My Dear Neets,
Look at this! My fingers found their way to my Mac’s keyboard, typed the right codes and passwords, and voila, my good ole blog. I’ve told you this venue is more my portfolio. Why letters to you in my portfolio, my presumably, maybe wishfully, more literary blog? The alliteration in the title, of course! Such extravagant use of N’s requires a step beyond the workaday, life in Australia, blah, blah, blog. You, my dear, get the big blog.
So all this time since we moved (were moved by our Employer, The Entity Which Shall Not Be Named) to Canberra, I’ve somehow had it in my head that I was 14,000 thousand miles from home. Feels that way, to be sure, but I looked up, just now, the distance from Canberra (where I still am) to Seattle (where you now are) and Google told me it’s only 7,897 miles between us. Is it goofy that I was comforted by that? Though 1 or 7,897 miles, I can’t feel your warm body next to me as I drift off to sleep unless you are no miles away, my preference for where I’d like you located. Still, 7,897 is almost half of 14,000 and that makes me feel good. I checked the distance from our other dear ones: 10,079 to Brooklyn, 9,404 to West Lafayette, and our next-door neighbors, our oldest and his wife, who (recognizing how close they, in Baku, are to us, in Canberra) spent the holidays with us this past December, are only a mere 8,175 miles away. Excuse me while I step next door and borrow a cup of Azerbaijani walnuts. (I’m cooking a Georgian dish and I can’t go a step further without the nuts.)
The point of all this is that we’re not as far apart as it feels we are. Are you comforted? Somehow, in a screwball sort of way, I am.
I’m sitting here on the veranda. It’s 7:44 p.m. Monday evening. I mowed the front yard a little bit ago. You know how that task is for me not just yard mowing, but compost building. I emptied one of my compost bins, shoveling the black, sweet, crumbly stuff into bags, to make room for the grass I was about to cut. Then, of course, before I cut the grass I needed to rake up enough of the ubiquitous brown dried eucalyptus leaves so I could mow them first, chopping them up, to make them ready to be layered with the new-cut grass in the compost. I mowed the lawn twice this evening, once at the maximum height the lawnmower allows and catching the clippings for the compost. Then I lowered it a notch and smoothed it out, making it the only perfect patch of green on our block. Most of the other yards, as you know, are perfect patches of brown, sunburned yards in this sunburnt country. I’m thinking about cutting our grass shorter and shorter over the next four weeks, and watering it less, so it dries out a bit and doesn’t grow so vigorously while I’m away from it for three weeks.
After perfecting the compost and the yard, I picked three fully mature cucumbers, two zucchini, 8 okra (!…where are you when I need you?!?), a decent tomato, and a bunch of flowers. The gardener in this family ain’t the flower arranger, but I’m going to set out flowers after I eat grilled Australian lamb for supper.
Of course I showered as I do after working in the yard, and also used some mint I picked from my herb garden in a minty beverage I’m sipping as I write this and eat your wonderful pate.
Life is so good and sweet and lovely except you’re not here. Too bad, cause living and sharing this wonderful world with you is what I want more than anything, but I know why you’re there and know it’s good and right. So I’ll continue my life here, not as far from you as I thought, though still way too far.
Love,
