Lefty Loosy, Righty Tighty: the steep learning curve of a new widow

 

 

I’m not really a ‘new’ widow. It’s been nearly 3 years now; I should be getting used to it. But when my husband died so suddenly I lost not only the love of my life but my ready access to a whole lot of other support options I’d thoughtlessly taken for granted for decades. He wasn’t what anyone would call an enthusiastic home-maker – happier with a guitar or an Apple Mac than a paint brush or an electric drill - but as a fixer & rescuer he was tops. Whatever went wrong in my life he seemed to be able to fix. He knew how things worked and if he didn’t he’d nut it out. As my chief tech support he was unfailingly helpful and pretty darn brilliant as well. No computer problem, no sound system glitch, no electric appliance was beyond him and he tackled these with serene confidence. 

For any and all purchases he would scrupulously file the warrantee and – get this – read the instructions!!

I’ve never done this in my life. I’d just wait for him to do it and then tell me how it worked. Or, as my mother had advised, 'just chuck it in, Dear, and see if it floats'.

So, alone, I noticed the things I couldn’t do start to multiply, rearing their little heads and waking me up at 2 am to ponder my incompetence and wonder what the heck I was going to do about it.

The get-a-man-in approach I’ve resorted to willingly and often but it's not always easy.

A recent dilemma emerged when, on a frosty 4 degree morning, my ducted gas heating failed to ignite.   Not keen to start fiddling with gas pipes, I called the professionals. His first question? “How long since you cleaned the filter?” What? And yes, there was judgement in his eyes. The ‘filter’ (ha!) so clogged with dust and dog hair that no self-respecting air could’ve got through to be cleansed, heated and recycled back to keep the house warm. I sheepishly thanked him, paid up and promised to clean it regularly for the rest of my days.

I’ve since found someone to clean the windows, a task Philip did willingly. With his 6’ 3” frame, a formidable wingspan and no fear of heights he quite liked the satisfaction this job presented.

When he'd been gone for a year and I could hardly see through the front windows I knew I had to act.
 

Cars got cleaned, gutters got purged and giant bins heavy with green waste got dragged up the hill to be emptied and brought in again – all without me really noticing or appreciating his diligence with these jobs that were not in his natural realm. 

For all of these jobs I have had to, with great tenacity, do them myself or find someone to help.

But with other things there’s that little spectre that keeps muttering out the side of its mouth, “C’mon, how hard can it be?”

In the heat of last summer a back external security door dropped and would no longer lock. Call a locksmith? None available. Buy a new lock and find someone to fit it? “Maybe late next week, Madam”. Buy a new door! (I was getting desperate.) Or, put on my glasses and examine the problem. (How hard can it be?) Chisel, hammer and a few screws later I’d reset the hole the little locky bit goes into and all was well. (Terminology is not my strong suit.) God knows how secure it actually is now but it's fixed to my standards anyway.

YouTube, of course, is the single person’s saviour. Everything is there.

Recently there loomed a big one. After a week of visitors for various celebratory birthday lunches  the dishwasher - top brand, not that old - got a bit of a workout and as I unpacked the latest load I noticed that it hadn’t done a very good job. Memories of the gas heating surfaced. There’s sure to be a filter and I’m not going to be shamed in front of another tradesmen as he realises I probably haven’t cleaned it since my husband died. YouTube to the rescue and even that didn’t quite appease my fear that, even if I got it apart and cleaned all the bits, what if I couldn’t get it back together again?

It took me till lunchtime to pluck up the courage to get down on my hands and knees and Just Do It! I invoked that old maxim of Lefty Loosy, Righty Tighty, got it all dismantled, cleaned it thoroughly and put it back together again. Okay, the first attempt was upside down but in the end I triumphed. I set off in the rain to walk my dog, feeling as if I’d just won the Pulitzer Prize.

My baby chainsaw, my pride and joy, recently lost its chain as I, down on my hand and knees in the dirt, face-shield in place, attacked a suckering out-of-control lilac tree. No panicking this time, I dismantled it, smugly put it all back together again and – it wouldn’t work. Left Loosy Righty Tighty didn’t take care of the back-to-front, upside down option but I do have good friends I can occasionally call on. Which was clearly necessary.

Scoff if you will, all you natural-born handy-persons out there, but for us novices, while there is certainly a time to call in help, there’s also a time to put our hands on our hips, look the problem in the eye and ask, “How hard can it be?”

 

~*~

Ask Your Mother

The Tweed River, N.S.W.

A wise woman once said to me that one of our enduring goals ought to be to die with no regrets. I've blown it already I'm afraid and, with another Mothers day upon us, I realise that one of my biggest regrets is that I didn't ask my mum more questions about her life while I had the chance.

At 17 I went bobbing off on a bus with 18 of my just-graduated school mates from Murwillumbah High to the University of New England 400 kilometres away, all compliments of Commonwealth scholarships which few of us, including our parents, knew much about at all. The comparative luxury of Mary White College was handed to me on a plate and I've never lived at home since.

Perhaps if I had I might have developed the wisdom or the maturity to become curious about my mother before it was too late. But too late it is and I'm wracked with questions that nobody can answer, least of all her.

Left motherless 3 days after her birth in a family self-described as bog-Irish catholics she grew up with a feisty disrespect for authority if their rules didn't align with her own innate beliefs or logic. She was fearless, articulate and a bit quirky, my mum. She painted our shoes with stove black, left conditioner in her hair because 'it feels so lovely' (only until it dried) and encouraged us to rub charcoal on our teeth instead of the much more palatable toothpaste. Salt water would cure anything, as would jumping in the sea. She regularly dismissed the need for precision with a carefree 'Oh don't fuss. A man on a galloping horse won't notice!' I blame her for my own sometime cavalier attitude towards attention to detail. 

At our small house opposite an arm of the Tweed River two green tree frogs lived in the tin letterbox out the front. Mum used to chat to them whenever she went out to check for mail.

When a passer-by once looked at her askance she happily explained that no, she wasn't talking to herself, she was talking to the two resident frogs - as if that made it all okay. (I was recently told by my sister-in-law that an old friend of Mum's once borrowed the two frogs  to deal with a cockroach problem she was having in her garden shed. None of us knows how that turned out.)

The mystery is that this woman who left school at 13 could, and did, recite poetry at length and with great expression, was familiar with the works of Alexander Dumas, Emile Zola and Dickens - "Barkus is willin''' was a favourite expression - was a faultless speller, regularly made up games involving grammar and punctuation to entertain us in our television-free evenings and had a boundless repertoire of spine-chilling stories which left us wide-eyed and breathless.  

And I never thought to find out how this could be. 

At her funeral some old chums were discussing their own memories of my mum's life.

'Remember Maisie and the spelling prize? She first won the whole school medal when she was only ten.'

'That was when they were living over the fruit shop with their Aunty Bub.'

What?

I ache to know. What was it like growing up motherless? Why did she despise the church so vehemently? Why did she never value possessions and give away anything we gave her the minute our backs were turned? When did her family arrive in Australia, and how? What became of her father after her mother died? Where did she meet my dad?

Tell me the stories. If only someone could.

At 17 I wasn't the least bit curious about her. Self-focused and wanting only to get away I just never thought to ask. Of course I went back, frequently. The highways from Melbourne to the Tweed are as familiar as my own street - the monotony of the Newell, the hair-raising risks and beauty of the Pacific. But on arrival there was always the excitement of being together again, reunions, partners to introduce, old friends to catch up with. Never the right time to sit down with just my mum for heart to hearts and a sharing of her history.

Now there's a vacuum that will never be filled, an echo-free space where I might toss my questions as often as I like but no answers will ever bounce back.

If you have your mother still I hope you ask her all the questions you might ever want to have answered. Find out all the things she loved, feared and desired. Etch her history onto your own and have no regrets when you lose her because hers might be the stories you will one day treasure the most.

 

*~*

How Does Your Garden Grow?

 *This piece first appeared in The Big Issue Vol. 632, March 2021

When the first lockdown hit at the beginning of 2020 I had been a widow for just one year. The shock of my husband's early death was still all-consuming, his ongoing absence paralysing. I imagined him everywhere and thought constantly of things I must tell him. Our two dogs raced to the couch and leapt up to stare hopefully out the window every time a car approached our driveway. 

I knew I could cope, knew I'd survive, but what for?

I'd had a few awards and enough things published in the past to start to call myself a writer but with his death every creative thought dropped out of my head and has so far never returned. Every night for four months I sat alone at the table in silence, doing nothing.

But one evening, sitting out on the old sleeper steps out in the backyard with Stella I looked at the space where I'd had an old shed removed. Straggling trails of jasmine remained and one unstoppable white banksia rose. I wondered what the soil would be like and if I could perhaps plant something else there along the fence. Eventually darkness fell, the birds went wherever birds go at twilight and reluctantly I came inside. 

Early the next day I found myself out in the new space idly pulling out jasmine which I soon discovered is not something you can do idly at all. I found the mattock and set about waging war on the jasmine roots that had commandeered the whole area. It was an ugly job.

A challenging start

    

Now, despite the bad press it gets a lot of the time, I have an enviable network of people on Twitter, a lot of them writers, many of them nature photographers and nearly all of them avid gardeners. I started to pay closer attention to their posts about plants and gardens. In lockdown my Twitter pals became my best resource, commenting positively on the progress I made, posting inspirational photos of their own plants and gardens and sharing ideas for sourcing plants online while we could no longer make raids on the local nurseries. A highlight came when, unable to identify a deciduous blue-flowering plant hiding in my own garden I asked for help on Twitter. Within minutes back came a reply from an unknown person in California. It's caryopteris, she said, and so it proved to be. Seems gardeners know no borders.

Before long and concurrently I started on the front yard. It was only a 'yard' - a struggling lawn labouring under the greed of some huge gum trees that sucked the life out of anything underneath.

In the year that followed I created a whole new garden out the front as well as out the back where the shed had been. The fence now sports climbing roses and a variety of perennials that are growing like Topsy.

Soon I became aware that the more active I was outside in the garden, the more my head was filled with plans instead of grief. If anything kept me awake at night it was a visual journey of what things might look like if I spread mulch to kill what poor grass remained, dug in compost, created pathways through and under trees and chose plants that were as tough as old boots. The costs were not great  - a load of secondhand bricks from eBay, cuttings from my own and friends' gardens, dividing and transplanting things from one place to a new location, soon saw my front yard begin to transform, as did I. 

I came inside at the end of each day sore from digging and pulling weeds, from shovelling and spreading barrows of mulch and disposing of dead soil. But I felt better.

I know that many schools, prisons and various mental health facilities offer gardening programs and extol their success. I know I'm lucky to have the time and the ability to bend my knees and my back every day over my developing garden. As I respond to my garden, my garden responds to me. After a year I beam over it like a proud parent. I walk the new paths I created and I tend the plants with love. I seem to have reconnected to life.

If I were to find myself living in a high rise apartment the first thing I'd do is acquire a few pots and fill what little space I had with living plants that needed my care. I would hope that I could look out onto green space nearby, watching the seasons change and the gardeners at their precious work.

*~*

Treasure

Before Philip and I married I lived in a flat in an old single level Art Deco building in High Street, Armadale, with my dog Millicent. Philip still lived with his parents (you could tell) in a beautiful big weatherboard house in Brunswick with a fertile backyard full of fruit trees including a nectarine tree to die for. In season the fruit was given away by the bucketful and still more remained.

I loved my Saturday mornings in Armadale - an early tram ride down to Prahran Market then usually a wander up High Street which was then the antique belt of Melbourne. I'm sure most of the shops were antique shops. There was also a place called Marney's Secondhand Wares where I bought, for $65, a genuine Chesterfield settee which I still have today. Several re-coverings later it's always been the most sought after seat in the house.

Across the road from Marneys, up the Glenferrie Road end and very close, if not next door, to The Green Man, where Philip played guitar several times a week, was Kents Antiques. I was entranced by the things in Kents window but one item drew me back time and time again. I stared at it from the street more times than I could count and marvelled at its translucence and colour. I dreaded the day when I might walk past and it would be gone, sold to someone else. It was a lamp, hanging high from the ceiling on a long chain, emerald green and luminous and way out of my price range.

One day as I stared up at 'my' lamp from the street the proprietor himself came out to talk to me. Well, he came and stood on the marble steps and looked at me enquiringly. Dapper always, this time in a navy blue blazer and red bow tie, William Johnson invited me into the store and together we craned our necks to view my lamp. He told me it was Regency Venetian glass and was in fact originally a candle holder, still having traces of candle wax inside. He pointed out the tiny peacocks at the end of each chain that held the lamp in place. 

I didn't know at the time that this was a rare privilege and that William Johnson himself could be a bit picky about who he fraternised with and who came into his shop. I told Philip the story and every time we left the Green Man where I frequently went to listen to him play, we'd stop by Kents window so I could gaze upwards and lust after my lamp.

After we married and bought a house amongst the gum trees out in the wilds of Eltham I was a bit wistful about having left the antique belt of High Street behind and especially about the inevitable lost contact with my lamp. Until, that is, one day Philip arrived home with it, packed in masses of straw and brown paper. I was speechless with surprise, filled with love and gratitude, but he was far more pragmatic. 

'Well, I couldn't bear the thought of going back to High Street one day to see it had been sold, and you banging on about it for the rest of our lives. So I just bought it."  

At this early stage of our lives together, having just bought a house, we had about $11 in the bank between us so this was a massive outlay, which, forever more, we both agreed was worth every cent. It hangs in our bedroom still and I love it beyond measure, and bask in the reminder of Philip's boundless generosity and thoughtfulness. 

This month he will have been gone two years. I sometimes lie in bed and wonder how I will fill in the rest of my life without him but this light above me, this treasure, will always remind me of the joy he brought.

~*~

The Year of Delusional Thinking

And so another year draws to a close. For me an unthinkable year, a year where loss and absence have been the backdrop to everything.
All I've achieved is mess. The mess of cleaning out one house for sale, the much worse mess of filling up the other house with all the stuff I swore I wouldn't bring home. The awareness that this is the only goal I have - to somehow get rid of the mess.
Belatedly, I read Joan Dideon's book The Year of Magical Thinking. I didn't read it when it first came out but a recent article in The Age about the stage version struck a chord and I immediately acquired and read it. Her husband died in circumstances almost the same as did my own. Suddenly, shockingly, unexpectedly. Two things she wrote resonated with me enough to make me quiver: the deep belief that of course he would come back, the total inability to believe that he was gone forever. The second was the daily assumption that later she would tell him things, report on the day, laugh with him about something that struck a chord. I do that still, eleven months later. There is a kind of undersong, a constant hum to use Alice Bishop's phrase, in which we talk and laugh and confer and nod, simpatico as always. That sly glance across a room to each other when the same thing strikes a chord with both of us, the telepathic nudge. 'We'll talk about it later'.
But of course we won't. Maybe Joan Dideon should have called her book The Year of Delusional Thinking.
She too dreaded the new year rolling over because then she'd have to say, he died last year, which seems so accepting, so ordinary, such a long time ago.

One of the many consequences for me is the disappearance of any vestige of creativity. Not only have I written nothing and have no ideas for doing so, but all the projects that used to fill my time and my thinking have disappeared. Once I was forever seeing all manner of materials in terms of what I could make but this year, nothing. No interest, no plans.
I don't buy anything. I've given away mountains of 'stuff and things'—even precious objects I've had for decades— with no regrets. Yesterday I farewelled my last crop of sweet peas which thrived every year in the beachside northern sun. I have no regrets about leaving them. That was then, this is now.

My friends have been precious, constant  supports. Some of Philip's friends have been so kind to me it's hard to fathom. And it's high time I crawled out of this hole and became me again. I will travel with my women friends again, I will be lured back into my garden. I will get back to being a transporter for Starting Over Dog Rescue, those extraordinary people who've let me off the hook these past months as I cleaned out a whole house and sold it. Now that's done I hope I can soon be useful again.
Of course I dread Christmas and moreso, the New Year, where Philip was famous for his music quiz, which he spent weeks devising. I won't be there.
But almost by accident, I did somehow grow an impressive crop of hollyhocks and cornflowers just recently, a first for both. That was gratifying.

 And luckily, I still have my personal life support system which has never failed me.

Long may they endure, along with the friends and the friendships that have so faithfully got me through. To them I give my love and my thanks, my deepest appreciation for your patience and your kindness. 2020 can only be better.

~*~

That September Smell

I've tried many times to write something here that's positive and uplifting but every time I get about half-way through the first paragraph and the words dry up. Still, after seven months, it's only sad thoughts that can find expression and I know there's a point where even the dearest of friends might start to think - isn't time she started to get over it?
But here I am, down at the beach where the blue sunny day of yesterday disappeared and produced heavy rain and wild South Gippsland winds. I'm clearing out cupboards, washing glass doors, sorting crockery and wondering again if this week any of the local tradesmen will ever turn up as promised. Because this beautiful house that we transformed from a humble fibro bungalow all those years ago will go on the market this spring to be emptied, handed over and farewelled, a chapter closed.

No, this is not a real estate ad. Most of you won't even know where this is but those who do might be thinking - "How could she?"
And I do too. How can I close the door on all those sublime memories of beach walks, afternoon siestas, beloved dogs swimming in the sea, friends gathering for food and wine and laughter. Philip happy to get up early the next morning and wash load after load of glasses because he loved everyone to have a new glass for each wine.

Friends to stay, neighbours to visit, Christmas breakfasts on the beach and everyone to help in the garden.

It's the silences I find so hard. Where once, when evening rolled around, there he was, playing guitar, singing snatches of the latest new song - 'listen to this and tell me what you think' - or taking over the cooking of dinner when I baulked at more crispy potatoes. Now, inside, there's a deadly silence; outside, just the wind, the blackness of night and the roar of the sea. 

There were always dogs with us - dearest Barney, rescued late in his life and forever joyous, dippy Archie, barricaded out of the kitchen, virtuous Stella who loved a deep and meaningful conversation.
Beautiful memories, too sad to indulge.

With winter set to depart there are snowdrops at the gate, as ever.

The wooden figures that we made in protest at the desal plant ("There are better ways!") still hang on the gate. When we head for a walk 'down the big sandhill' Stella and Archie race ahead to check things out. It's all predictable, all beloved.

 Today though, I knew I had to leave. Heading off down the big sandhill a perfume in the air grabbed me by the heart and made me falter. It was the smell of approaching September, the sweet honey-scented air surrounding the banks of the Bootlace Bush in full bloom. It was one of the first thing we noticed when we bought the place all those years ago and something we commented on to each other every year at just this time.

A smell does powerful things to you and this one brought it all rushing back - the sudden decision to purchase this tiny house when we had nothing in the bank, bringing friends out onto the beach, through the just-flowering native shrubs, to ask their opinion, the annual arrival of that September smell. 'Spring's on the way!'
It is, and should be, a beautiful memory, but one that I find hard to bear.

So soon there will be a turning away - farewell house, goodbye remote and beautiful beach. The friends and neighbours I will keep, I know that. I love them too much to ever be without them. It's just that when the September smell fills the air next year and the bootlace bushes bloom, I need to be somewhere else, where the memories can't get to me and break my heart.

The Bootlace Bush - Pimelia Axiflora

~*~

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

Peak hour, Melbourne's notorious Ring Road, rainy day. What could make things worse? Oh yes, a plane to catch.
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.

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.

He's leaning on one hand, staring at his mobile phone as if his heart is broken. He must become aware that I'm looking at him as he straightens up, pushes away his phone and changes the expression on his face to one of swaggering confidence. I look away but soon notice that within minutes he's resumed the sad phone-face and his shoulders have sagged once more.

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.

Writers retreat cabins

I rejoice that I have good friends, wonderful neighbours and priceless indulgent, babysitters for my dogs.
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.

~*~