we're all making our own sense of things
The fridge beeps if the door is left open for longer than one minute.
The beeps are the kind that burrow into my brain.
Getting the celery to fit back in the vegetable drawer after taking out the capsicum and beans takes one minute and thirty seconds.
By the end of the week, I get an unhealthy pleasure out of chopping then boiling that celery.
So remember when you thought that enjo would change your life.
This basket looks beautiful, doesn’t it?
But be ye not fooled, for this is a True Enemy of Order.
A beribboned member of the Order of Disorder.
For while it sits magnificently n the corner of the room seemingly fulfilling its function of holding the paper, textas, crayons and pens,
promising order
it is all the while gathering:
Remember – and it really wasn’t so long ago – when bananas were in short supply, and more expensive than gold and they never went black in your bowl?
Today littlest boy and I have been air guitaring to Born in the USA. I’m so getting the new Bruce Springsteen album. As you can probably tell, I’ve never been on the cutting edge music-wise. I mean, I desperately wanted to be a post-punk Gothic, but I grew up in the country, and it was a bit hard to be post- something that hadn’t even arrived. So for me, it was a pretty straight diet of Eurythmics (I wanted to be Annie Lennox so much that I’m still dye-ing my hair red), INXS, Prince, the Cars, Midnight Oil, Hoodoo Gurus, Pretenders…that type of thing. And Bruce Springsteen.
And every now and then I do like to get them out again. And sometimes I buy the CDs of the cassettes and albums I used to have. It would be cheaper to listen to MMM I suppose (I can’t bear to tell you how much I paid for my Frankie Goes to Hollywood CD), and if I ever write that I’m listening to D*re Straights or J*hn C*ugar Melon-Camp do come and shoot me. If you need to catch a plane the mister will reimburse you.
Perhaps it’s this return to 1984, but I’ve been thinking of asking the house down the street whether I could get a cutting or two of their geraniums. Or maybe it’s the limewash blue and pink I’ve been splashing around the back yard. It’s making me think of terracotta pots and plants with primary-coloured flowers. I said to the mister as I was scrubbing the backyard walls on the weekend ‘I’m Frida Kahlo and you’re Diego Rivera’. He doesn’t want to play. He says ‘I’m happy to steal their colours, but why would we want their lives’. Sometimes you really can tell that I’m humanities and he’s science.
And I bet he would’ve played if I’d said ‘I’ll be Frida and you can be Trotsky’.
You know when you book the oven-fixer – the one who never quite fixed the dishwasher, but it’s who the people recommend and if you use anyone else warranty, guarantee blah blah blah – and it’s two weeks before he can get there, and even then they can say nothing more definite than sometime between 8 am and 1 pm and so you arrange your entire day around being there then, and then at 10 am he rings and says I’ve got caught up and you think already and he says can you be there later in the day and you say well, yes…what time and he says it will be after four and you say well, I did have something to do, because you did, on account of making sure you were here all morning, but you know there’s no point complaining, because then it will be another two weeks of not having a decent oven and of therefore making dry muffins and of children rejecting even your cakes, and if you were a decent mother they would never be so ungrateful…
…and you have to remind yourself, there’s worser places to live.
UPDATE: well, bugger me, and who knew…5.30 pm and he still hasn’t rocked up.
‘Just follow through. Just get the dustpan and sweep it up,’ the mister said as Adelaide rested the broom, carefully nesting the pile of crumbs, glitter, paper snow and sandpit sand between the bristles and the wall.
There was a silence between them – despite the boy dressed up as Spiderman and the boy with the basketball – and her silence was this: when you aren’t here, I open the door and push at the mat with my foot and swoosh the sweepings into the yard. And then I hold the broom at shoulder height..I look at the shit that is scattered around and I think ‘that will all just blow back in’. And then I get the outside broom and I sweep it all across the pavers and over towards the lawn.
His silence was the grout. And the way that he always said oh, look here they are whenever she said I can’t find my keys.
Adelaide looked at the pile she’d swept and it was all the piles she’d seen. They’d been on parquetry, floorboards, lino, slate. This house, that house, that one too. The brooms were blue and yellow and red.
But those piles underneath the orange broom…against the lino that was never quite Handy Andy white…whose piles were they? Probably Mum’s. Possibly Dad’s. And who in the end had scooped those up? Who was the one who followed through?
Adelaide cleared her throat and wished again that if the cold she had almost got this week were going to appear it would just get on with it, she wouldn’t mind the day in bed with a book. And then she said: ‘would you like a cup of tea?’ and the mister said ‘yes’ and she put the kettle on. And later on, he stuck his face over the top of her book and said ‘peppermint or green?’
Flicking through one of my many lists of things To Do – this one divided into Big, Medium, Little, then further into Long (term), Medium, Short – I realise that the deadline for the ABC Fiction Awards is looming. June 29.
I have something I was vaguely intending to enter. It needs a lot more work. Like a lot. But in some ways, I was thinking of giving this particular work this One Last Chance. You know, One Final Push, before I think to myself ‘well, it’s had a good life…it didn’t get published, but that’s life in the big city…NEXT’. And I feel like if I don’t give it One Last Chance then I’ll never be able to move on to the next thing. Which I have to do, because I told someone I would, and they gave me something in exchange. Do you see what I mean?
But June 29. That’s not far away. Is it?
So I have written a plan of what I would need to do. I have used a clean printout and my lamy lead pencil (it’s red). It Can’t Be Done. Not with Everything Else. There’re the obvious things – an important gig next week that I want to write some new material for (I think that is how you use the word gig, though to be honest, it does not come easily off my tongue); a small number of book reviews; an article which is already overdue; an article whose deadline looms; the Big Comedy Piece I am determined to write; the application for something I really want to do; the new novel which I am Determined I Will Begin. And then, there’re other things – the replacement computer I must buy before this one just refuses to start even after I plug and unplug it six times; the move of rooms so that I am no longer trying to work in the middle of the boys’ racing circuit; my determination that my contact with my friends Will Be Maintained. There’s cooking of course, and getting the boys safely home after school. And there are Other Things. Enormous wake-me-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night but not mine to blog about things. You know. You’ve got them, I’m sure.
And then, there’s the vegetable drawer which, no matter how many times I clean it, still has liquid in the bottom. Only last week, I cleaned it out, used the edgey veges for stock, converted the stock into soup, which was spooned into containers which were transferred to the freezer. How awesome is that? But wait, there’s more – we went away for the weekend, and because the freezer was so full it seems not to have closed properly and so we returned to a half-thawed freezer and potentially-botulistic soup – oh, it broke my heart, no matter that the ice had formed a beautiful winter wonderland.
Is it any wonder the mister returned home one evening to find me on the recognisable edge of a torrent of tears?
How I said, waving somewhat melodramatically at the vegetable drawer which seems to be filled with liquid mould again am I supposed to create? There was only a slight pause before I began – somewhat melodramatically again – I’m a failure at my job…all I have to do is keep the mould out and LOOK just LOOK.
I’m sure that you can see there was no room for rational discussion here. No amount of no one’s worth should be judged by the state of their vegetable drawer was going to work.
So, he did the only thing he could do. He scraped the cucumber – or was it zucchini – off the bottom of the drawer and then, when I sat down to work on the manuscript, he went into the bathroom and scrubbed the grout with an old toothbrush he had saved for just such a time.
And how do I repay this kindness? A few days later – when PlaySchool is on and I could be addressing the puzzle of the chapter which I know will work, I just have to work out how – I blog.
Over the weekend, I went to Melbourne and the mister went to visit his family who live a fair way along the Sturt Highway. He took the children and I took the plane.
Through a string of circumstances which we do not need to detail here (but just how good is it being the one totally not at fault) the fridge – the large white humming thing which, when on, keeps food fresh, but, when off for any extended length of time acts as a watermelon fermenter – was off from Friday evening until the mister’s return late yesterday afternoon.
Without fresh food of any description the day – the first of the school holidays – has been difficult. To say the least. Also, we are staying indoors, as advised by the people on the radio, because there has been an explosion at a paint factory. It’s a fair way away from us (a 10-15 minute drive at least), but, you know, better to be safe than sorry.
I have been teaching my eldest boy to knit. I will tell you more about that another day. Right now, I am too weak from hunger to type any more.
I am doing a reading tomorrow night, and now I must concede that it will have to be something I’ve already read before.
I have had plenty of notice, and I really wanted to write something new, but what with one thing and another I’ve barely had a chance to clean my teeth, let alone write the piece I wanted to write.
I only know that it is about the rhythm the dishwasher stole.