LYLE. Rosie brought Lyle home from hospital on Thursday night. He had not had another heart attack. He said they drained 1.7 litres of fluid from one side of his lungs. He is much better but still looks terrible to me. I'm taking him to his specialist's appointment, his urologist, on Monday afternoon.
RAIN. We had six mls last week, then 3ml, then 12ml on Friday night. That's 35ml for October with 3 days to go. The 30 year average for October is 124ml. I discussed this with Geoff Howard at the post office on my walk this morning. Geoff lives in the next house along from Pat and Leo Buckley in Launching Place Rd. As I walk past he's often doing his 'Tai Chi' exercises on a concrete slab that until recently supported a shed next to the house. He called me down a while back and gave me some basic instruction and elementary excersises to do. He often wears a black track suit and a black beanie on cold mornings over a shaved head with no facial hair except a little 'V' beard below and in the middle of the bottom lip, above the chin. He called it a tickler, with a suggestively lewd glint in his eye, when I said it looked good. He has blue eyes that hold your attention and a smooth voice that give his opinions a confident authority. He's a deep thinker and no fool. His garden is full of elaborate topiaries and the famous (at the time) TV gardening show 'Burke's Backyard' once filmed a segment there.
Geoff said this morning, " It's because the ****s have been removing all the old growth forests in the catchment areas and replacing them with new plantations that take up all the rainfall. The deep natural composting litter is lost as is water retension. The surface dries out. There's bugger all run off. The young trees soak up all the rain where before the forest floor was moist and the rain ran into streams. They've been warned about the consequences for twenty years but are still doing it."
I think he's right, and as well, too much land has been cleared for agriculture. I think Gov'ts should be giving farmers in marginal country drought assistance to stay on their farms, not to farm, but to plant them out with drought resistant vegetation. And not necessarily natives, though they may be the best option. It seems many things have to change if the 'ecological era' is to save us.
BEE SWARM. I found the frames last Wednesday and spent a few hours putting them together, wiring them, and inserting foundation wax. I was all thumbs as I don't do this often enough to do it easily or quickly , the last time being two years ago and then only a box or two. I enjoyed it. They are manual tasks that, like say cleaning and polishing shoes, are somehow rewarding. The swarm was hard to get at, being in the middle of the rubbish pile I couldn't drop them on the ground in front of the box and let them walk in as they like to do. I removed as many of the tangled sticks beneath them, and where I needed to put the box, as I could without them falling before I was ready.It was still messy. I shook them down and they fell into the heap, the box not really being close enough. I watched them for nearly an hour, smoking them gently on the side opposite to the box as they reformed their cluster, trying to herd them in. Some went in but the main part of the swarm was determined to cluster outside the box. I had to go, I had to pick rhodo and mollis azalea at Laurie Begg's and have it at the farm by 5 o'clock.
I came home about 6.30 and had a look. They were much as I left them, I had been hoping they'd have gone in of their own accord. I lit the smoker and stirred them up around the edge of the cluster away from the box while removing more sticks to make it clearer for them to go in. It was a big swarm. Slowly the bulk of them went in. A small cluster remained under the landing board and back to the cleat that the box sits on, which was quite a big gap the way the material I had scrounged went together. By this time it was after 7pm and nearly dark so I left them and went inside to the bathtub.
After Freda's funeral the next day I checked them and they were all in.
FREDA'S FUNERAL. Meredith picked me up at 9.30am and we went down in her car. Lib needed her car as she had an appointment at the physiotherapist in Pakenham, not that she could drive herself but fortunately Robbie was home on swotvac and he drove on L plates.
It was simple funeral with small crowd. The celebrant spoke briefly about Freda's life and then 'Amazing Grace' was played during which we were asked to reflect on our memories of her. Two fond memories for me were having afternoon tea with Ian and Freda many times over ten years or so. Freda was so at home in her kitchen and talked more there and she loved to talk of days long gone. Ian would become annoyed sometimes, with a 'here she goes again' attitude, but she liked to talk. Then when I was with Ian in the garden I'd come back to my van to find flowers had been put on the seat. Freda would be standing nearby watching and she'd say, "Take them to Meredith to see." I'd taken Meredith around to meet Ian and Freda and see their garden and they had been to see our farm. We had much in common.
Ian met Freda at the Flinders hall at a dance there when he was 17, so it would have been 1934. He had one dance with her, the last. It only happened because Freda was sitting near to him when a bloke who was dressed like a gangster came up and asked her to dance. She didn't like the look of him and said she couldn't dance because she had to dance with 'him', pointing to Ian. They didn't meet again for 10 years. When Ian was in the army in New Guinea in WW2 a letter arrived in handwriting he didn't recognize. He was puzzled because the only letters he got was from his mother. Freda had heard that he was in New Guinea and wrote to him. Ian replied and they continued to correspond. Ian looked her up when he got back to Australia and they married soon after. The celebrant told some of this story and Ian told us the rest while we had morning tea after the service.
I took a bunch of variegeted rhododendron ponticum flowers to the funeral. I picked them from a bush in my garden, one that Freda had given me about ten years ago as a small plant propogated from one in her garden.
Tears welled in my eyes and a lump was in my throat when the casket wheeled out at the end with Ian walking behind to the the old wartime classic song 'We'll meet again" by Vera Lynn. That just got me.
