jmgoyder

Yesterday was a magical day. My cousin and her daughter are visiting from Sydney and staying with my mother so they all came over with lunch. I haven’t seen my cousin for 15 years and it was wonderful! Ming and my cousin’s daughter are the same age and already friends on FB but there’s nothing like face to face. My mother made the lunch and served everyone which gave me more time with the cousins . It was fantastic and I am still tasting the joy of yesterday and looking forward to seeing them again tomorrow before they go back.

After lunch my mother took them to a magical little corner of our countryside called Gnomesville. I stayed home with Ants.

I had had Anthony wheelchair- taxied home for the event but he was mostly withdrawn and became sullen when he had to go back which always upsets me no matter how much I steel myself for it. His withdrawal isn’t intentional; it’s because he can’t focus on more than one thing at a time, so five people conversing excitedly is impossible. I remember when he was being assessed by a Parkinson’s Disease specialist in a Perth hospital, a kind lady who also had PD, befriended Ants and told him about this inability to focus on more than one thing and both Anthony and I realized how true this was for him too. For me it explained why he had become so silent and for him it was reassuring to know he wasn’t the only one to be confused by crowded conversations.

He is getting more and more shark-eyed. You can kind of see it in the photo below which is from ages ago. Now his eyes are often half closed and he looks at me with what seems an expression of malevolence but is really him trying to focus cognitively (well that’s what I think anyway!) He doesn’t know he’s doing it. Ming, on the other hand, appears to know exactly what he is doing with his eyes in an expression of unadulterated sarcasm! The only resemblance between these two sets of eyes is that they are blue.

[Oh, see that little spot next to Anthony’s left eye? That is now the massive skin cancer I was talking about the other day and, yeeha, we finally have an appointment with the surgeon tomorrow morning!]

Speaking of blue eyes, my photos of Woodroffe’s and Ola’s blue eyes yesterday intrigued a few people one of whom was Susan at http://susandanielseden.wordpress.com/

She is a talented poet and I can’t always keep up with her blog because she is so prolific. I suggested she might write a poem to go with the blue-eyed geese and within what seemed like minutes, she wrote this:

blue topaz eyes
chipped ice set in softness–
unexpected jewels

MAGIC!

So I decided to try and find a few more photos of the blue eyes!

And then I found this one. I had forgotten that the geese have an ability to change their eye colour if prompted.

MAGIC!