Diabolical Clay

I washed the window in our front door yesterday. It wasn’t a burst of spring cleaning. It wasn’t because I had suddenly morphed into the housework robot. It was so I could take clearer photos of the Superb Fairy Wrens that have decided that particular window is their favourite perch.

It was this particular shot that inspired me to break out the spray bottle and wash the window.

There are dots and smudgy bits all through the photo. This is the window that  David likes to write on with his nose, there were smudgy heart shaped blurs all through the shot but I managed to crop the worst of them out.

So in order to get a better bird photo I quickly washed the window. All the while hoping that I wouldn’t get sprung by The Spouse, because then he would guilt me into washing  the rest of the bloody things.

My housewifely diligence paid off this morning when I looked out the sparkly window and saw a female wallaby eating the grass under the clothesline.

I managed to get a dozen or so good clear shots through the window, of this female Bennetts Wallaby before the chooks wandered up to see what she was eating and scared her off. These photos haven’t been edited at all apart from some slight cropping.

I might have to wash another window later on today because these Green Rosellas have been perching on the balcony railing.

Luckily for me the door was open, so I very quietly stuck my arm out the door and by pure chance managed to get two decent shots. Yay!

If the door hadn’t been open I would have had to shoot through this window and the shots would have been very fuzzy.

The calendar says it is spring. The fruit trees are blossoming, so the calendar is probably correct but the dead giveaway that we might just be edging away from the gloomy greyness that characterised this winter is the behaviour of the birds.

The behaviour of these two sex obsessed Superb Fairy Wrens to be precise.

These two little wrens have been flying around the house for three days now,singing their little hearts out. They spend ages trying to chase off their rivals which also happen to be their own reflections. Silly birds.

They are singing outside the window right this minute.Their chirpy twitters make me smile and I have had my camera close to hand for the first time in weeks.

This photo also reminds me that I might just need to wash some windows.

But who can be bothered washing windows when there are kites to be flown?

The rainbow coloured kite made me smile. I had bought the children various kites over the years but we have too many trees and the wind is too swirly for successful kite flying here at home. So it was with great delight that Veronica’s paddock proved to be the perfect spot to fly a kite. We all had a turn and it was lovely fun.

If you want happy you wont find it here today. You should probably just google lolcats instead.

I met with the real estate agents at Mum’s on Monday and about 5 minutes into the conversation the tears started to roll down my cheeks. I walked to the window and watched the rain for a moment or two whilst I regained my composure. The real estate agents shuffled their feet and mumbled that it was perfectly understandable and were visibly relieved when we got back down to business.

A price has been set. There will be an open home in two weeks. It is all happening very quickly.

Yesterday I stood in the middle of Mum’s living area and tried to see the house with unbiased eyes and I couldn’t manage it. All I could see was my mother and my mothers things. After two hours of working like a cut cat I had the house presentable enough for marketing photos to be taken.

When I came home, The Spouse had cooked dinner and as he hugged me he asked if I was okay. I told him that I was and that I had a bit of a cry.What I didn’t describe to him was how I had stood for ages, just staring at the suitcase that I had brought home from the hospital, willing myself to open it. When I finally did open it I could smell the hospital and my Mother. I buried my face into Mum’s favourite pjs and in between my sobs I tried to capture her scent.

Today, finally after weeks of grey, grey weather that has been slowly sending me a little insane, the sky is blue. Mum’s good friend Lyn rang me last night and it was a relief to be able to talk to someone other than Veronica that actually gets how much we miss Mum.

It has been ten weeks and somedays the pain is so raw it hurts to breathe.

At least I have this place, my blog, where I can just dump all the words that are in my head and walk away. Contrary to what Veronica’s evil little troll thinks, I am not writing for sympathy. I am writing for myself. I am writing  out the pain so that today I can go outside and enjoy the blue sky before I have to go back down to Mum’s and pack away more of her life into cardboard boxes.

Gluten is evil. Well in regards to my granddaughter Amy, gluten is certainly the enemy.

I will start at the beginning for those of you out there amongst the interwebs not able to read my mind.

Veronica was reading a blog post where the writer was describing her daughter’s behavioural changes when she ate anything with wheat in it.Tantrums, mood swings, manic behaviour and meltdowns.Yet again the blogosphere provided a light-bulb moment for Veronica as the writer could have been describing Amy.

Veronica rang me and told me that she was thinking of eliminating all wheat from Amy’s diet. During the course of our phone conversation, I pulled out half the contents of my pantry and we examined the ingredients. Massel stock cubes are gluten free yay, but homebrand french onion soup is chockers full of the stuff. Spring Gully worcestershire sauce is good, Holbrooks is bad and so it went on.

I found gluten in some very unexpected places. There is wheat in marshmallows. The sneaky fuckers! I was going to make rocky road for Amy’s birthday. Gah!

Fast forward a few gluten free days.

Yesterday Amy stayed with me for a few hours and the change in my granddaughter is very obvious. Amy was much, much calmer. We still did all the things that we normally do but we did them much, much, much slower.

Normally Amy has me tearing about the place at breakneck speed. Feed the fish.Look in the cupboards. Check the chooks.Collect the eggs. Cook the eggs. Throw the ball for Harry.Play in the dirt. Look for tadpoles. Eat the beans in the garden. See Poppy. Run in circles. Come on Nanny chase Amy! etcetera, etcetera, ad infinitum.

Generally after spending a few hours with Amy I am exhausted, happy that we had fun together but totally exhausted. Yesterday after I waved goodbye to my granddaughter I compared notes with The Spouse and we both agreed that WOW, there was a marked difference in Amy’s behaviour. And double Wow I also,wasn’t completely knackered and in desperate need of a nanna nap. *cue applause.*

The most exciting behavioural improvement from my perspective, was that Amy allowed me to correct her speech. Previously when I  would correct her speech,Amy would sometimes listen and sometimes not. Yesterday she not only listened to me but she practiced her pronunciation with me, until she had the tricky word down pat. I am thrilled to bits.

Gluten is now the enemy.It also seems that there is a link between Ehlers Danlos and food allergies or intolerences. *sigh*

Also whilst we are on food related issues, my friend Barbara has just discovered her 22 month old son is allergic to peanuts.

Our issues with gluten aren’t life threatening and the changes needed are fairly easy to implement. Gluten wont send my Grand Daughter into anaphalactic shock it just sends her into meltdown mode, but it does mean a re-think on the foods we eat and it looks like  I am going to have to add a whole lot of new sites to my reader.

So my lovelies that was my weekend, How was yours?

If I am honest with myself, I will admit that Ehlers Danlos Syndrome frightens the shit out of me. I try not to think too deeply about the long term prospects this disorder has for my children and my grandchildren. I am generally an optimist who doesn’t belive in worrying about things beyond my control.

But.

Some days an icy hand of fear just grips my heart and squeezes tight.

Some days the fear sits heavy inside my head pushing out all thoughts, except for the ones that tell me that I am afraid. I am afraid for my children, afraid of their choices. Afraid of the possible consequences of their choices, afraid of fear itself.

My fears which are the normal fears of a parent are magnified by the loss of my Mother and by the challenges assosciated with living with Ehlers Danlos. This post written by Achelois, gives me a glimpse into a possible future for my daughterVeronica and whilst it scares me witless, I know that Veronica is a strong young woman who will cope in her own indomitable way.

My son David had a dentist appointment yesterday. Pre-EDS, Dave would have just walked to the dentist from school, had his fillings and then gone back to class.

Post-EDS it is a whole different ball game.

David had to be assessed by a senior dentist in Hobart to see if it was safe for him to be treated at the small local dental clinic. The senior dentist  needed a copy of Davids echocardiogram report and so it took nearly four months of to-ing and fro-ing before it was decided that yes, Dave could be treated at the small clinic which is attached to his school. But, he needed to have a preventative dose of antibiotics an hour before his treatment.

I don’t know exactly why David needs the antibiotics before his dental work, it is something to do with either his heart or his lungs. The Spouse took the phonecall from the dentist and didn’t ask why, he just wrote down Dave’s appointment times.Gah.

David’s Echocardiogram shows that he has mild pulmonary hypertension and the right hand side of his heart is enlarged. He is fifteen.We have an appointment with a cardioligist in September and I am trying not to think too deeply about the implications for my son until then.

But again that icy hand of fear is giving my own heart a bloody good squeeze.

As I was sitting in the waiting room of the dentists, trying to ignore the crap on the tv, I was quietly worrying about my son. I was hoping that the dentist wouldn’t accidentally dislocate David’s jaw.Possible scenarios and implications of a dislocated jaw played through my mind, all I needed was a brunette mournfully wailing for Heathcliffe and the melodramatic scene in my head would have been complete.*Sigh* I have a very vivid imagination.

David’s jaw didn’t dislocate but it became very clicky during his treatment and they want a senior dentist to have a look at it, at Dave’s next appointment.

I know that Veronica has her own fears, regarding the  health of her children but at least she is spared the soul destroying doubt and disbelief, shown to me by the medical profession as I struggled to convince someone that my daughter  really was ill and not faking.

Since Veronica’s formal diagnosis of Ehlers Danlos Syndrome earlier this year everything has become much easier,well much easier within the medical system at least. That little piece of paper from the geneticist means that Veronica doesn’t have to fight to be taken seriously.Her children are being closely watched by the paediatric team at the hospital and there are protocols being put into place for them. YAY.

Isaac’s E.C.G showed a lovely, perfectly healthy heart. Perfect perfect perfect. That is one less thing to worry about and I can prise back one of those icy fingers.

Tired, I am tired today. Tired of worrying about my daughter. Tired of trying to keep my shit together. Tired of being strong. Tired of being nice. But mostly I am tired of cowardly fuckwits like anyonetoblog.

Hmmm am amazed that you cant write 40 words yet you can type till the cows come home…. is this just writing for profit or just a sympathy blog………..god only knows

For fucks sake arsehole, if you actually read the post it is glaringly obvious that Veronica isn’t after sympathy. But of course self centred dickheads like you only see what they want to see. Leaving a nasty,anonymous comment is a cowardly, low act and tells me all I need to know about what sort of person you really are.

Achelois, a lovely English blogger has written about trolls in her latest post The Internet Bully & A Request her post is well worth reading.

I hadn’t really thought about trolls being bullies. I had just thought that they were a shadowy sub-species, sort of a cross between Gollum and Dr Phil. Full of useless advice and observations delivered in a slithery tone of voice.

“Oh yessss my precioussss you is not broken. You issssss pretending.You neeedsssss to get a real job and sssstop writing on the internetsssss.”

I have written a formal comment policy for my blog. It is up there at the top of the page. So in keeping with my current policy I will now edit anyonetoblog’s comment to amuse myself. Even though the comment wasn’t left on my blog, they harassed my child and as such only deserve my contempt. Veronica’s father’s feelings are quite unprintable.

Hmmm I am amazed by you.  you cant write 40 words without falling apart, dont worry writing is overrated as evidenced by my own pathetic attempt.  you can type away till the cows come home I adore you.….you should be writing for profit have you considered a career in journalism. just a sympathetic word or two from you will be enough to make me happy……..god only knows i couldn’t manage like you do.

There now, that is a much nicer comment.

Now on to some happier stuff. My friend Robin took some photos of my work and I have added a ceramic gallery to my blog as well. The photos are all thumbnails and you can click on them to make them a bit larger. The images are only a small selection of my work and I will be adding to the gallery as I find the time to photograph any new work.

You might remember that I was having an exhibition at the Lady Franklin Gallery in October. Unfortunately I had to cancel that in June because I just didn’t have the energy to think about an exhibition at that point in time. I have been invited to take part in a group exhibiton tentatively planned for November.Yay. So I have enough work lined up to keep me busy for months.

Remember the platters that I was working on last month? I have fired two of them and I am pleased with the results. They are gutsy pieces with a raw energy that make me feel a tiny bit hopeful.

These handbuilt platters allow me the freedom to just chuck some clay around and have some fun as well as giving me a large surface area to experiment with a range of different glazes. If you want to know what any of the glazes are, or how I got that interesting crawling  just ask me in the comment section and I will share the recipes.

I will finish up with a piece I made for my Mother. Mum loved this little vase and it will now be my inspiration for a series of  its own.

I don’t know how many times I have answered the question,” Where is Veronica or where is David?” with,”Down at Mum’s.”

Easily a gazillion times.

As I am writing this, if I straighten up in my seat I can see Mum’s house. The house has been dark for a long time now. It has been empty for  two months and I am still nowhere near ready to sell Mum’s house. It is hard.

We shared a boundary Mum and I. The children grew up having free run over the two properties. It was always easier to walk down the bush track to Mum’s rather than walk the half a kilometre it is by road.

When the children were smaller we would swim in the dam in the summer and try and crack the ice with rocks in the winter. David learned to stalk a wallaby and identify animal tracks down at Mum’s.

Veronica would take a book and sit in the clearing halfway down the hill and read for hours, then she would invariably end up down at Mum’s

There were countless weekend phonecalls, from the children saying, “We are at Nan’s,we are staying for tea and can we sleep the night please?”

This photo was taken this morning from my back verandah.If you look underneath the text you can see Mum’s house through the trees at the bottom of the hill.

When the new people move into Mum’s I will be able to see them from up here. I will be able to hear them talking. I will have to drive past them every fucking day.I will have to watch as they change Mum’s house into their house.I will have the country woman’s fear of bushfire because all newbies light a fire and have it escape from them and if there is an escaped burnoff it will run up the hill to us. *sigh*

Then there is Mum’s tree. A magnificent ancient stringybark below the house. A family of sugar gliders live in that tree.Will they chop it down? What will happen to the proteas that Mum planted? Will they shoot the Bettongs and the Potoroos that  Mum loved? Will they have dogs that bark and drive me nuts? Will they make me sadder than I already am?

Veronica wrote a beautifully poignant post about how hard it has been to pack Mum’s life away into boxes.

We are going down to Mum’s again this weekend to pack up more of Mum’s things and possibly move out the last of Mum’s furniture. Veronica and I just get down to work and let practicalities take over. David mopes around aimlessly, muttering to himself, “This fucking sucks” and I snap at him for swearing, whilst at the same time silently agreeing with him that, “Yep this fucking well sucks big time baby.”

The only thing that is stopping me from digging my heels in and flat out refusing to sell the house is the fact that Mum and I had talked about it so much in the months before her death. Mum was adamant that I had to sell the house.

“You have to sell it Kimmy” was always her response to me saying I didn’t want to,” It will be my legacy to you.”

Mum’s legacy to me is so much more than the money the sale of her house will bring.

I am the woman that I am, because of my Mother. That is Mum’s legacy to me.

I am a fly by the seat of your pants cook and ninety five percent of the time we arrive unscathed at our culinary destination.Five percent of the time I crash and burn and it is a culinary disaster.Veronica still casually mentions the time I served up raw fish to her as a child and no, I wasnt trying to make sashimi. Oooops.

My friend Sue makes really nice hommous.So I thought that I would make some, as the pre packaged stuff tastes like shit.

Unfortunately I am prone to daydreams as well, so I only heard Sue say, mix some chickpeas with some tahini, chuck in a bit of lemon juice and some garlic and away you go.

I had a can of chickpeas in the pantry, so I plonked them in a bowl and mashed them up with a fork. I stirred in a crushed garlic clove and added a squeeze of lemon juice.

It was looking all right so far.

I added a couple of tablespoons of tahini and mixed it through with a fork. It still didn’t taste like Sue’s, so I added some more tahini and some more lemon juice. This didn’t look like Sue’s lovely creamy hommous either.It was very thick and gluggy but I am an optimist so onwards and upwards.

I don’t have a food processor because it takes longer to wash them up than it does to mooosh things by hand. Mix, mix,mixity mix. By now my wrist was getting sore from all the mixing and I was rethinking my aversion to food processors.

I had added half a jar of tahini to a can of chickpeas.I was going nowhere fast and I was starting to wonder if maybe I should have googled a recipe first.

My fly by the seat of my pants hommous experiment was fast descending into farce. I had added enough tahini to make a bucket load of hommous. So I put it all into the fridge and went to bed.

Day two of the hommous extravaganza.

I cooked up a fresh batch of chickpeas to try and even up the ratio. This took nearly all afternoon because they took ages to get soft. The pulse gods were not smiling on me at all.

Heartily sick of the sight of chickpeas by now, I mooshed up the fresh batch with a fork. Encouraged by how soft they were I grabbed the stick mixer. Ha. Chickpeas are so gluggy that they gummed up the blades of the stick mixer in about 5 seconds flat. *sigh* A food proccessor was starting to look very,very tempting. I added them to yesterdays failed hoummous and starting mixing it all together. I had run out of lemons so I added a good splash of white balsamic vinegar, another clove of garlic and about half a cup of extra virgin olive oil. Flying blind indeed.

So at this stage of my hommous adventure I now had a very large mixing bowl full of  a chickpea/tahini/miscellaneous mixture that didn’t remotely resemble Sue’s at all. The craving for hommous had vanished days ago. The kitchen looked like a bomb had hit it when in walked my saviour, The Spouse with a case of beer induced munchies. Yay.

Half a packet of dry bickies later, a decent dent had been made into bowl and my confidence was slightly restored. I put the hommous back into the fridge and went to bed. Again.

It is now Tuesday and I have this huge bowl of pseudo hommous sitting there in the fridge, mocking me. I think I might have to add some paprika and chilli to some of it, some parsley and cucumber to another handful of it and voila a plethora of mixed dips will grace my fridge. Now I better nip down to the pub and get The Spouse some more beer. Lots of beer.

*** Note: If you totally forget about the hommous for a couple of weeks and then discover it lurking at the back of the fridge. It will be fizzy. Very fizzy.It still smelled fine. It had just fermented and fizzed very unpleasantly on my tongue. Ooops.

And the winner is comment number 4.

Congratulations to Liz. I would like to thank everyone that entered.Some of your comments made me smile, some made me teary but they all  made me think deep thoughts about my work, life and the universe. Once again I was touched by the healing power of the blogosphere. Each time I checked the new comments I was excited by the possibilities that your comments inspired in me.Thankyou.

Yesterday was the first day in ages that wasn’t grey and rainy. We have had so much rain this winter, it has been marvellous and it will be a really good year for frogs but the constant greyness hasn’t been doing much for my soul.

Dave has been flirting with depression, The Spouse has cabin fever which makes him crankier than usual and I am all over the shop, happy one minute, in tears the next.

So even though it was a tad windy, we packed up the car and drove to Craigbourne Dam to see if we could scare a trout or two. When we got to Craigbourne it was so windy that I didn’t even get out of the car. We are keen anglers and normally the weather doesn’t stop me from drowning a few worms or wattle grubs but the wind yesterday was insane.

So we went and had a bit of a look under the bridge at the Coal river. The water was so muddy that it was a pointless exercise really but I am an optimist. We sat under the bridge for an hour or so, drowning worms and enjoying the sunshine.