dance and drop . raindrops . rose petals
Are you getting this rain? This is what I was texting to my neighbourly Melbourne gardeners yesterday. Are you getting this rain? Isn't it delicious!?
I live a life straddling hemispheres. With a farm and family in Illinois, family in California, family in Canada and gardens and more family in New Zealand and now garden and growing family in Australia. I move about - my writing and my work in my laptop under my arm. I find my life full of challenges and joys and an eclectic mix of stories and knowledge and memories for you.
Time is a strange creature. Cruel really. But joyous. Joy is my word of the week!
I remember having a conversation with a very onto-it, very nimble-minded old lady, she had just turned 104. She had been a leading party figure in Manhattan Beach in the roaring twenties, and her house on the beach with the swimming pool and pool house and outdoor bar and beach gardens was packed with mementoes of that time: pictures of stars, Japanese screens, and fringed dresses hanging beside little black dresses in the back of her wardrobe. Lamps and satin cushions and chaise lounge next to stippled orange 50’s armless chairs. Leaded windows and cosy porches.
Her old house was painted faded beach green sandwiched between two huge high rise modern apartment buildings - she had been offered millions by developers to sell her property but she smiled widely at them flashing the gold in her teeth as she declined, but do join me for a gin young man, do you have a light?
Her little house settled comfortably between these modern glass and steel snubbing them gently.
We sat in the old sea blasted chairs on the verandah, her walker stashed beside her, looking across the boardwalk to the little bit of sea view the high rises had left us.
She had been telling me about the period in the late twenties when they would go out in dresses made of tissue. Tissue, darling. And if you were caught in the rain, the tissue simply melted. She said. “We rouged our nipples in those days,” she added, with a decidedly wicked glint in her eye. Her neat white bob swinging.
“Do you think a lot about those wild days?” I asked her, clumsily.
She was quiet a long time.
“No,” she said. “I think of the things I got wrong. The moments I misstepped. The things I never said. That’s what I think about”
There was no answer for that. I was half her age. What did I know. Time gently moves us forward. Whether we have learned our lessons or not.
Her name was Great Aunt Sis and she gave up drinking at 96 because after a few too many dirty martinis she got her walker backwards, stood up and stumbled. Mortified. She never drunk alcohol again.
She was a tall woman. Supremely elegant. Wealthy. She never spent a cent more than she had to and would send us clear across town in her death trap of an old Buick to buy bananas that were a dime cheaper than down the road.
I visited her every year for a good five years and she never once stepped foot in the kitchen.
One evening she had been teaching me (from her chair) how to make a sidecar in the front lounge, with the good cognac, in the correct glass with just the right twist of lemon and a slice of orange. “Can’t you have just one drink?” I asked. She eyed me. As though I was every kind of fool. “Good Lord, girl.” she said. “What on earth is the point of only one drink. Go get me a new pack of cigarettes from the kitchen cabinet and switch the channel, it’s almost time for the news”.
I rotated the dial on her old monster of a TV in its mahogany cabinet and left the room sipping my drink as I went.
She called me the girl as in “tell the girl to go out and pick some roses for the table”.
It never rained in Manhattan Beach, LA, California when I visited and when she was tucked up in bed early at night I could walk for miles along the boardwalks.
Watching the sea.
It is raining here in Melbourne, Australia. And you know how I love the rain.
Rain in the rose petals. I know it feels like the fabric of our society is being torn apart by a raging beast. This feels really scary to those of us who have not lived through war and upheaval before. Spend a little time each day intentionally finding little moments of joy. We need tenacity and persistence. Both good skills for a long life.
Find joy like rain pooling in the fallen rose petals. My rose petal mulch is bring me such joy lately.
My Mum was an artist and told me once that in a painting she made sure that each corner was different from the others. I am not sure why but find I unconsciously apply her rules to my photographs.
I was writing about rain here:
A little of the farm back in Illinois.
The PopPops. I don’t know but it does not look like these little pigs have grown at all. It is hard to tell with photographs.
Two farm helpers. Rhonda brings her grandchildren out with her to the farm for farm therapy a couple of times a week.
She put John on the tractor and got him to help. If you look through the trees you will see the size of the compost pile. It is getting big. I love a good compost pile!
For Happy Earth Day they are planting the oaks and maples we grew.
Oaks grow slow and maples are fast and both have their place in our forest. Down in the Fellowship Forest by the creek that is really a ditch.
A large portion of the upgrade donations you make here go to trees to help mitigate the pollution we create here on this gentle earth.
This is one of the tracks I am listening to while I am writing today. Music does this magic thing. It takes you straight back to a time and a place. This one takes me to a party in Onekawa, Napier, New Zealand when I must have been around 16? It was at this party that I realized how hard being part of a crowd was. I have never been much for parties. I need a reason. A task. A role to be comfortable. Shyness is my curse.
But shyness is pushed aside by music. In the US when I was 17 in high school ( I was a field scholar) we used to go to dances in halls in small country towns. We would drive singing through the hot night, collected from our country houses, windows down, passing cigarettes between us, clothed in not much. Tight bellbottoms snapped with buttons, flowers crocheted down the hip, little ittbitty tops held up with strings. Small boobs (breast enlargements were unheard of). Tiny waists. No bras. Boots with heels. Hems exactly hitting the floor. I would walk straight onto the dance floor - it was all about the dance floor. We never carried purses or cell phones ( they weren’t invented yet), no ID, no nothing, I had a little zip pocket in my high leather boots with enough change to call my host family if I needed help. (Though I never did, but there were phone booths everywhere). We never wore coats. We carried nothing. One of us would have the car keys jammed in her pocket. Cherry brandy hidden somewhere in the car parked in a field by the hall. We were there to dance. Not to chat. I was at least. There to dance. The bands were loud and played covers. And we would dance. Dance hard, all rhythm like whipping trees, stomping the floor, curls flying, arms soaring like weapons, we danced in circles - I did this thing where I bent backward at the knees until my back was parallel with the floor, arched, touched the floor behind my head with my hand then streamed back up to my feet laughing, all in time with the music- laughing hard. My shyness forgotten in the music.
I think about that time sometimes and wonder where I went. Where did that part of me go.
Sometimes when I listen to the music from that period thats what I do in my head. Dance. Dance with no restraint. The only other time I have danced with no care is with a baby on my hip and kids at the table. So maybe again soon - yes?
Have a lovely day.
Put your hands into the earth close to you today. Check for earth health. Most of us have a little patch we are responsible for. Even only a tiny patch beside the path on the way to the gate. Or under our house. Or behind it. Own it. Cherish it.
Celi
I have finished reading The Blue Castle. See below for the completed narration.
I am working on creating a guided meditation for you. Just a light one. Gentle A rest for you. In between books. This is the meditation I would guide my at-risk drama students through - whole classrooms of them. I will let you know when it is ready.
The Blue Castle by LM Montgomery, read by Cecilia Gunther
What would you do if you had only a year left to live?
This is so amazingly joyous to read all through, Cecelia. The visuals spanning decades, from Great Aunt Sis remembering the twenties and missteps and missed words, to you in bellbottoms, to the IL farm and the rain in Melbourne, all of it is the joy of living. Being alive. Thank you.
I agree that the times are tumultous, but none of you know what real fear is. I do. I spent a year in Viet Nam never knowing if we went out that day, would I come back OK, would I be killed, would I be maimed for life, would I get that "million dollar wound" and go home? You don't know what fear is until you have lived like that for a day, let alone a year. It changed me fore ever. Those of you who are afraid now, you only know the tip of real fear. God forbid that you ever know real fear.