I have asked my American friend Kristin from Wanderlust, to write a guest post for me. I have had the pleasure of reading Kristin’s wonderful writing for a while now and it is time that I began to share. So without further ado I have great pleasure in introducing Kristin Brumm.
I admire Kim for many things, but chief among them is her unabating love for our environment. I will say upfront that I do not consider myself someone who steps all that lightly upon the earth. I recycle more than I throw away, I compost, I often eat organic, I campaign like hell against Republicans. But I also drive a minivan, because I have children and it’s practical. I don’t take public transportation or carpool. I rarely buy used. I am the face of the concerned, yet mildly apathetic citizen. Middle consumer. I also sometimes, under duress, pull into the McDonald’s drive-thru and order Happy Meals for my kids, even though I know they are devoid of any nutritional value. This doesn’t mean I love my children any less than other parents who have the fortitude to avoid such lazy temptations.
And so it is with our planet. I love our earth with such intensity that it sometimes hurts, and I especially love the Australian land – recklessly, passionately, inexplicably – which is why when Kim invited me to write a post for her, my mind tracked back 22 years and landed on this story.
When I first came to Australia I fell in love. Not with a person, but with the land. I’ve written about that on my blog, but that’s not what this post is about. I was young, traveling alone and on the cheap, and as happens in those situations I didn’t follow a set itinerary, but rather allowed fate and whimsy to chart my path. Which is how I found myself headed to the tropical coast after four weeks in the Northern Territory. At this point in my travels I had already been in the country several months, met a couple of traveling companions (an Aussie and another American, both men) and covered some 7,600 km, from Sydney to Brisbane to the Red Centre to Darwin and points east, all by car. Someone knew someone in Cairns and thus my traveling companions and I ended up at the home of a man and his 2 sons, crashed out in the spare room.
The man was a divorcee, probably in his 40′s, and his sons were maybe 8 and 10. They were a motley bunch, the father clearly out of his league trying to raise two kids on his own. The house was littered with fast food wrappers and had all the touches of a make-shift bachelor pad. Sparse, mismatched furniture, barren walls in the kids’ rooms, empty beer cans piled in the trash.
And the kids. Wild, unruly, angry as a bed of scorpions. Violent. And simply starved for feminine affection.
As the lone woman in the group, the kids were fascinated with me. I was there for perhaps three days and they never left me alone. They followed me everywhere, hung on my arms, showed me their toys, hit me when they got angry, often hit me hard. One of my companions would have to pull them off me and physically restrain them until they settled.
I had met their mother in Sydney. She had left their dad a couple years back and in doing so had left the boys too. I don’t know the reasons for any of it, it wasn’t my place to ask. She was an attractive woman and seemed much more cultured and sophisticated than the father, and I just couldn’t see the two of them together. I think I remember hearing that the boys were just too unruly for her, or that was a reason given anyway.
One day we took a boat out to Green Island. I went off for a walk and the boys followed and I was annoyed by this. After being harassed and shadowed and pummeled for three days running I simply wanted some space. It was a secluded path and I was taking in the beauty of the trees and the shrubs and the silence, what I could get of it anyway with the boys yammering loudly behind me.
And I remember this, so clearly. One of the boys, the older one, reached up and grabbed the branch of a small tree and snapped it off violently. Snapped it right off this beautiful tree like it was nothing. I was shocked. I remember feeling actual pain in that moment, as if he had ripped an arm off my body.
I wheeled around angrily, started to explain to him that this was wrong, that you didn’t just go destroying wild things willy nilly, but even as the words were escaping my mouth, I realized their futility. How they were like fragile seeds falling on the cracked and barren desert.
We stood there, facing off. Me, defender of trees, foreigner passing through his life, stirring up unwelcome emotions. Him, defiantly holding his stick, his nine-year-old heart shattered in a hundred places because he had already suffered the deepest blow imaginable. No, unimaginable. A mother’s love is a given, the one constant we should all be able to count on.
As I looked at him I felt an odd emotion which I’ve since come to know well, something that sits at the border of aversion and love. Perhaps it is merely compassion. I stood there, feeling utterly inadequate.
“Come on then,” I said, “Let’s get back to the beach.”
The next day we left Cairns and headed down the coast. On the way out the kids showered me with brief hugs and fisticuffs. I have no idea what became of them. I never saw them again. They would be around thirty now, perhaps with children of their own, perhaps with divorces of their own. Though in my mind they will be forever frozen in time, two children throwing themselves against the world, asking it to bleed for them, angry, bewildered, raw, bereft.
When I think about that branch being ripped from the tree I cringe a bit even now, so many years later. I still love the Australian land as much as ever and I still lack the words to explain, though as I’ve gotten older I’m less interested in explanations in general and more interested simply in rich experience.
It still makes me immensely sad that so often we can see but not mute the pain inside another person. That seems a flaw of the human condition.
Kristin writes at Wanderlust
You can find her on Twitter
Wanderlust is on Facebook
Look what arrived in the mail today.
I am feeling a little bit stunned by Mrs Oh’s amazing generosity. Well maybe stunned isn’t the proper word to use. How does totally gobsmacked, overwhelmed,thrilled to bits, and giddy with excitement sound instead?
Every time I pour my heart out, here on my blog, you my lovely internetz always hold me up and give me solace. Mrs Oh is a motherless woman as well and her thoughtful comments on my saddest posts always make me feel that is okay to miss Mum. Even though my grief causes Mrs Oh to be reminded of her own, she still takes the time to console me and because of that care and compassion I know that I am not quite so alone.
This is the beautiful joy of blogging, the fabulous sense of friendship and community shared by bloggers who have never met in person but are privy to each others hopes and dreams, heartaches and despair.
And I thank each and every one of you for being my dearest internetz.
Now back to the chocolate. mmm.
I squealed with excitement when I saw these Almond joys.
I don’t know how to accurately describe the excitement of receiving a chocolate that I had only read about or seen in the movies. so you will just have to imagine me jumping up and down going SQUEEEE!
Then there were all these little treasures.Turtles and Watchamacallits and Hershey bars and Hershey kisses and and and…
Mmmmmmmmmmmmm.
Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
Thank you so much Mrs Oh. I am in chocolate heaven.
Long term readers of this blog will remember the petition Veronica started for young Ivy Tregenza to get the IVIG treatment that she needed so that Ivy could have a chance at some sort of normalacy in her very sick young life.
Ivy spends a lot of time in the John Hunter Childrens Hospital and I mean a lot. So Ivy’s mum the very talented and super gorgeous Tiff from My Three Ring Circus is trying to raise some money to make things a little bit easier on the ward that is her and Ivy’s second home.
The company that Tiff’s husband Daivid works for coughcanoncough has said that they will match the money raised dollar for dollar.
Now that is a pretty sweet offer.
Tiff has set up a page especially for donations. You can donate as little as the dollar you found behind the couch or as much as you like.
So please go here to read why Tiff is trying to raise some money
Or just go here to donate.
Cheers Kim.
I would like to say thank you to everyone that commented on my last post, Motivation, Inspiration and chocolate, Send all three. Your kind and thoughtful comments worked, as they always do and I am feeling much better.
I was trying to explain blogs and blogging to a classmate yesterday. Explaining the functionality and the versatility of a blog as a platform for marketing yourself as an artist was easy.
But when I tried to explain the sense of community and the friendships that are formed via blogging I could tell that I had lost her.
In the lead up to Mum’s funeral the phone had rung off the hook and I found it very exhausting, there was a lot of tension within the immediate family as Veronica and I tried to do what Mum had asked us to do. Mum had left explicit instructions for her funeral and by following Mum’s instructions, Veronica and I became the focus for my brother and uncle’s anger and grief.
My story isn’t unique. My pain was my own but my story was very similar to a lot of your stories and via this blog you shared your stories with me, comforted me and gave me the support that I needed to keep on going.
This is part of the reason why I have my ceramic giveaways. It is a giving back to you my readers, my online friends.But it is also my way of asking for your help again, asking you to comfort me when I need it, asking you to help get my creative juices flowing again by thinking about your ideas for my work. Your comment could be the one that inspires a whole series of work, so please go and comment if you haven’t already and remember that you can comment more than once.
I sat outside in the sun on Thursday and spent all morning making pots. Only one pot actually worked but the process of experimentation was a good one. As I was working the clay my mind wandered off in tangents, I thought about your different ideas, some of them are far beyond my basic talents but most of them are very doable. All of them have given me something.
Your comments on my camera quandry post helped me as well even though I am still dithering. One day I have decided on a high zoom compact camera and the next day it seems a DSLR is the way to go. I will keep you posted.
The giveaway is here, click, click, clickety, click.
Or in my case to get two uses out of one batch of chicken drumsticks.
Yesterday morning I was trying to work out what I could do with a kilo or so of chicken drumsticks. As I was thinking through my cooking options I also followed a train of thought to do with healthy cooking when you are living below the poverty line. There is so much negative publicity out there relating to low incomes being synonomous with poor eating habits. On and on whirred my brain, busily formatting blog posts until I slammed back into a wall of negativity relating to that blasted review.
I stood in the kitchen chopping vegetables and stewing on the fact that the reviewer had spat out the word recipes like it was a curse. And that moment was when I finally let go of the review. Of course I occasionally share recipes I am passionate about good food as well as playing in the mud. Tosser.
So I need to say a big thankyou to everyone that has humoured me whilst I have been sulking over that stupid arsed review. I am finally over it now and that really is all down to you, my dear internetz. Whilst I was analyzing my responses to the review and giggling at some of your responses to my post about the review, I also had a bit of a think about my blog and why I am blogging. The main reason that I am still blogging is because I really enjoy the ongoing conversation that I am having with you my readers. Thanks to blogging I now have a large circle of online friends and I am not lonely anymore.
Your ideas for the dragon eggs have made the air around me crackle with creative energy. Your feedback, friendship and support gives me respite from the sadness that threatens to overwhelm me. You have all given me a great gift and I am thankful.
So back to the chicken,I threw them into a large pot with a chopped onion, three or four cloves of garlic, some carrots and potatoes. I tied together some sage leaves and fresh thyme from the garden I also threw in a good shake of mixed herbs and a pinch of salt. I simmered the pot on top of the woodheater until the drumsticks were cooked through and then I fished them out and put them aside for later.
Somehow I managed to get sidetracked by twitter and the telephone and before I knew it it was tea time and the spouse was looking a tad gaunt. I kept the peace by giving him a drumstick and shooing him back into his cave shed. I browned off the drumsticks in some olive oil and more garlic and dished them up with mashed potatoes, peas and gravy. Simple comfort food for a Sunday night.
Today I will tart up the soup base that I made yesterday, by throwing in some greenery from the garden, kale and silverbeet. I have a heap of zucchinis that I was given so I will probably throw some zuke in to the pot as well. I normally have frozen celery tops in the freezer that I keep specifically for soups and stock but I have just run out and the celery in the garden is looking very sad.
This pot of vegetable soup will be our main meal tonight and probably lunch tomorrow.I will also freeze three portions for my lunch this week whilst I am at the studio. So I think that I got my moneys worth out of that batch of drumsticks.
And just because I can here is a photo of the moon I took last night. I couldn’t be bothered setting up the tripod so I just went outside and pointed at the moon and hoped the shots wouldn’t be too blurry. They weren’t. Yay.
