Long Summer Weeks

Well they felt long, until I started working.

Isn't it amazing how sometimes life can just scoop you up and bundle you along. It doesn't feel like I've been doing all that much, but three weeks have flown by. Now the days seem packed to the gills with nothing but just getting through everything that needs to be done. Perhaps that's an outcome of the travel, of having a 9 - 5  type job, and being too tired to scratch by 10pm.

Some parts of the country have started to get some rain, and it seems like every newscaster in the country feels the need to quote the only line of Dorothea Mackeller that anyone knows. And no, I don't mean the one that goes "Green tangle of the brushes, Where lithe lianas coil" even though it is the best to say. It astounds me that in the one snippit of one line, they manage to get the sing-song voice in so you know it must be kulcha. We have a great range of clouds moving over and around our property. Riley found a crack in the ground last week that was so large, he put nearly his whole head in it. His whole head. I grant you, you doesn't have a really large head, but for a split moment, the scene shifted, and it looked like the earth was eating him.

 

Now I'm stuck on "My Country". I prepared that poem for a reading that didn't happen a few years ago. I do really like it, but there's some funny things about it that, if I had less irony, might be problematic to enjoying it. Did you know that it, one of the most famous Australian poems, is actually in part about the joy of watching grass grow! Hilarious. no really! Don't believe me? Fair enough ...here's the second-last stanza:

 

Core of my heart, my country!
Land of the rainbow gold,
For flood and fire and famine,
She pays us back threefold;
Over the thirsty paddocks,
Watch, after many days,
The filmy veil of greenness
That thickens as we gaze.