T'box

i will take more pics of the beautiful house here, but this is looking over from near dad's grapes over towards the house.  is the rainbow landing in the kitchen? you can see the brown house below...

Tinderbox. Blue sky. Windows looking out to tree tops. Derwent river sashays past, wide as the sea. The hum of crickets, the water tank buzz. Big kitchen, looking over the water. Countless (attempts at) cakes, cookies, rice pies – a cooking heaven.  Janu head down, over my ancient collection of dolls. Dad used to bring them back from (innumerable) overseas trips. There are dolls from china mingling with jamacains; dutch dancing with Kenyan, thai warriors meeting girls of the prairies.  Amazingly, before janu got to them, they had never staged a battle. I don’t know what I did with them – I suspect I played ‘house’.  Now they are in teams, fighting for their lives. This whole gender business is really something.

 

Dad taps at his computer, mum rushes from boat to garden, from beach to mountain.  When it rains, it taps lightly on the windows, and the tree tops outside the house roll gracefully. The house is on a 30% slope, poles reaching to the clouds with the house built around them. 

My dad has a filing system in his brain – someone says ‘grapes’ and his brain shuffles, and comes up with at least 2 jokes about grapes. He’s one of those insuperable (he told me to write that) people that remember jokes. He thinks of jokes faster than anyone I know. It is exhausting (and funny, if you like puns, which I do).     He is always sending me ‘joke of the day’ if they are good ones – can I repeat them? No.

Parrots cluster at the gum tree outside, screeching for nuts.  Flapping the shallow tray of water.  I follow, barefeet enjoying the hot prickly grass, the path to the washing line. The wet flaps dry in a matter of hours, blasted by the sunny wind.  Further along are the falling-down steps to the vineyard, where dad has planted row upon row upon row of pinot and chardonnay. And where his faithful hound, Mello, is buried.  My favourite rows are the boysenberries, a single row at the end yielding end-of-summer fat, heavy black berries. 

Follow the bumpy track even further, and an old shed holds memories of growing up in ratty boxes.  Almost cleared now, we can still unpack boxes of letters from my 100s of penpals growing up, the dolls, odd bits that I thought I couldn’t live without, and are now on the bonfire pile.  Then there is a small orchard of apples, falling now in the new autumn light.  A field beckons us to build on it, but for now it’s empty.  And old chook run abandoned. The whistle of a car passing.  Eucalypt oil wafting from sun burning into leaves all around. 

A valley drops into a small dam (almost always empty when I’ve been here).  If you scratched through the undergrowth, or back-tracked back to the house, another track leads down to the river.  Giant bull kelp grows up from the dark water. Flat rocks hold the sun.  the neighbour has secured a dingy for abalone excursions, or secret lobster pots.  The river is salty, leading out into the Tasman Sea.  Next land mass: Antartica.  Miss that, you might hit South America. I love watching the ice-breakers head out – they are tough, small ships. My favourite is the Aurora Australis, a brilliant red.  One day…