Deborah Forster

I’ve been going to an indoor play centre with our eldest grandchildren, Alfie and Hazel and our daughter Eileen. These places are great on a howling winter day like the ones we’ve had this year. I’ve noticed that the children seem to play alongside others rather than with them.

The kids have just gotten back to normal after a big trip to Europe to visit their father’s family. The kids managed the trip like troopers, jet lag coming home being the worst of it. They are back now and four years old, Alfie is trying to re-enter the refined atmosphere of the social life of four-year-olds. Being gone for a month is like going to the moon to these little kids. How quickly they forget each other. How long does it take to bed down friendships? His mother had a band of friends from the age of three and still has them. Is this a matter of gender? Or is this just a time thing?

Time nudges us all forward all the time and still, the hiccoughs are always there, especially after burgers. Johnny, our one-year-old grandchild (there are two, but they are not twins), came around with his parents for an early dinner and his father Joe cooked him a baby hamburger. The baby devoured soft bread and all and mostly used two hands and watching him eat was a real joy. Sturdy and happy and hungry is about perfect with babies. He’s just learned to walk and often finds something to help him balance as he walks, the other day it was a muffin tin. His mum is onto her fifth cold over the winter/ spring season, due to common day-care bugs. It’s a given that your kids will pick up plenty of them, but you never expect to get them yourself.

We’ve all been sick because of baby germs in this time of covid. My husband Ned, was off work for two weeks with something that had an ancient feel to it. He was so sick he stayed in bed. We thought it was the dread covid, but it turned out just to be a nasty cold. I had it too and if that’s how the babies feel when they get them, then I am impressed they don’t complain more.

This morning at 7.05 am, we woke to the humming of tree loppers. Men in cherry pickers sawing offending branches and dropping them to the road below.

That noise, the mulching of big logs, is like gears crunching on an old truck. And the action is worth watching in a surgical searing way. I doubt there were even power lines when these trees were planted.

I walk around outside willing sunlight into this shady garden, but the sun’s visit is short-lived. Soon, you think we’ll have so much sun and leaves will crisp and fry. Melbourne has a delicate relationship with the weather. But truly it’s often about wind. We live on a corner and the wind shrieks through the garden, hurling spears from our skinny tall palm. And then there’s a lack of rain or too much, it’s about changeability and unreliability. And yet when the sun does come out, there is nothing as lovely and that’s Melbourne. And now that we must contend with climate change, we know the difference in our lives.

And yet it’s always about potential, either to wreck or provide a pool of beauty. I got some mauve flowers, Geraldton wax, statice and freesias, one day this week when the sky was nearly mauve itself and coming home past a rusty shed and old fence, they seemed part of each other. Birds in a lemon-scented gum huddling. Sometimes in these muffled afternoons, beauty comes so close.

In this Tuesday wind, the house creaks as if it were pegged together with clothes pegs and a tram creaks, by hugging the curves, going home. The birds are settling, the cars are all intent on getting somewhere. The days are lengthening like a bolt of cloth.

Deborah Forster is the Melbourne journalist and author behind the Sunday Age column ‘This Life’. This is a revisiting of that column.