An Italian Story

"When are you coming out to my place again?" It was my Italian friend Margarita on the phone answering machine, a couple of weeks ago. When I rang her back she explained she was going into hospital soon for her operation. She wanted to ask me something about some plants she didn't know the name of.

On Monday I was in Margarita's garden, picking bunches of lemon rose geranium and looking across the valley over the white trunked manor gums in the gully to the lush green paddocks on the other side. They were speckled with lazy looking black and white beef cattle basking in the winter sun. Margarita and her husband own 100 acres in an agricultural area as beautiful as I've seen anywhere. They agist the cattle. In recent years her husband has worked for a potato packing firm.

Unrushed this day, I savoured the clean fresh air and took in the surroundings. A big new plastic water tank stood to the side of the well painted weatherboard house. Last time I was there a leaky old gal tank on a timber stand stood there. There's no town water here. The garden round the house, and the big vegie garden next to the large steel shed, rely totally on the heavens and tanks, as of course does the house.

Margarita's rake scratching the ground could be heard some distance away. We'd had our chat about the sacred bamboo she'd rescued from her daughter in law's rubbish heap, she then saying she had work to do, to get the garden tidy, before she moved inside to start there. I've never been inside the house, but I'd bet it's as tidy as the garden. She'd explained she was going into hospital the next day, in preparation for her operation to have a tumour removed from her pituitary gland. By coincidence, it's the same tumour that we recently found that Lib has. Margarita's must be bigger than Lib's, therefore requiring removal. Apparently if they get too big they can cause blindness.

A row of enormous cactus plants grows runs across the garden from near where I was standing. The plants stand 10 feet high or more, bursting out from gnarly old trunks like popeye the sailor man's muscles after he ate the spinach. I had seen them many times before, yet had not recognized their beauty till Monday.

"Do you eat the prickly pear?" I asked her as I walked back to my van.

"Oh yeah. You Aussies miss out on a lot of good things."

I had an internal chuckle. Margarita was born in Kooweerup in 1941. Her family moved to Gembrook the same year, along with some other Italian families. She's as much an Aussie as me. But she sees herself as Italian, her father coming from Italy in 1928.

"What part do you eat?"

"The fruit. Those round things sticking out at the top."

"They're amazing. How long have they been growing there?"

"Let me think. We came here to this farm in 1958, the year I was married. My mother planted them, in 1958.

I wished her luck with the operation and thanked her for the geranium, the camellia, and magnolia buds. I gave her my last billy of last season's honey, explaining that it was a bit thin because it was from the last extract in April, in cool weather.

"We like it thin. And thanks. Say a prayer for me on Wednesday morning. I'll be right. I'm strong."

She'll be in hospital a week or more. She'd be in theatre about right now. My prayer is with you Margarita.