Deborah Forster

Not long ago my travelling daughter went overseas for a month with her husband and the kids, Alfie and Hazel.  Skies full of birds, clouds and aircraft. And cold air. I missed her clever thoughts and kind heart instantly. The trip went well. Even now, at such young ages, they have their resources. Alfie loves watching things on the screen. And Hazel likes to explore and change her shoes a lot. A plane is so big. Yet you watch it take off and realise it’s very small in the sky. And we are even smaller. Waiting for the results of that trip was hard. Are they OK? Will they see the butterflies in Singapore Airport? But it all went well enough. Only a month, I thought and during that month I’ve been thinking of the poem ‘Keeping Things Whole’ by the Canadian Mark Strand,

In a field

I am the absence

of field.

This is always the case.

Wherever I am

I am what is missing

We move to keep ourselves whole, to let the empty space behind us fill in as we try to stay in the present before the zip closes, but that’s just my idea of it. It could be other things.

Just as when you become a grandmother, your past recedes and the children are before you absorbing every molecule, until one day they aren’t and then I suppose the absence will be back.  At first in this new stage of life,  love for the grandchild showers over everything but you fear the cupboards are full of love for others. Grandchildren never miss out because love always expands.

I have four grandchildren. Alfie likes superheroes, and sabre-tooth tigers at the moment. Hazel, his sister does not like our dog. And there are two other babies, Johnny, who loves our dog and waves like a member of the royal family and Rosie with her wild curls and her joyous laugh tries to climb every single thing before her. It turned out we have one five-year-old, a nearly three-year-old and two two-year-olds. They do laps chasing around the house. Sometimes the four exhaust our own children and that is hard to watch, but this is the way it is. Sometimes they exhaust everyone.

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Tullamarine used to be a farm which became an airport which became a shabby airport. As is true in all things, we deserve better. The airport is a modern cathedral to the worship of travel.  All the tears shed in there, all the goodbyes and hellos, emotional due to distances and anticipation and fear. And waiting.  You cannot even get a cup of coffee as you wait with your banner of welcome in the wee hours.

Travel is never how you want it to be. I  remember being in Scotland standing for an hour in the bitter wind looking out for the Airbnb bloke to demonstrate the inner workings of the washing machine or something. My neck was so cold it felt like a little frozen bean. Unusually at that time, Melbourne was having a good autumn; not something we are ever used to. But I thought of it fondly.

I loved the lavish accents of the Scots. I felt knitted into Scotland by some loose genetic scarf and I noticed I was unaccountably fond of everyone, not something that happens to me.

Scotland is where the family would still have been if not for the Clearances. And though they have the saddest music, their sense of humour is reliably dark.  On an open-topped bus in Glasgow, we drove past the Dissy Corner, called this because when they came to town it’s where the people from the Western Isles would meet their dates.  Disappointment, when no one showed up, became  ‘dissy’.

In Edinburgh, waiting for the guardian of the door, crowds of young women in micro skirts passed by on their way to a concert. Their legs were like custard and their arms like blotting paper and they were all queuing up near the Edinburgh train station, laughing and mucking around, dressed for indoors yet standing in the raw wind.

Distance from home is measured in many ways. When we got home, leaves like tiny yellow hearts were swaying in the rocking horse wind and  I saw how we must love wherever we are and try to keep things whole.