Hang suspended...

a new post from Knots in the String.

Today, as I think about writing my next newsletter, my world is covered in a fine grey mist.

The furthest point in the bay is hidden. There’s not a sound of a wave and no breeze stirs anything, not even cobwebs.

The paths are wet, the trees dripping, autumn leaves fall with the weight of the night's moisture. Beneath the back liquid amber is a path of gold – we can see the physical weight of autumn building and must check leaf rakes and garden gloves.

In the orchard, the bush ravens are descending to feed on the un-netted apple and pear trees. 'Go for it,' I say, because those pears are riddled with pear slug and those apples have Codling Moth.

But the ravens have a raucous unholy sound like some bird from the Dark Side and when I look at the mist, the damp, the dark and when I listen to the maudlin bird call, it's as though it's underlining the dreadful events in Europe, a naturally orchestrated backdrop...

I had always hoped my newsletter would be devoid of politics, but it’s hard to avoid what is happening at the moment. There are flashes of what we never hoped to see all over the digital and electronic media. What sticks in my mind is pure and unsullied courage and resilience. It’s heroic.

But as I said in Knots in the String’s Harsh Reality last week, this newsletter is a rabbit-hole, so let’s go, if only for a moment’s escape.

When I was a child, if I wanted to escape, I would head over the road to my grandfather’s jetty on the river. It was a wondrous structure, an angled wooden outpost set in the deepening part of the Prosser. It had roofed davits to haul out his wooden crayboat. And sometimes, if parents weren’t watching, we would climb into the hanging boat, hoping to the heavens that the ropes were tied off hard on the cleats and then we would just hang, suspended in this smelly environs, where fish-scales that were caught in the strakes might catch the light.

At other times, and when on my own, seeking solitude even then, I would stretch out on my stomach on the silvered planks of the jetty, chin on my hands and just watch the fish hovering around the upright wooden piles.

They were delicate things, almost transparent – prettyfish they were called. And they sparkled as they swam round and round in small shoals. Sometimes on the sandy bottom, I would see small flounder and there would be the flash too of infantile mullet.

It was a silent time where my young mind ran into nothingness. To just lie there, with the smell of the river below me and the tang of the ocean at the mouth of the estuary in my nose – balm to a growing child.

Good times, innocent times. It’s what I so badly want for my grandson. I want to show him that lying on a jetty looking at a wholly different world without intruding and just marvelling at nature is quite something.

I used to walk off the jetty revived and ready for my next Swallows and Amazons adventure. My own children did something similar, if not quite so free. I live in faith for my grandson – that the world will be kind to he and his peers. Let’s hope…

Other escapes:

Not much reading done this week. But on audio, I’ve just begun Amor Towles’ The Didomenico Fragment. I’m a committed Towles fan – he has such an elegance of word about him and his characters are always so sharply framed. But my commitment is going to have to be super strong as the American narrator’s voice raises the hairs on my neck – like nails on a blackboard. The narration of A Gentleman in Moscow was so polished, so perfect. This however is not. IMO.

Rain and dour weather is an advantage though - my latest novel is reaching the ‘have I got a story’ mark. It’s always a relief after the editor has okayed to that point.

And I have so enjoyed the regular posts from Letters of Note - one of my three most favoured newsletters.

I’ve done a heap of stitching, too, in my rabbit hole, managing not to get too many knots. A new glasses case…

… and making more hearts for 1000Hearts.com.au which must surely be needed everywhere just now. Today, in the city, I purchased felt in the colours of the Ukrainian flag. They’ll be sent where they’re needed.

Cooking too – pear and raspberry cake, zucchini-filo pie, ratatouille, scones – all bar the scones with foraging produce. Don’t you just love the word ‘forage’? It implies food well-earned, I think.

And I’ve walked roads and beaches, anything to avoid current affairs reports.

We’ve watched much on TV at night – escapist shows:

Larkrise to Candleford (Finished. Beautiful production)

Young Wallender Series Two. (Dark… but good)

Alone - Mongolia. (Harsh, harsh terrain and such incredible mental and physical endurance)

Death in Paradise. (Always good)

All very escapist until we watched Munich – the Edge of War. A 4-5 star Netflix film about Chamberlain and Hitler, pre WWII. No escapism there – just alarming parallels. But worth the viewing. If only as a reminder…

I look out the window, see that the drizzle is persistent and I don’t complain. I can always wear shorts when I walk the dog, then under my raincoat there’s not as much to get wet. Besides, I find things on my walks - like a grey feather, stunning in its simplicity and surrounded by the dimples of a good shower of rain.

We need the rain – autumn has arrived with a brittle dryness. My husband and son are slashing the farm paddocks, releasing a green understory, spreading dry seed with the cut, evening-out the pasture. A bit of rain will fire up the green pick even more and we have masses of baled grass and lucerne hay stored undercover for our own stock and for sale.

And so the seasons change.

That's the wonderful thing about nature. It's a beautiful, hopeful cycle that is religious in its regularity.

And when all is said and done, that’s what we need, don’t we? Hope?