\u00a0 shining, there\u2019s no wind. Fishermen say you catch fish on a rising tide.\u00a0 So we arm ourselves with a thermos of coffee and our last four gluten free biscuits and motor across the river to Andy\u2019s little cove: he said that you row there, drop in a line, pull up a fish, and row home, all in 20 minutes. \u00a0GG has a rod at the prow of the boat, and I have a line at the stern. \u00a0\u00a0At the moment we arrive, so do throngs of orange jelly fish. Fishermen say you can\u2019t catch fish where there\u2019s jellyfish. I count 25 jellyfish floating by, all majestically curling and uncurling their yellow bells and lazily pulsing their pale tentacle. GG says a throng of jelly fish should be called a clag, as in clag glue. We fish for 3 hours, until the tide turns. And catch nothing.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n At home, we have a long talk to K about her watching less tv, and helping us more. She says tv helps her forget an autistic childhood of being bullied. We argue that work can help you forget it. She agrees, fearfully, to watch one hour less tv, and do two chores a day. We can nominate the chores. And she begins straight away. She cooks lunch- lentil clag. One more meal of lentils left i the lentil jar, which had seemed bottomless when we began. I gather, clean, blanch and cook warrigal greens.\u00a0 It all seems less a burden with her help, even though we\u2019ve eaten through our patch of \u00a0warrigal greens and I\u2019m now gathering them now from Adam\u2019s steep hillside, trying not to slide over his sea-wall and into the mud. \u00a0For her second chore, she agrees to choose between plant identification apps for me, and downloads “Picture This” (free for seven days then $29.99 a year). I\u2019ve never got around to downloading one, partly because I must first find my diary to look up my 20 digit long password.<\/p>\n With Picture This I kneel in the veggie garden and find to my delight, from my out-of- date spinach seeds, amongst the weeds, two \u2013 two! oh, joy! two actual real-life spinach plants. They don\u2019t match each other; one is the tweezers I originally spotted, the other has a flattened leaf. They must be two different sorts of spinach. Tomorrow I\u2019ll weed and give them a chance.<\/p>\n But in the perspex box, where I sowed an entire packet of My Fothergill tomato seeds and 50 Mr Fothergill spinach seeds, I find only a pumpkin seedling and a garlic weed. I sit back on my bottom in the muddy garden, astonished. How is this possible? Is there a rebel at Mr Fothergill\u2019s mixing up the seeds and laughing maniacally at what we customers discover?<\/p>\n Spellbound with Picture This, I walk down the track to heroic C\u2019s house,\u00a0\u00a0 and find all along the way milk thistle weeds, which Picture This says are pleasant to eat. To eat! Any weed would be pleasant as a change from warrigal greens! I pull one up, carry it home, plant it in the veggie garden and hose it encouragingly.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve gone up to the house when suddenly a boat races into the bay and streams towards our house at great speed. Two strangers wave. I wave back, wondering. As they come close, a woman pops her head around the dashboard shouting like an Old Testament prophet:<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re not alone\u201d.<\/p>\n A familiar voice, though my eyes see only a blur. Our jetty is full; \u00a0boats, the last firewood bag, the huge rubbish bags awaiting the barge, crab nets, the illegal prawn net we still haven\u2019t figured out. I run down to Adam\u2019s jetty, which is clear. The boat swerves in a circle. \u00a0At last my blind eyes can see it\u2019s my therapist, and a man driver. They skid to a stop. I grab their boat, careful about the \u00a0prescribed 2 metre distance.<\/p>\n \u201cI came to tell you you\u2019re not alone\u201d.<\/p>\n I\u2019m gaping, finding a rope, throwing it over their prow rail, asking how on earth they come to be here.<\/p>\n She says she could never tell me because of breaking professional distance, but they bought a house on Bar Point two years ago.<\/p>\n \u201cWe love your bay, but we\u2019re not pioneers\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cBar Point! I was just talking about it with my brother. He says the fishing\u2019s great there.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe never catch a thing.\u201d<\/p>\n In the course of conversation, she mentions where the locals get their online food orders delivered to The Ruins, much closer to them and us than DB\u2019s boat yard.<\/p>\n \u201cThe benefits of having a community\u201d, I say wistfully.<\/p>\n For comfort, she hands me a plastic bag of oranges, and there\u2019s introductions to her husband, and GG, who\u2019s just arrived smiling. He hangs back when there\u2019s company so I\u2019m always pleased to see him arrive smiling. He remembers them coming to the last production of his play, \u2018The Boys.\u2019 Playwrights remember these kindnesses, even when the play sells out.<\/p>\n We invite them in, but her husband is twitchy about the tide.<\/p>\n \u201cI won\u2019t be able to get out of here soon\u201d.<\/p>\n I\u2019m about to say that the tide only turned an hour ago, and it won\u2019t be low until 5 pm, (three hours away) and then only it\u2019s only a point 6 which would probably be fine for his hull, but my voice falls away. I\u2019m a nerd, a nerd in muddy trackies, an unravelling jumper, and hair brushed two days ago if that.\u00a0Whereas my therapist is one of those women who\u2019s naturally glamorous. She\u2019d wear mud, prickles and spider webs and they\u2019d be fashion accessories.<\/p>\n We chat, my therapist, her husband, GG and me, and my heart suddenly bursts into singing.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re not alone\u201d. \u201cYou\u2019re not alone\u201d<\/p>\n They\u2019ve come to stay in their house at Bar Point for 6 weeks, maybe longer. I ask could we have a holiday from the concept of professional distance.<\/p>\n She laughs.\u201d Oh no, never\u201d<\/p>\n But she\u2019s going to pick up seedlings at Bunnings to plant a veggie garden, and generously agrees to pick up some for me.<\/p>\n \u201cIf they\u2019ve got any,\u201d \u00a0laughs GG, remembering his trip there.<\/p>\n I ask her about the water at Bar Point, mentioning my brother. and his house there. \u00a0She says she\u2019d never drink it- that\u2019d be dangerous. Children swim in that dam. The water would be full of nasties.<\/p>\n We sadly wave them off, but an ancient impulse seizes me and I’m texting my brother:<\/p>\n \u201cI hope you didn\u2019t drink the water while you stayed at Bar Point. My doctor, who\u2019s had a house there for 2 years, says it\u2019s dangerous.”<\/p>\n Take that! Serves you right, for keeping inside the lines when I couldn’t!<\/p>\n And then, because I didn’t fare with mum as badly as my oldest brother, who she believed was not her real child, so she waited all her life for her real child to turn up, and he probably still waits for his real mother; because, though I wasn’t her favourite, i”m happier now than him, I delete the text.<\/p>\n But \u00a0for even thinking of that text, I get the punishment I deserve.<\/p>\n At night, k is very difficult. She\u2019s charming all afternoon, then suddenly, unexpectedly, a full autistic meltdown. Even when she was little, her meltdowns were cataclysmic, with horizontal tears that leaped out and splashed the furthest wall. We sit shattered, as we did in the old days, \u00a0till she subsides. She’s shattered as well. It may be the change in routine, always difficult for her. Or it may be the warrigal greens, which, considering the way their leaves grow in a cross, must be cruciferous. The citizen science site we follow (www.cfsremisison.com<\/a>) shows that cruciferous vegetables increase the symptoms of autism by encouraging \u00a0the overgrowth of wrong bacteria. However short we are of vegetables, she \u00a0must not eat warrigal greens anymore. There\u2019s still the remains of\u00a0 a packet of frozen beans, the end of a leek, a bendy stalk of celery and half a sweet potato. I\u2019ll \u00a0make sure she eats only those tomorrow and till Tuesday night, and hope.<\/p>\n At night in bed, while GG sleeps, I finally get to watch,\u00a0 through tangled headphones, an Easter Service on Youtube, and howl again over the yearning in the singing, the ambition of our human hopes, the puniness of us who have the genius of gods but the ueslessness of butterflies. \u00a0Cockroaches do better work than us. Viruses do better work. \u00a0Worms, far better. I weep quietly, shaking the mattress until GG murmurs in sleepy protest,\u00a0 at the songs about the love of God. I curve my legs and nestle into GG\u2019s back and feet- men\u2019s bodies sleep so warm- and try again to pray.<\/p>\n I believe you love us, despite who we are.\u00a0I believe. I think I believe. Help me my disbelief.<\/p>\n Pity us. Save us. Pity us.<\/p>\n And then I hear again:<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re not alone.\u201d<\/p>\n