jmgoyder

As the young girl grew into a young woman, she and the dairy farmer maintained a close friendship. Her nursing student friends would casually dribble phrases like “father figure” and “big brother” but she would recoil from these suggestions, her cheeks crimson with embarrassment.

Her grief at losing her father was relentless; it stormed into her dreams so vividly that she began writing clumsy poetry about sharks and salvation. On her days off, she would travel home to the countryside, to see her mother. On her way back to the city, she would visit the dairy farmer and his younger brother’s family, who shared the farm.

The younger brother’s family consisted of a wife and four children, all startlingly blonde. The eldest daughter was only a few years younger than she was. The second eldest daughter had never forgotten the day she and the young girl had first met over a mixing bowl in the dairy farmer’s kitchen. A nine-year-old at the time, she had taken great pleasure in instructing the young girl in cake-making.

And outside, in the paddocks, the dairy farmer and his brother could easily be spotted via the bright white light of the little boys’ hair. The young girl would stand at the window with the dairy farmer’s mother and observe the scene, smiling when the children’s giggles filled the hot summer air and wafted into the house.

The young girl didn’t just fall in love with the dairy farmer; she fell in love with his whole family! She became especially fond of the dairy farmer’s youngest brother’s wife, a tall, shy woman who she looked up to. This fondness was reciprocated when the young girl was asked to become a godparent to the littlest of the blonde children.

‘In the meantime’ became a constant in the young woman’s absolute certainty that the dairy farmer was the one and only person she would ever marry. Her certainty matched his uncertainty in equal amounts:

Him: I’m too old for you.
Her: I don’t care.
Him: You are too beautiful; find a younger guy. It wouldn’t be fair on you.

Her: Okay then.

Those years threw snakes into the sky and plunged crows underground, but they also carpetted a future path of moss. Okay, too many mixed metaphors, sorry. They saw each others’ feet and both exclaimed ‘yuck!’

PS. I need to give names to these characters.