Love story 22
The Bible college in Sydney was very new and I think we (that is the dozen or so others and me) were the first cohort. I remember a lovely grey-haired man, the founder of the college, giving us our first lesson in leadership and I remember his wife, a heavily made-up woman with coiffed hair, giving us our first lesson in (the concept of) love. This same woman was unable to make eye contact and was extremely unapproachable. Our ‘lessons’ were on the top floor of a highrise building and, periodically, we were asked to go to the surrounding glass windows, look down on the crowds and pray for the sinners below.
We lived in a dis-used convent, dormitory style. The cohort was a mixture of aspiring leaders/meglomaniacs; the troubled/depressed; total looneys/looneys; and a couple of normalish, searching people like me. We were all young, but I was definitely the most bewildered and naive. Once, when I accidentally confided in one of the cohort that I was missing Husband-to-be, he gathered everyone together in the basement of the convent, lit candles and attempted an exorcism. Mid-way through this weird event, I broke free of their hands and raced back up the stairs into the daylight, ran down the street to the phone box (there was no phone in the ‘dorm’) and rang my dad. This ended up being my last conversation with him:
Me: Dad, can I come home? These people are weird. (I then told him some stuff).
Dad: Tell them to go to buggery and come home!
Me (crying): Thanks, Dad!
It took a bit of time to arrange my homecoming and I don’t remember the details. What I do remember is having to wait and finish the first 4 month semester. I was happy to do that because I knew I would be going home soon. I missed my parents and I missed Inna desperately, but most of all I missed my Husband-to-be and the missing of him was like always having sand in my eyes.
One morning, during the window session, I had a strong premonition that my dad was sick; that night, the Bible college held a religious skit night and, when I heard the phone ring from a distance (in plush rooms of the grey-haired man and his coiffed wife), I knew, without any doubt, that my father was dead.
Oh, the beautiful peas!
King is our only adult peacock (not counting Queenie, his wife, who is a peahen) and, as some of you may recall, he moulted his magnificent tail feathers some time ago and is only now gradually growing them back. Until that happens, he prefers me to just take head shots. This photo is of him looking at himself longingly in the back veranda window reflection, wondering when he will get those feathers back!
And the following photo is of him flaunting himself (a few months ago) in a winning competition with our adolescent white peacock.
Unfortunately for King, the white peacock’s tail feathers are growing faster (perhaps because these will be his first?) This is him now.
I can’t wait to take a photo of this guy doing his display thing! It won’t be long….
Grandma and grammar
As one of my main roles at the university used to be teaching grammar to first year students, it is with some reluctance that I haven’t corrected Son’s email to my mother/his only grandparent. I have always wondered why my grammar knowledge didn’t just seep into Son, in an osmosis-ish way but this is probably because I am not a scientist!
He wrote this to her not long after his spinal surgery, when we were having some tough times.
Your the best Grandma and this is the best family / life anyone could ever imagine to have. I am indeed too lucky. In so many ways there’s a lot of good and some bad never 50/50 I grown to realise life gets harder but it also gets much better! There is always hard patches that seem to get worst over time but the that makes the good so much better! Therefore “Life really does get better and better!” I will always remember that saying you said years back “dark can never go into light – But light can shatter dark” & I thank you so much for your help it really helps. Todays a new day and I feel real good! Thanks Grandma xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxo
‘Cheer up, Jules – it’s not the end of the world!’
These were Husband’s words to me over the phone a moment ago. You see I have the flu again and so I can’t visit him and on the phone I got all teary about this, about letting him down. And that’s when he said, “Cheer up, Jules – it’s not the end of the world,” and made me laugh at my guilt and my stupid fluey self-pity. His beautiful voice on the phone, his little chuckle, his reassurance that it was okay to not come in today and to just get well – he sounded so normal and said he was fine.
It is possible that I keep getting rundown because I don’t know how to do all sorts of things here that Husband used to do, like ordering the kerosene and lighting the Aga for the winter, maintaining the garden, reading the electricity meter, maintaining his old BMW, knowing what to do when a pump goes wonky, unblocking the sink when the water table goes up, winding his collection of antique clocks, ratsacking the sheds, operating the lawnmowers, changing the oil in the old ute (truck), and so on.
Son and I are getting a handle on how to do these things and we both feel stupid sometimes for not knowing how, but all of these jobs were Husband’s while Son was at school and I was teaching at the university, so it wasn’t until Husband’s Parkinson’s got worse, and I had to stop teaching (nearly 2 years ago) that I realized how little I knew about how to ‘run’ this place. We are so lucky to have the beautiful neighbours, whose farm adjoins this one, and who Son will soon resume milking cows for, leasing this property and helping us with advice, support and emu rescuing!
Sometimes, when I ring Husband, or go and see him, he is disorientated, immobile, or he has a ‘turn’, or he is down in the dumps. But whenever I ask him for advice or support, he seems to catapult himself out of his Parkinsonism and rally for me, and for Son. He gives advice, he tell us who to contact about this or that, and he comforts us if things are difficult (like after Son’s spinal surgery).
So, when Husband said his cheering words to me, I realized once again what a hero I married. His resilience is awe-inspiring and takes my breath away. His strength of spirit is something I can only aspire to. He has made my heart huge.
So for any of you who are going through dark, difficult, challenging experiences, health problems, anxiety and/or depression, I hope Husband’s “Cheer up – it’s not the end of the world” axiom will help.
Don’t worry about the expiry date – just peel it off the ‘Cheer Up’ package!
Note 1: This doesn’t work for everyone, but there will be no refunds.
Note 2: It did work for me because if got me out of my flu fug and got me trying to be funny again (emphasis on ‘trying’).
I love Husband so much!
I miss you
I miss you because you are one of the bloggers I mislaid when I unsubscribed from everybody’s and created a blogroll. I am still relatively new at this blogthing so please remind me if I have unwittingly forgotten you.
I miss you because you are my now impossible-to-care-for Husband.
I miss you because you are my now growing-up Son.
I miss you because you were my father and you died.
I miss you because you were the mother who loved music, and now you can’t hear it.
I miss you because you used to think I was okay until I became so unreliable, unpredictable, unsociable, but I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.
I miss all of the visits from friends and family because now home feels quiet and dead without Husband.
I miss myself.
Emus
For those of you who don’t know the emu back-story, here it is in brief. We got our first little emu as a chick and he bonded with the other babies – ducks, geese and turkeys, and with me. I named him Emery. I bought him from a hobby farmer who said all of Emery’s brothers and sisters had been bought and he was lonely.
I subsequently bought a couple more emu chicks from another hobby farmer, so we had three little Emerys. But, as they were, like all of the other birds, free-ranging, I lost all three to a fox in one afternoon, when they wandered off into a back paddock. It’s difficult to describe the horror I felt at the time.
Fast forward a bit: I then found a proper emu farmer who was willing to bring me six adolescent emus and, yes, I named them all ‘Emery’. It took me awhile to tame them, and we have lost three – one on arrival, one to digestive problems and another to paralysis (again, all of this was horrifying for me), but the remaining three are wonderfully happy and settled.
Several of my previous posts include various emu stories and other pictures, but the exciting news now is that, because the proper emu farmer ‘owes’ me a chick, I will soon be getting another baby Emery and this time I will be much more careful.
Love story 21
My parents got a bit worried about my infatuation with Inna and her son, Husband-to-be, so after six months of working for the family, I agreed to go to a Bible college in Sydney (the other side of Australia) to do a leadership course.
I didn’t want to go, and everything inside me pulled against going, but it seemed the best thing to do at the time so I went. The grief of leaving Inna was indescribable, but the grief of leaving Husband-to-be was much worse and my most vivid memory of that is Husband-to-be coming over to my parents’ house to say goodbye the night before my flight. This was quite awkward and very brief, and I kept wishing that he would simply ask me not to go. He didn’t.
But, as I was seeing him off, he got into his car, then jumped out again, wrapped me in a bearhug and whispered in my ear, “Oh Jules, I wish you didn’t have to go.” Then he kissed me on the cheek and was gone. It was all so quick and I spent a restless evening wondering what his hug, kiss and words had meant.
The next morning my parents drove me up to Perth and put me on the plane but I have no recollection of this because I guess my teenage heart was too torn. On the plane, I kept thinking that I should have stayed, I should have stayed, I should have stayed, but eventually I went to sleep, only waking when the plane landed, my eyes full of dried tears.
I never saw my father again because he died while I was away. I will always wonder about this and about my reluctance to go in the first place. My mother told me that well before Dad died, he had somehow intuited that Husband-to-be was the meant-to-be person for me and gave his blessing.
Wheat and chaff
Every morning and every afternoon, I refill the food containers with wheat for the throng of birds, and they all rush at me in a flood of colour. The only ‘odd-man-out’ is Phoenix 1, our golden pheasant, who tries to fit in with the rest of the birds but whose colours outshine everyone else’s, so he is a little excluded. They think he is the chaff but I think he is the wheat! As a result of these dynamics, he and I have become very close and I don’t think it will be long before he leaps onto my lap.
jmgoyder 