This is Zaruma drinking hesitantly from the water trough for the emus.
This is Zaruma trying to hide the fact that he is drinking from the emus’ trough.
This is Zaruma promising me that he will not actually get into the drinking trough.
This is Zaruma after having a swim in the trough.
Yes, I am the daughter of a Momma who has Parkinson’s. I am no different from the Sister of a Parkinson’s brother, or the Wife of a husband who has Parkinson’s or the Husband of a wife that has Parkinson’s.
Our lives are filled with daily care, or hopes that something will change. It doesn’t. We have voices and we use them. But unfortunately our voices are not heard.
Everyday, Cancer, Alzheimer’s, and other Diseases have the privilege of being heard on the radio, and the television, brought into the fore front of the news. Us? We are a very large group of people who fight on a day-to-day basis, for some sense of normality, in a Disease that is not normal.
We are the by-standers , we watch what this Disease does to our loved ones, we cannot help them, other than to make them comfortable…
View original post 306 more words
Questions:
What kind of person doesn’t let themselves adore the person they have adored more than anyone else?
What kind of person doesn’t allow themselves to love the person they have loved for over a decade?
What kind of person cries tears for the years lost?
What kind of person attempts to make up for the years lost with an avalanche of passion?
What kind of person banishes a lifelong fear of love in a single moment of clarity?
What kind of person reveals a hidden heart so huge with generosity that it shocks him?
What kind of person is honest enough to express the guilt and remorse of not having expressed these things before?
What kind of person can wipe all of the tears, fears and years away with the single sentence: “I am in love with you”?
Answer:
An Anthony kind of person.
I have come to a point in this love story where I feel I should go back and fill in the details in previous chapters.
I have come to a point in this love story where the joy of ‘happily ever after’ was tainted by some unexpected contingencies.
I have come to a point in this love story where the past and present are about to have a head-on collision.
Last night, when I rang Anthony in the nursing lodge, he wasn’t sure where he was and he asked me to pick him up soon because there was a storm. But he thought he was in the past and so, instead of the usual, “I love you, Ants”, I decided to say, “I am in love with you, Ants.”
“Me too,” he said, his new, quiet voice louder than usual.
I have come to a point in this love story….
Our engagement announcement was met with a mixture of reactions with 99.9% of our friends and family ecstatically happy for us.
Of course there was surprise all around because, by now, Anthony was 56 and I was 33. We had told a few people but we hadn’t yet told Anthony’s brother (the one who lived across the road with the beautiful blonde-haired children who were now young adults, and his wife, who I regarded as an older sister figure).
I didn’t understand why Anthony felt it necessary to take a carton of champagne over to their house to tell them the good news. After all, they were my very good friends and their youngest son was my godson. They had always adored me for the way I had cared for Inna, so we had a very strong relationship and I didn’t understand why Anthony was so nervous. He later revealed that his anxiety about various potential repercussions had prevented him from contemplating marriage years before but at the time I didn’t understand this at all.
Well, our good news was greeted with great mirth and congratulations and we all drank a lot of champagne and everyone was smiling, especially the beautiful blond teenagers and their mother. It didn’t register with me at the time that the brother had gone pale and withdrawn from the room, and we went back to the farm very merry – relieved that it was now out in the open. We had even set a wedding date for the following year.
I didn’t realize then that the next decade would be so fraught with heartache, because I didn’t understand the politics of Anthony’s partnership with his brother and that our marriage, for this brother, was devastating. It had always been assumed, I guess, that Anthony would never get married and that his side of the farm would be their legacy. I was so naive.
The brother and his wife didn’t speak to me for years, not even at our wedding, and, even though the brother demanded a dissolution of his partnership with Anthony the day after our engagement announcement, he wouldn’t sign off on this for eight years. This broke Anthony’s heart and hardened my own and, soon after, Anthony developed the first of his diseases – kidney cancer. He had to undergo two operations before the bad kidney was removed and then he was told he could never ride a motorbike again (and he loved riding).
In retrospect, this was the beginning of the end of Anthony’s good health. From then on, despite the birth and joy of Son, Anthony just got sicker and sicker with what I now know was the onset of Parkinson’s disease and prostate cancer.
These first years of our marriage were laced with what I will, from now on, call ‘the troubles’. Son’s entrance into the world made everything okay and I discovered, within myself, a feistiness I didn’t know I possessed. So I tried to become a kind of shield to protect my boys -’mother bear’ is probably a more apt metaphor.
When Anthony and I got married and had Son (exactly 9 months later – how embarrassing!) we had no idea that our heaven would soon be pierced by sharp little arrows from hell. The troubles entered our world.
After we were engaged, I would get the train down from Perth some weekends and Anthony would pick me up from the station and we’d go back to the farm. Every time we saw each other it was as if we’d just discovered something brand new and the joy was neon, blinking surprise, like a double moon.
He always cooked me a roast chicken and I was always ravenous because I was still a rather poor student. So we ate, drank and were merry, sometimes with visitors and sometime without. These were the best days of my life so far – the very best.
Everyone adored Anthony – all of his many nephews and nieces, the local butcher, postmistress and shop keeper, the neighbouring farmers, his young buddies with their Toranas, his old boarding school friends, the cows, the dogs – everyone!
When Son was born (the worst 48 hours of pain I have ever experienced – yes, isn’t childbirth wonderful!) I watched Anthony’s face as he held our little midget in his arms and I felt a little blanket of comfort settle on the three of us.
Now we were 3.
Yes, I am over-posting, sorry. I am wide awake with anxiety for a friend who has been in a car accident and for the people in Colorado. I don’t know what to say about any of this so I revert to talking turkey trivia….
In the forefront, you can see Bubble approaching me for a hug.
Now, Bubble is right next to me on the table, looking very huggable.
Bubble was rather cute when he was little.
It was Anthony who wanted turkeys and here is a picture of our first Bubble who didn’t survive. And, a few months later, Anthony began living in the nursing lodge.
To have to spend the first few days, of knowing that Anthony loved me, in a luxurious penthouse motel room with a man who showered me with gifts, dinners and adoration was, to say the least, a bit strange. At the end of the first day with the Sydney man I had had enough of his futile amorous attempts and told him the truth and he cried! I had never had men crying over me before so to have two of them in the space of 48 hours was extraordinary.
I have to hand it to the Sydney man; he ended up accepting that even though he thought I was ‘the one’ for him, I most definitely didn’t. So, instead of doing all the romantic stuff he had probably planned, we went on pub crawls, to outside concerts, to fancy restaurants, to art galleries and museums, and even to visit some of his friends. He took me to his nearly renovated house in a fancy suburb and then showed me a cute little flat he had wanted to buy me because he knew I wanted to be a full-time writer. He was obviously wealthy and, no matter how much I insisted, he wouldn’t let me pay for a single thing.
In the evenings, I would sleep in the enormous king-sized bed and, after giving me a chaste kiss (or two!) he would retire to the couch in the other room and watch television. For three nights I went to sleep, counting the hours until my flight back to Western Australia.
When the Sydney man saw me off at the airport, he cried again quite publically which I found extremely embarrassing. Giving me a bearhug, he whispered, “I’ll never see you again, will I,” and, once I’d extricated myself from his embrace, I nodded, thanked him profusely and he left the airport and went back to his life.
On the plane, I got the yellow envelope out of its hiding place in my handbag and stared at all of the things Anthony had said to me just a few days previous. As the plane lifted, so did my exhausted heart.
Love story 44 – ‘I am in love with you, Jules’
I have very little recollection of how I got back to my flat after arriving at Perth airport but, the relief of entering the tinyness of my home overwhelmed me and I sat down and took a breath.
The phone rang repeatedly for the next hour until I finally answered it. It was Anthony.
“Jules?” he said, his big, booming voice somehow diminished by what I now realize was uncertainty.
“Hi Ants. I’m home.”
“I don’t love you, Jules,” he said, but I was so tired I almost didn’t register the devastation of this remark.
“Oh,” I said.
“I am in love with you, Julie. I always have been.”
I paused, unable to find the right words.
“Did you hear me, Jules?”
“Yes.”
“So….?”
“That’s nice,” I said, trying to scramble out of the fog of my exhaustion. “I’m happy for you.”
The feeling of power was rather lovely!
Love story 45 – A ‘new’ Anthony
It was strange getting used to this ‘new’ Anthony, who rushed up to Perth the very day I returned from Sydney and arrived on my doorstep exactly two hours after our phone conversation. He must have broken all the speed limits.
The loud knocking on my door woke me from a deep sleep because my flight back from Perth was during the night, so I was a bit disorientated when I answered the door. You see, I didn’t know Anthony was coming up to Perth, so I assumed it was either Andrew, my best friend, or Neville and Robbo, my Guinness buddies, or else one of my girlfriends.
“Just a minute,” I called, tidying myself up a bit in my teensy bathroom.
The knocking grew alarmingly loud, and then I heard his voice: “JULES!” and I got a terrible shock.
I took my time answering the door, trying to compose myself, wanting to appear nonchalant, but my heart was galloping like a herd of wild buffalo.
Well, it was just like in the movies! A reunion made in heaven. He embraced me with such fervor that I had to push him away, laughing, and then we talked and talked and talked, or, rather, he talked. I listened with fascination to his story of love for me over coffee, then a bottle of wine he’d brought, and then we went out for lunch.
He stayed with me for two days and then asked me to come back to the farm with him for the remainder of the week. So I took a week off work (I was working in a nursing home), and off my university studies, and entered, not without some trepidation, a new chapter – a brand new chapter – of life.
[Note to readers (especially new ones): This love story begins way back earlier in this blog and consists of anecdotal fragments. Initially I wrote them, one by one, into this blog, then I created a separate blog just for the love story. Now I have decided to copy/paste them back into this blog. I have numbered them so as not to confuse myself – ha! My husband is now in a nursing lodge which makes this love story a bit of a poignant adventure back in time for me. Thank you for reading.]
Love story 39 – The gap that was Inna
After Inna’s death, Anthony and I lost the connection with each other that was Inna.
These few years, when I lived and worked in Perth, as a trainee nurse, were agonizing because I missed him so much. If I were in the middle of the city and a truck with cattle drove past, the smell of cowpoop would plunge me into such nostalgia for the farm that I would want to chase the truck and leap on but of course I didn’t.
Anthony and I exchanged phonecalls regularly because our friendship was solid, but, for me, its platonicness seemed like a gladwrap covering of what was really there and I wanted to tear it off. But he wouldn’t budge. I was too young. He was too old.
Whenever I visited my mother, who lived in the next town to the farm, I would visit Anthony and, across the road, his brother, sister-in-law and the beautiful blonde children who were were growing up fast. I loved these visits.
Sometimes Anthony would be warm and inviting and other times he would be cold and busy. I didn’t know where I stood until one day, when I was 23, I let the ‘I love you’ slip out of my mouth accidentally and he looked at me, walked me to the back door and told me to go home to my mother’s place. His expression was impossible to read and, distraught, instead of going to my mother’s place, I drove all the way back to Perth in my old Holden Kingswood, crying like a baby.
Not long after that we began an awkward, and rather volatile, romantic relationship, keeping it very secret, knowing that everyone we knew would disapprove.
Except Inna. But Inna was gone.
Love story 40 – Too late?
For me to have known, without the slightest doubt, that Anthony and I would one day be husband and wife, and that we would have a little boy, was a certainty that alternatively tortured, and elated, me from the age of 17 to 32, when he uttered the words, “I love you.”
When he finally said those words on the phone, and he said them over and over, more times than I had ever said them, and he was weeping and asking me to marry him, I laughed, thinking it was a joke, then told him I had to go out, said goodbye, and hung up, bemused.
The phone rang again and again but I didn’t pick it up. But then there was a knock on the door. I ignored that too. I felt very cold and strange and bewildered.
Eventually I opened the door to my flat and there were a dozen red roses, with a note that had obviously been dictated by Anthony to the florist.
I put the roses into the sink in my little kitchenette, then walked down to the local pub to join my buddies, Neville and Robbo, because it was Guinness night.
Anthony could go to hell.
Love story 41 – The in-between years
During the years between unrequited and requited love, I had done the following:
During this period of time, Anthony (Husband-to-be) had milked about a billion cows.
So, during one of our arguments, when he suggested that I “get in the real world, Jules,” I was speechless.
Love story 42 – The Sydney man
The day after Husband-to-be/Anthony said those taboo words, “I love you”, on the phone to me, I was due to fly to Sydney to meet another man. I had already met this man a few times in Perth when he was doing contract work here and I was rather attracted to the fact that he was so attracted to me. He had already paid for my plane ticket, and a hotel room (even though I said I would not partake in any shenanigans), and a concert and everything, so I didn’t feel I could let him down.
Before Anthony’s phonecall, I had been looking forward to this trip. I had thought this new man might somehow obliterate Anthony from my heart.
But after Anthony’s phonecall, especially when he repeated his strange, unfamiliar words on the phone the next morning, I didn’t want to go to Sydney at all. I had told Anthony, during the previous night’s surreal conversation, that I was driving up north to see some friends on the weekend, but somehow, by the next morning, he had discovered I was going to Sydney and the name of the man paying for my ticket. To have not only intuited that I was lying (which was unlike me), and to have discovered I was going to Sydney indicated that he must have spent several hours ringing various travel agencies and finally convincing someone to tell him what was confidential information. Anthony and I both admitted our different crimes in the same breath on the phone (you have to remember we were 200 kms apart), but I said I had to go because I had promised the man.
This conversation was agonizing in so many ways but I eventually had to terminate it or I would have missed my flight. So I hurriedly got my bag packed and my wonderful friend, Andrew, took me to the airport (he knew the whole complicated situation).
Once in the plane (it was the midnight horror flight), I sat for awhile, stunned. Then – because the Sydney man was interested in my writing – I tore the big yellow envelope off my short stories and began to write every single word Anthony had said to me. I knew that if I didn’t write it down straight away, I would never believe he could have said it. I wrote for an hour and then fell asleep.
I awoke to the plane landing and, with a sense of dread, I disembarked and went to meet my host.
Just outside the back veranda door there are two peacocks wishing I would take better photographs of them
Just outside the back veranda door there is a golden pheasant wanting bread
Just outside the back veranda door, beyond the ancient fig trees, there is a car and a driveway and the possibility of a road that will lead me to the nursing lodge where my husband waits for me constantly
a road that suddenly became one-way
a road that can’t bring him home
a road that reverted from tar to gravel to dirt
a road that ripped our smiles apart and gave us a new jigsaw that is too difficult to figure out
a road that, today, I cannot travel.
Love story 33 – Inna’s last week
So, once again, I left the farm, Inna, Anthony, the oranges, little dogs, Inna’s golden-haired grandchildren. And I left my mother, with my two younger, growing-up brothers, in a house that was, for me, dark with the absence of my father, and I went to Perth to pursue my nursing career.
While I waited for the nursing course to begin I worked in a nursing home and lived with friends of friends. One day, I felt very weird and nearly fainted at handover and was sent home. In the evening, I rang Anthony and he said Inna was in hospital again. He was very gruff on the phone but I was too worried about Inna to care. I then rang the hospital and was put through to Inna who sounded different, not herself.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………
I can’t remember how I got the week off from the nursing home where I was working, but I did. I can’t even remember how I got from Perth to the hospital where Inna was, 200 kms away, because I didn’t have a car at the time. All I do remember is the eight days I sat with Inna, all day and into the evenings. And on the morning of the ninth day, Inna let out a huge gasp and died.
Love story 34 – Promise to Inna
During the week before Inna died, she fluctuated a lot. Sometimes she would want me to light her a cigarette, sometimes she would want to leap out of bed and go home but, eventually, by about the fourth day in hospital, she lapsed in a semi-comatosed state. Just before she did so, though – and these were her last coherent words to me – she said, “Promise me, darling, that you will look after Anthony?” and her tired eyes twinkled with a mixture of hope and mischief.
“I promise,” I said, squeezing her hand, and she went to sleep. She slept quite peacefully then for the next few days before she died.
Love story 35 – Inna’s death
I wasn’t sure if Inna had died. Well, I was sure in one way but, as I had never seen this before, I got a bit panicky and ran out of her hospital room into the corridor to find a nurse or a nun or someone. I held my sobbing inside me like a scratchy rock until one of the nuns came back with me into Inna’s room, saw that she had died, and gently touched her eyelids to make sure they were closed.
It was only when this lovely nun nodded to me that I realized for sure and I let the scratchy rock out of my throat and wept, not sure if I could touch Inna’s hand again or not. But when the nun went away to call Anthony, I grabbed Inna’s limp hand and held it to my chest and sobbed.
By the time Anthony and his brother arrived I had calmed down a bit so I left Inna’s room so they could have some privacy with their mother. A little while later, they joined me in an adjacent waiting room where I was, once again, crying but neither of them had a hanky or a tissue, and the nun had left us to it, so my tears just fell, unhindered, onto the blue carpet.
Inna was gone.
Love story 36 – Growing up
The years after Inna’s death are a bit of a blur to me now so, once again, I will resort to point form:
At the time, I still hadn’t reached the milestone of 21 and Anthony was 44.
Love story 37 – Inna’s dress 1
Before Inna died, she was always trying to influence the way I dressed. My earlier attire of thongs, batik skirts and t-shirts had been replaced by jeans, collared shirts and sandals (easier on the bicycle) but regardless of what I wore, Inna always disapproved. She herself always wore frocks, stockings and court shoes.
One day, she looked at my jeans and said, “Darling, we really need to do something with you. Let’s have a look and see if I have something,” and with that she opened her wardrobe to an array of dresses and picked out two to give me – and made me try one on.
The horror! I mean, for a teenage girl, I was unusually indifferent to fashion trends but I did know for sure that I didn’t want to wear dresses made for old ladies.
And who should walk into the house while Inna was parading me in front of the hallway mirror?
Love story 38 – Inna’s dress 2
When Anthony saw me in his mother’s dress in front of the hallway mirror, his expression was both perplexed and amused.
“Mum,” she shouted to Inna, who was, of course, standing next to me, “are you insane? What are you doing to her? She looks ridiculous!”
Inna was abashed, but only slightly. “It’s a vast improvement,” she said to her son.
“No, it’s not, Mum – she’s a kid, not an old lady!”
As they tossed their dispute around the hallway, I scurried into Inna’s room and took her dress off and threw my own clothes on hurriedly, terrified they would follow me. Once I was dressed as ‘me’ again, I hung the dress back in the wardrobe and listened at the door until I heard Anthony stomp out of the house. Then I waited.
A few seconds later, Inna opened the door, looked at me for a long moment and then said, “Would you like a cup of tea, darling. The kettle’s just boiled.”
Okay, I don’t do this all the time but today a woman behind a counter served me with a smile even though she could see the desperate, psycho look in my eyes.
“This is a mobile phone,” I began (which, in hindsight, seems a rather obvious thing to say as I was in a mobile phone shop).
She smiled, patiently and asked, “And….?”
“Well we bought it from you guys and it belongs to my husband who is in a nursing home and it’s supposed to be easy to operate but he can’t answer it before the five rings and I want the message thing eradicated and I have brought it back twice and rung all of those numbers and followed all of the prompts but I still can’t get the stupid thing to ring more than five times and all of his family and mine are going mad because nobody can get through to him and twice the stupid message my son put on my husband’s phone has been eradicated but it keeps returning like some sort of phone ghost and….”
“Would you like me to take a look at the phone?” she asked calmly.
“Yes, okay,” I said uncalmly, “but we have been here before and done this before and honestly I am really going insane and people are getting angry with me because they can’t get through to my husband even though I have changed all the settings and my brilliant son has altered all of the thingys and why won’t it work?” By now, Ming, having had a nice chat with someone he bumped into, was at my side whispering to me that I was getting a bit loud.
During my little rant (and I wasn’t really that loud), I had half noticed that the woman serving me was pressing buttons on her phone, our phone, a computer, another phone, and another computer, at such astonishing speed that for a moment I thought she had 50 fingers. And then she handed me the phone, demonstrated how it would now ring out before cutting into the stupid message bank thing, and my whole body wilted with relief that finally this ongoing problem was solved.
But, just before I decided to smile back at this woman who I now felt resembled an angel, I said, “But we’ve done this before and it reverted back to the same problem, so how do we know it’s going to work for sure this time?”
“Oh,” she said, “I have the code, so it’s quite simple. You won’t have any more problems with this,” she said, again handing me Anthony’s phone and glancing at Ming in a way that indicated that (a) she’d had enough of us, and (b) she admired him for coping with me (yes, I really did see that kid-versus-parent-empathy, flick of the eye-lash exchange between them).
OMG – the phone was fixed? After all my struggles with it? A miracle.
“I LOVE YOU!” I whooped at the woman who had served me, and she smiled with the joy of her job and waved us goodbye and then I let out another whoop of joy as Ming and I left the shop to go and take the phone back to Anthony.
Love story 30 – Getting away
I didn’t understand why Husband-to-be (Anthony) was often so angry with me. Yes, I understood when I stuffed up the grapefruit marmalade, overcooked the roast, and killed the scrambled eggs (“Don’t keep stirring them, Jules, let them set!” he would snap.)
Years later, when he proposed marriage, he admitted that part of his gruffness during this period of time was that he was, indeed, in love with me too, but he was afraid of my youth, my ridiculous innocence and my beautifulness.
Inna’s moods were also unpredictable, because she was beginning to find the ordinary chores of the day too hard (she was in her mid-80s!) but didn’t like having to depend on me, so the dynamics were tricky.
I have a huge grin that has always come naturally to my face so it may well have been that grin that maintained the equilbrium. I don’t know, because, behind that same grin, I was grinding my teeth, and doing a lot of wondering.
On my bicycle, on the way to the farm every morning, I would sing hymns quite loudly but I stopped doing that too when I frightened some guys who were working on the road. Of course I stopped singing as soon as I whizzed past their astonished faces and, after that, I stopped singing altogether.
The sadness of Inna’s impending death, my mother’s grief over the death of Dad, and Anthony’s unpredictable attitude to me, settled onto my shoulders like a mantle that I couldn’t shake off and, eventually, I decided that I should get right away from this family.
Love story 31 – Miscommunication
I applied to do Nursing in Perth and was accepted.
Inna was half proud of me and half upset that I was leaving her.
Anthony didn’t appear to care, although one night when I was sleeping over while he went out, I tucked Inna into her own bed and went into mine in the spare room to read a magazine. I was supposed to wait, you see, until Anthony came home so that I could unlock the back door and let him in (Inna insisted that all doors should be locked).
Eventually I went to sleep and was woken suddenly by a loud tapping on the window to the spare room and, when I opened the blinds, I saw a very merry Anthony who shouted for me to open the back door.
So I got up and crept through the house (I didn’t want Inna to wake up) to the back veranda and let him in.
In the kitchen, he stood next to me against the warm Aga while the kettle boiled. I was very embarrassed because I was wearing a very old, flanelette nightie, but I still, somehow felt undressed.
“So, you’re leaving us again,” he chuckled, leaving me to do the coffee so he could sit down at the big, white kitchen table.
“Yes,” I said, hesitantly, giving him his coffee.
“And you’re going to be a nurse?” he laughed.
I suddenly became indignant and snapped, “You think you’re above me don’t you!”
Anthony replied (and I will never forget his words because he obviously mis-heard mine), “Maybe I am in love with you!”
I left him to have his coffee by himself, and went back to my bed with a little, mystified smile on my face, but, as I was leaving the kiitchen, he wrapped his big arms around me and the resonance of that particular hug lasted several years.
Love story 32 – Mouchoirs
Inna must have done some French lessons during her private schooling as a child because she would never refer to her ever elusive handkerchief as a hanky. Instead, whenever she wanted to blow her nose, she would ask me, “Darling, have to seen my mouchoir?”
Her walking stick was another thing that seemed to have a habit of walking off and having little holdidays in strange places like the corner of the pantry, or under Inna’s bed, or behind the washing machine in the washhouse. But Inna didn’t resort to French for that; instead, she would ask me, “Darling, have you seen my whatchamacallit?”
Once both of these items were found, Inna would often ask me to accompany her out to the fig tree and ask me to fetch the biggest, ripest fig at the very top of the tree. I would try – with her walking stick and a rake, or by shaking the tree, or sometimes by climbing it.
Sometimes Anthony (Husband-to-be) would witness these various treasure hunts and cast a bemused look in our direction. When this happened I felt super-hero abilities to find mouchoirs, walking sticks and figs, grow inside me at an exponential rate.
jmgoyder 