Although I'm flying to the Gold Coast there's no sun-drenched holiday coming up, no running into the waves at Greenmount Beach, no getting burnt to a crisp on that silky white sand (the measure of a successful day back then), no cool shower, a splathering of Nivea, white dress, brown legs, a contented stroll down to one of the seafood restaurants on the front strip where you listen to the surf as you wait for your table, sipping a campari and soda and watching the passing parade. How easy it is to reminisce, to paint with gold those days back then.
No, this is a visit to someone dear, now suffering from dementia. An hour after I leave she won't know I've been but her partner will have enjoyed this small respite and I will have grown wistful being back on home ground.
Since my husband died so recently I often contemplate where I might live. Stay put in the house we filled up with the evidence of our lives over decades? Shift to the tiny Bass Coast beach community where I feel safe and loved, or head north to where I grew up, where there's family and some friends from school days with whom I can pick up a conversation as if we've never been apart.
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| Yesterday Today & Tomorrow plant |
These days I'm doing a lot of things on my own, things I used to blithely leave to my spouse. You divvy up the jobs and duties in a long term relationship and when that ends there's a multitude of things that are unfamiliar, even if everyone else knows they're a breeze. I booked my car in, for instance, to one of those long term carparks where they park your car and drive you to the airport. A great investment as it turned out but on the way there you might have thought I was facing the hangman's noose. Will I find it? Will the GPS work? (It always does, but that's no guarantee is it, as every pessimist will know.) Will they have lost my booking? Send me away because I'm early? (I'm always early.)
I follow the instructions (turn Voice Guidance On) and end up driving slowly along a wasteland of a suburb, passing a few 1970's brown brick veneer houses, some small factories and miles of brown paddocks where the brown crisp grass has turned soggy in the unfamiliar rain. I must be lost. They can't be here. Heart-sinking panic threatens. I'll have to pull over and ring them, try to follow their phone instructions for how I really get there. But no, Tom Tom announces that I have reached my destination and here, sure enough, is a small sign announcing A1 Airport Parking, where everyone is kind and helpful, my booking is on record and an efficient man is there to take my bag and drive me to the airport. How can it be that this was so easy?
I never learn.
At the airport - over an hour early - I check in my bag and head for the best coffee bar I can find, there to peruse the vagaries of other travellers. I see a large man in an official-looking white shirt, name badge attached, his large, very bald head shining under the lights from the great disco-looking balls hanging from the ceiling.
There's a youngish man with a voice like a pneumatic drill, under headphones, waving his phone and shouting to his mates about his bets on the "f*^%$# neddies". I make haste to leave and get to my boarding gate, noting that the majority of travellers look anxious and uncertain.
The last time I was in an airport we'd just arrived back from 3 sublime weeks in W.A. The time before that, sore and grubby but sublimely happy after walking through the Cinque Terra and Provence for several weeks. Joys and adventures I took for granted, assuming there were more to come for as long as I wanted. But what now?
If I were a different person I might be making plans, the future awash with diverging possibilities. Me being me, the future is obscure, like something seen through a Vaseline lens. I can't make out the shapes, can't see what populates the landscape. I can smile at other people's successes, thrill to the thought of Wolfe Island, Lucy Treloar's new book, reading Nigel Featherstone's Bodies of Men, the fabulous success of Boy Swallows Universe. I contemplate a planned writers retreat in Tathra in July with my writerly friend Vicky.
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| Writers retreat cabins |
I just have to wait until the lens clears.
But here, struggling up through the mire to the surface, comes a small realisation. See all those words written above, quickly and effortlessly? Seems there could be a small possibility that I might be writing again, and that's progress.
~*~
