Old Family Photos

 

In this picture I’m dancing

with my cousin Leo –

as kind as he was handsome.

I must have been 16. He,

older by seven years. 

Now I’m 86. He’s dead.

In this one, I’m a baby,

fat and round, like the beach ball 

posed beside me (a fashion

in baby snaps back then). Pretty

curls, pretty pursed lips, and 

a solemn, shrewd, appraising stare.

Here’s my young mother

in a long winter coat. The few 

trees are bare. Her dark, wavy hair, 

parted in the centre, is pinned 

back off her forehead. She is

holding me up to the light.

Here she is again, kneeling 

in an empty field beside one 

lump of rock. She’s draped it 

with McLean tartan. Red and green. 

Her father’s tartan. (I wonder

if I’m looking at Culloden.)

Of course, she was much

older then. That was the same trip 

when she and my stepfather posed, 

all dressed up – top hat, gloves – 

to attend, of all things, a garden party 

at Buckingham Palace. Such proud smiles!

There’s my little brother, with me 

and his best friend Roger, at The Gorge – 

showing off his balsa-wood boat, The Star,

which our dad made. We are standing

knee-deep in water. That same day 

The Star escaped, tumbling the rapids.

‘Stay there!’ said our dad, pointing

at the shore, as he set off to track it

all the way down to flat water. Only

the slender mast broke. But he found us 

crowded on top of a small, flat rock, 

oblivious of raging swirls. (No photo.)

We come to me in my twenties:

bridesmaid to a childhood friend,

then to my nearest cousin; my graduation;

then all those balls I attended with Don

whom I married first time around.

Even my own wedding.

The histories continued, but

the album comes to an end. This was 

the one I inherited after my mother died, 

the one she filled – mostly with pictures

of me. She wasn’t a cuddly mother, but,

after all, she must have liked me.

Written for Friday Writings #245: Family at Poets and Storytellers United.

Looking Back

 

I see me small, on a vast lawn – a smooth green lawn surrounded by bushes, some of them berry bushes, others flowers. There are two huge weeping willows further down the yard, one on either side of the vegetable garden past the end of the lawn, beyond the wooden trellis summer-house.

I am all alone. The two-storey back of the house looms large and flat. My mother, upstairs, sometimes looks out the distant kitchen window to check on me. Her face is tiny, far away and pale, ghost-like.

Yet I don’t feel lonely. All around me the garden throbs with life. Insects are drawn to the flowers, small birds to the berries. The willow leaves, on their long dangling fronds that sweep the ground, rustle and toss, lightly and gently, in intermittent breeze.

I talk in my mind to clouds, to birds, to insects, to berries … to the rising trunks and curtaining fronds of both the soft green willows. I talk to the listeners under the ground and the watchers behind the sky.

When they reply, it is not as if to a small child. They answer all my questions, calmly. I feel rather than hear their answers. I feel, too, their assurance of my understanding.

My young mother, enclosed in the house, does, I think (I think in hindsight) feel fearfully alone … lonely …

Written for Poets and Storytellers United, Friday Writings #219.

When Everything Changed: 2.

Continued from this post.

When my father remarried, he moved my brother and me far from sparkling rivers, hilly streets, craggy mountains and the surrounding sea – to the flat, dry Mallee where his new wife had house, business, and her own children older than us.

The river there was wide and sluggish. The few trees were small and squat. My stepmother lived near an expanse of grape vines, the primary industry there. We could walk into the village by crossing an irrigation channel spanned by a wide plank. I was terrified, but I learned to walk it confidently and alone. 

My new stepsister held my hand and showed me how to place my steps. She was 18 months older than me; we’d met when Dad brought his ‘new friend’ to our home town and introduced her around. They clearly wanted their daughters to chum up. With a love of reading in common, we did. But it was puzzling. When they married, it became instantly clear.

Merrie was often away long weeks at boarding school. When she was home, we lounged on her bed talking, sneakily smoking cigarettes she pinched from her mother’s stash. She taught me how to smoke. I was 16 by then; I wanted to be sophisticated.

Navigating my stepmother’s strange moods, strict edicts, bizarre accusations and weirder punishments, and my much older step-brother’s silent, glowering resentment, was even scarier when Merrie was away. 

Our father never defended us. The only time I asked, he said, ‘I’ve had one marriage break up and I won’t let you kids wreck another!’

When I told new friends at my new school what was happening at home, they frankly disbelieved me. I was already known as a writer, a dreamer. I must be making it up.

On holidays at home with Mum and our kind, fun stepfather, I said nothing. I wanted to escape from all thoughts of that. And I believed the court ruling – term time with Dad, holidays with Mum – couldn’t be changed.  

My brother said plenty, I learned years later; but without my corroboration they thought he must be exaggerating.

It took me months to realise my stepmother was drinking heavily. She masked the smell with strong perfume, sickly-sweet.

Written for Weekly Scribblings #81 at Poets and Storytellers United: Change and Renewal, where the invitation is to write of either or both.

When Everything Changed

The thing we never saw coming, my brother and I, was our parents’ divorce. It was in 1955. I was 15. My little brother was 11. 

They called me into my brother’s bedroom where he was playing, and said they had something to tell us both. We sat down on my brother’s bed, mystified at the sudden air of solemnity. 

It’s hard now to remember that room. It was the new house they’d built, not the one we grew up in. (‘When a marriage is breaking apart,’ someone told me years later, ‘People try and glue it back together with a new baby or a new house. It never works.’) There must have been chairs; I see them sitting across from us while Dad explained that people don’t always stay married and it didn’t mean they didn’t love us any more. 

Mum would move out, and live with ‘Uncle Jack’, a family friend, after he too got divorced. We could spend as much time as we liked with both parents.

I don’t remember us crying, or even asking questions. We went numb, I think.

I do remember feeling a surge of protectiveness towards my brother – genuine, but also in a strange, ‘this is what Good Girls do’ kind of way: a role I could take on, because I didn’t know how else to react. I always wanted to do what I thought was expected of me, what was right and good behaviour in my parents’ and the world’s eyes. I worked to be seen as normal, not the oddity I secretly feared I was.

But I didn’t know what would be expected of a normal girl in this situation. Being the protective big sister (whether he actually wanted that or not) was something I could get right.

Also it was a way of quietly punishing my parents, who were doing this dreadful, disrupting thing to us. ‘You are failing your duty,’ my secret self told them silently. ‘What you’ve abandoned is my job now; I won’t fail.’

I did, though. 

Dad, rebounding, suddenly married a widow from interstate, where we went to live during school terms – our real-life Wicked Stepmother, against whom, at 15, I had little power. 

Written for Weekly Scribblings #80: Sudden Moments, at Poets and Storytellers United. 

Continued in this post.

Better Late ...

Better Late ...

It would have been easy for her to fall yet again into the family story, widely and often repeated, in which my cousin Sue should have been her daughter and I Aunty Franki’s. Mum and Sue were polite, pretty, sweet; Franki and I were seen as intellectual, improper, eccentric.

Even Aunty Franki herself used to say it. I was secretly thankful I wasn’t born to her, with her screaming, volatile marriage to Uncle Bill, her wildly erratic care of her children. No wonder Sue loved visiting us. No wonder our lifelong rivalry for Mum’s attention. (Only 18 months apart, we were the eldest of our generation.)

It must have been that last time I stayed with her (living, by then, far distant) before she broke her hip and went to hospital, then nursing home. 

It was Sue, living so much nearer, who arranged all that, visited, took her on family outings … who phoned me and said, ‘Come now!’; who was already holding her hand, sitting up close, when I arrived. Who half-stood, then sat back down, deciding not to cede first place. 

We’d fought so often to be first with her! I wasn’t going to make a scene at her deathbed. I took the other chair, held her other hand, spoke to her of all the love people were sending. 

‘No!’ said Sue. ‘Far too late for that; she can’t hear you.’ I believed otherwise, but again subsided rather than argue.

After the funeral, a cousin’s new wife, oblivious of my identity, publicly expressed condolences to Sue. 

‘You were effectively her daughter, weren’t you?’ she said. (Aunty Franki was long dead.) Sue smiled and agreed.

Another cousin caught my eye, concerned. I gave a tiny shrug. 

 

After all, Sue was indeed the daughter to her, in her final years, that I was too far away to be.

And I had that memory!

That last time I stayed with her, I’d repeated the opinion that Sue might have been a better daughter for her. 

How easy for her to have agreed unthinkingly as usual. Seeming about to, she suddenly looked hard at me, straightened, and said deliberately:

‘I’m very fond of Sue. But you’re my Daughter, and I love you.’

Written in response to Poets and Storytellers United's Weekly Scribblings #75: Between What Is Right and What Seems Easy.

Wanting to Show My New Cat to My Mum

 Wanting to Show My New Cat to My Mum

I find myself wanting to show my new cat 

to my Mum, picturing how she will like

this one in particular, so pretty and sweet;

and it’s only idly, later, I remind myself

my Mum has been dead since 1998,

and we were never all that close anyway,

couldn’t get over our suspicions of each other

(coming from being completely different 

kinds of people and never finding the right 

manner of talking together) but I’ve surely 

had enough time to get over all that, and 

I dare say she will have too, where she is:

I’m sure people rise to their highest and best

after shuffling off this mortal, and can 

love so much more; and she did after all 

like cats – though probably dogs 

better when I come to think of it – well,

regardless, I wish I could show her.

 

Poetic Asides prompt #19 for April poetry month of 2021 is to write a poem with an animal in the title.

Rebelling

Rebelling

 
At 17 I escaped, cast off her strictures 

(imposed by secret signs across rooms: to fix my hair, how to sit, when to stay silent …)

along with the gloves, hats, stockings

the fear, the conformity.

I learned to cross my legs at the knee. I learned to laugh loud.

She shuddered, calling it 'coarse'.

I was glad she was dark. I was fair, resembling Dad’s side.

Until one day someone said, 'You look so like your mother!' Then the mirror said so too.

I dreaded her forties-housewife life; kept my career long after marriage and kids.

(Forgetting her secretarial job when I was a teen – at a time when married women simply didn’t. Dad, afraid of being thought unable to provide, reluctantly agreed: better than her boredom, depression. A valued Office Manager, she finally retired in her seventies, when her path was no longer brave or unusual.)

I deplored her conservative taste in clothes, furniture, politics and art.

When I was newly adult, unhappy, her house was my haven, a place to self-indulge. I knew: wherever she was, was my home. I could just arrive.

Fearful, even phobic, she never learned to swim or drive a car.

I learned both.  A timid swimmer, I hate waves, hate getting my face underwater. I swim in still pools or rivers, from the neck down. A scared driver, I stick to places I know. Otherwise I do much silent praying.

Once socially active, in age she preferred the phone, or for friends to visit her. She shocked me by watching Days of Our Lives; even explaining it to me. (If I was visiting, I had to sit through it too.) She borrowed a bundle of romance novels from the library every week. 'How could she?' I thought. 'A supposedly intelligent woman.'

Now in this pandemic, old and widowed, I stay home alone watching Netflix, or reading romance novels on my Kindle.

She lived to be two years older than I am now. Travelling hastily to her bedside, I was with her on Christmas Eve, as she died.

My Christmas letter, finally telling her all the reasons I was glad and grateful for her, arrived after me, three days later.

 

************

369 words for Weekly Scribbings #55: "What You Resist, You Become" at Poets and Storytellers United.

Heat Freak (Cold Phobic)

Heat Freak

(Cold Phobic)

I was born into a cold climate, to a young mother who was ordered by child care experts not to pick me up when I cried — a ruling for all babies then. (Much later, much too late, she told me she cried too. She longed to take me in her arms but didn’t dare. Much too much later, I realised it damaged her too.) My mind doesn't remember the horror of crying for help and no help coming – but my body does.

No wonder I was always cold, needing the simulated hug of a woollen cardigan, a thick coat, the comfort of a hot bath, the embrace of summer sun. Finally encountering the tropics was bliss.

Choice and circumstance, mixed, brought me to live in the sub-tropics. Even here, in the brief, mild winter, I need my doona and fluffy blankets, I need the heater on all night. Unless I’m warm, I can’t sleep. 

I wake in the cold dark, utterly demoralised: crying, shivering, incoherent, believing I’ll never get warm again. I stumble out of bed disoriented, blindly seeking rescue: groping around, confused, lost, helpless, a terrified child. 

There have been men who held me in those moments, warmed me in their arms, found me extra blankets, murmured to me as if I was a child, calmed me, brought me back to my adult self. The essential is warmth.

Now there is no-one. I must keep me warm. I make very certain of it. An extra blanket folded across the foot of the bed in case the temperature drops. Three shawls kept in my car — one black, one white, one mauve, to match whatever I’m wearing. 

My best friend, conversely, can’t sleep unless she’s cool. My firstborn prefers winter to summer. Incomprehensible! Two of the people I’m closest to, yet so different from me in that respect. Evidently love doesn’t depend on being alike in every way.

Mum and I had a strained relationship, yearning for more but unable to reach each other. She did love me, I eventually realised. Too late, I eventually realised I loved her too. But we never really bonded. She was never a cuddly mother. 

I always hugged my kids — a lot.


Short prose of exactly 369 words, excluding title and sub-title.

I read this on Poets Out Loud via Zoom tonight (21 May 2020) as we were allowed to include stories – and was beyond delighted when someone described it in chat as 'beautiful poetic prose'.

Remembrance

Remembrance

For my mother

Tasmania was mine, mmm, I loved it.  The many colours, many landscapes, the movement of the seasons.  The deep blue mountains, the bright meandering streams.  Silver and golden streams, water and sunlight.  Sunlight streaming on my wide back lawn, which spread like a meadow.  Shimmering grass and shimmering sky.  Fresh springtime mornings, their frosts diminishing, becoming dew.  Summer full of bees, their peaceful hum.  Me on my own, mooning through summer days, meandering round my meadow, humming too.

Winter mists hiding the valleys, climbing the hills, almost veiling the mountains, draping my  familiar town in mystery, magic.  Then melting gradually, by midday gone, the gleaming town new-minted.

Murky rain, black mud; myself muffled in overcoat, cap and mittens.  Gumboots to mid-calf.  Squelch, squelch, I am the master of all this mud!  Hurrying home to the warm, the welcoming  mother.  Tomato soup beside the fire.  My clothes hugging me warm: soft socks and cosy jumper.  Hugging myself with my happy arms.

The taste of tomato soup and mushy brown bread.  The taste of comfort, home.  The flavour of a warm room, safe from the frosts and marauding storms. Summer tastes were fruit – gooseberries, raspberries, nectarines, damson plums...  The purplest of plums, dark purple, thick with juice.  Messy all over my cheeks, staining my hair, covering my  hands to the wrists.  My rich purple lips, my inky tongue.  Mum amazed, aghast at so much mess.  Oh miraculous messy damson plums!  Welcome back to my memory, dreamtime summer fruit.

My summer stretched to encompass all the autumn.  Mellow harvest moons, huge and golden, mimicked the sun.  The sky smiled, the cosmos smiled on me.

'Come home!' the island calls me now.  'You are my child.  Come home, come back, you are mine.' 


First draft written 1987; final version 1990.
Published in Secret Leopard (Paris, Alyscamps Press 2005) 


An old poem for the new Writers' Pantry #1 at Poets and Storytellers United. It seems particularly fitting, as we now include prose or poetry – and this is a prose-poem.

Although the Pantry isn't prompted, i.e. we can write on any topic, this time its host, Magaly, touched on what constitutes home and I was reminded of this piece about my childhood home. Like the rest of Australia, it's burning, so I recall all the more poignantly what it was to me.