The Life Literary

So here I sit, again, on the veranda*.  It’s seven twenty p.m., Saturday March 1 on my antipodean side of the world though for you now in the Northern Hemispheric Seattle, slumbering peacefully I expect, it’s only been March 1 for about twenty minutes.  I was sitting here working on that project we spoke of earlier, the photo album, when suddenly I recognized the rareness of the moment and the fact I wanted to describe it to you to give you a sense of things.

I’m sitting at the table covered with that purplish print tablecloth from Gujurat in India (my how this textile has traveled!).  A light, steady rain is falling, the gentle pit-pat sound of it a sweet counterpoint to the music I’m listening to.  Both the music and the rain are periodically interrupted by the very-familiar-to-us raucous squawks of cockatoos flying from tree to tree around the house, screaming their displeasure about who knows what.  I have lit a candelabra and also the lights, as usual, and am enjoying, on crackers with good Australian Brie, the Lumpfish caviar (a welcome and tasty surprise) you left me.

A few minutes ago I finished skyping with A and E.  They’re well and it was good, as always, to check in.  I am thankful you and I skyped a few times today, too.  I’m glad you’re there doing what you’re doing.  It’s important.  I wouldn’t want to change that.  But I’m describing this sweet, dusky moment I’m now enjoying to let you know how much nicer it would be sharing it with you.  The world is a beautiful place, as is our veranda right now, and I can peacefully enjoy it all on my own but even so, something’s missing.  Or rather, someone: you.  Rich moments like these can only rise to a certain level of good without you here to share them.  I’m grateful for this moment and that I am, essentially, content, but that does not change how I’d so much rather be enjoying this rain, this candlelight, the cheese and caviar and music and even the screeching cockatoos with you.

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*I feel sort of elitist, smarty-pants-world-traveler calling it a veranda which, as you know, is exactly what the Australians would call it.  Of course, we both know good and well that it’s really just a back porch.  Nothing more, nothing less, though as back porches go it’s a pretty nice one.  Still, in my defense, the word veranda ennobles what it is and reinforces it’s niceness and homespun elegance and the fact that it would be so much better with you here with me on it.

Dear Neets,

Here I sit on the back porch, absorbing Gorgonzola on crackers and sipping a Between the Sheets.  I have switched on the (in Australian English: fairy) lights that make our back porch here in suburban Canberra seem almost magical, and am trying to switch off the messages I speak to myself in the privacy of my own mind.  I am coming to recognize the things I say to myself are faulty and, frankly, unhealthy for me.  Funny I could come home from a day of solid, intense work from 10 (got there late because I had to be here for the workman to do some repairs; I would have started at 8:15 and worked just as hard) to 6:10 feeling, I just now recognized, like I’m some unemployed slacker now home with a long to-do list I’ve hung over my head, Damocles-like, incessant, unrelenting.  How can this be?  I just put in a focused, lunch-wolfed-at-the-desk, forget-checking-mail-or-taking-a-lunchtime-walk sort of day, and now here I’m berating myself for wasting time this evening, not doing one of a couple dozen or more things on my to-do list.  Then I realized the false gospel I was preaching, oh so winsomely, to myself soI mixed the drink, pulled out the cheese, dragged my Mac to the veranda here and, surrounded by the colored lights, started writing this note to you, my dear, sweet bride.

Where did I get this obsession, this drive, this crazy definition of a life correctly, righteously, spent as a life of constant “accomplishment?”  I am starting, with great difficulty, to identify my own voice inside my head and recognize it for what it is: an arbitrary, petty despot defining for myself, in my own homemade little bubble, what’s right and wrong.  And I guess the point of this is my recognition that this is a definition I have the magical power, if I’d just grant it to myself, to change.

I’m going to go make myself some supper now, including a brilliant Caprese salad with home grown tomatoes and basil.  I may watch a “West Wing” while I eat.  Wish you were here to share it all with me.

Probably shouldn’t start a letter this way but I have a confession to make. Actually, it’s quite a small one. I don’t need to tell you how lately we’ve been making adjustments to our eating and living to try to be more healthy and sustainable. You know I’m 100 percent for it. We’re in it together and I’m pretty much continuing to eat that way, even with you not here to cook. Back to the point of this, remember when we were talking about what we wanted to do when we’re in the States together visiting family mid-March or so and I said that I would love to go to an Ikea, I guess for comfort’s sake since it, though Swedish, has been such a part of our lives? I commented that one thing I wanted to get was a box of those inexpensive but nice candles they sell, those white and off-white ones that we’ve gone through by the score over the years. You said, understandably, that you’d rather get candles made from something healthy to breath as it burns and you weren’t sure about Ikea’s candles. I took the point and thought, well, o.k., why not? No problem. Scrap the Swedish tapers.

Here’s where the confession comes in. On Saturday after I dropped you off at the Sydney airport, I  comforted the loss of you by going to Ikea which is a five-minute drive from there. Not that Ikea makes up for me losing you for these four weeks we’ll be apart, but it felt good being in such a familiar place, laid out precisely like any other Ikea you or I have ever enjoyed walking through together. I walked in the front door needing to visit the men’s room and I knew exactly where to go, the place was that familiar. So I’ve postponed the bad news long enough but by now you can probably guess: I bought a box of the candles. I don’t know what came over me except that they looked so familiar and I was craving comfort at that moment.

So let me tell you where I’ve been using them: Outside. Yep, I think that mitigates their possible unhealthy effect. Sunday night while grilling lamb, I had our two candelabras (both purchased at Ikea, of course) lit, the smaller four-candle model on the table and the larger, five candle version we’ve had since our children were little, on the wheeled table  (also from Ikea) on which I place the various cooking implements and plates of meat and shakers of salt and dispensers of olive oil and other accoutrements I need during grilling. Those candles blazing on that porch draped with little, colored lights, inexplicably called Fairy Lights in Australian English, made for a pretty sight.

So this evening I was out there on the veranda again, after my shower, after appetizers (your chicken-liver pate again…so good, so delectable and almost, well, sweet…how can anyone not adore pate?) with a plateful of supper  which consisted of more grilled lamb, more (my own) garden-fresh grilled potatoes, and (you’ll be proud), zucchini “noodles” made from (again, my own) garden-fresh zucchini, steamed and slathered with your wonderful pesto made from (once again, my own) garden-fresh basil. There I sat with that feast before me, the four-candle candelabra alight, and the latest episode of Downton Abbey on the Mac. Was nice but (once again, and this is my refrain) for the lack of you. Still, I’m finding ways to occupy and entertain myself even if they include possibly unhealthy candles the purchase of which, I’m happy to say, is the only thing I have to confess.  Hurry home so we can enjoy candlelit dinners on the veranda the way they’re really meant to be: for two…for us two.

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,