Hey Plain Jane

One day, possibly one day this year, I am determined to stage a Winter Christmas. I’m not asking for snow, it  just needs to be cooler….it is too much in this tropical swamp pit to expect a cold Christmas.

The reasons are myriad for me wanting to do this, and some you perhaps would not suspect. For a start, Christmas here is hung on the humid air. Humidity of upwards of 90% most days. Try to bake a cookie in this cloud of moist air and see how long before your cookies go limp. Gingerbread house? Very much a lean-to to after a hour or so. Chocolate is also pretty useless; a beautiful chocolate Christmas truffle  will melt before you get it to your lips. Eating hot food like turkey roast or flambe plum pud with brandy custard or drinking lovely warmed spice wine? All basically uncomfortable pursuits.

No, this year, I want to send out four to six Christmas cards as invites for a midyear get together. We shall have mulled wine and toasty fireside muses beside our tiny outside brazier that people laugh at because nobody else in Cairns has braziers, we shall gaze at a twinkling Christmas tree and sit on lovely snuggling quilts, we shall eat our fill of crisp Christmas cookies, and we shall even frollick in fake snow if it so takes our fancy.

June 21 this year is the Winter Solstice. It is a Sunday. Looking good.

Jack will begin prep school at the end of January, and hey, where did those five years go? Seriously.

But loooooooooook, his ickle black school shoes we bought today. So ickle. So shiny. Although I note with some grrrr that he has already managed to scuff both of them as he lollopped about the lounge room in them. He’s very excited. Gary, who visited this afternoon for a cup of tea, said “well aren’t they just the very bricks of love.” I thought it apt. There is so much love in our eyes as we gaze at their chunky, shiny goodness.

Whenever I’ve mentioned the shoes to anyone today they ask if he got the brand “Bata Scout”, which to many people around my age is the name of the coolest pair of school shoes imaginable. Bata Scouts looked like any normal black school shoes, but they had secret properties; the lion paw imprint it left on the ground for a start, and the most secret squirrel hidden compass nestled in the heel. They were de rigour and deliriously funky stuff. Oh course I had a pair, are you nuts? As poor as my parents were, they got me a pair of them. You can still buy them, but alas, without the miniature compass.

Okay, as I did promise myself, I’m nutting out the finer points of the resolution.

Seeing as I completed the rehearsal draft of Cake in the very early hours of this morning, and seeing as the dramaturg has already called to say it all looked fine, I felt at liberty to approach one of the resolutions with caution…..”be organised”. I cannot contemplate entering into this year with an urgent agenda to smarten up my organisational skills. With Jack starting at school, a school that is miles away from where we live, a school that starts at 8:30 every morning, sharpish, I cannot afford to have no routine and nothing sorted, and great piles of  project related things strewn about, and the fridge in an uproar, and meals planned hickity-pickity, and everyone eating dinner at 8, and me staying up til all hours, and sleeping in til 8am. What am I like?

So.

A routine. I will draw up a schedule of general daily events. A chart. For the wall or the fridge. 
I printed out a shopping list, even remembered to take it shopping. But I hadn’t done a plan of all the meals for the week, so still it all felt ad hoc. Even worse, the meal I had planned for tonight, Fried Ginger Fish with Mirin dipping sauce, was stymied when John announced he was “not in the mood for fish”, Never mind. The goal here is to develop a weekly menu planner, and a weekly shopping list to match it. There are bound to be stumbling blocks like men with contrary tastebuds!

My list of New Year resolutions is quite monstrously long. It is so long and seemingly so critical to my general life happiness that I decided I should break the whole thing into smaller bite size chunks of possibilities, consider the goals, objectives, strategies, blather, blather, blather. I began this task days ago and much to my disgust, have found it all too much to finish. I just know I want a bunch of things to be different! But I also know that without some real effort and organisation these things will not happen. Perhaps it is an ongoing thing.

So, I’ll list them here, and they may get elaborated upon as the week goes on. 

FAMILY:
I resolve to spend more quality meaningful, fun and soul-loving time with my family.
I resolve to spend time creating and nurturing traditions within my immediate family. 

A film, a picnic, going to a festival, or a Museum or just a walk or a lagoon swim. This year I want to go camping at least once with Jack and John. Why? Because we’ve never been camping together. Because camping can fill up your spirit even when you don’t believe in all that. Because invaribaly something small or large goes awry on camping trips and the fun part is testing your combined mettle to fix the problem. We live in the oldest continuous rain forest in the World, the original Gondwanna-land, on the shores of one of the seven natural wonders of the World. At age 5, Jack has not seen any of it except that forest-laden range of mountains that tower in the distance from our yard. Unbelievable fact. That’s just shameful.

Go crabbing and fishing. Spend a night at Green Island or Fitzroy Island resort. Do a Daintree River Cruise in a fruitless search for crocodiles (who are far too clever than to hang about waiting for tourists to spot them). Do the free Tai Chi and aqua-robics classes at the Lagoon some early mornings. Plus I want to get some time away with John, just the two of us.

I also need to visit my hometown this year once, if not twice. There’s a reunion of some sort, being organised by our beloved school captain who is now the Editor of the hometown newspaper. Besides, I haven’t been home in years.

HOME
I resolve to take the risk of selling and building a new home in the midst of world economic mayhem. 
I resolve to be more economical, more organised and  more diligent when it comes to domestic management. 

House sold, home built, moved by Christmas 2009. End this procrastination.
Be organised: cupboards cleared.
Know what I own and be content.
Make do.
Throw trash responsibly, but throw it.
Plan meals.
Be on time, every time
One “buy nothing day” per fortnight 

Jack baptised.

WORK
I resolve to passionately pursue creative employment to fulfill my needs and to pay the bills. 

Set up a recycled art business?
Four hours with my craft pal, Soo, once a week.
Part time job that brings in at least $200 cash per week
Build my Art confidence.

LIFESTYLE

I resolve to take back control of my errantly menopausal body and claim the right to be fit, slim and energetic.
Lose 10 kilos (one kilo per month)
three gym classes per week
Thirty minutes exercise per day

Write lists.

Told you. The resolutions are a-plenty. Almost all of them are part of an overall picture of me in 2009 as a more organised, sharper, fitter, more responsible, more thinking individual. I’ll let  you know how that works out….

Piggy bread 2

Originally uploaded by luckysundae

Oh, now please! This Piggy Bread is so impossibly cute. The woman in charge of this and other outrageous culinary fare, Lucky Sundae, should be given a medal for kitchen tolerance above and beyond the call of duty. She makes many of her creations (like the bento box one I looked at a few posts ago) for her children.

Just how appreciative her children are of her efforts remains moot. Some children do dig this sort of attention being lavished on their food. Others…meh. My own son falls in the ‘meh’ group more often than not.

In working on Cake, the latest play of mine, more recently I have been exploring what it is to want to give your children extremely beautiful memories of their mother’s food. It’s like a chronic deep-seated need in many women I know; the need to lavish. It’s really ridiculously primal. I’ve been know to hurriedly whip up an entire chocolate cake at 3pm, having it iced and waiting for Jack for his return from day care. He has a slice, then runs off, thanks Mum.

It’s not just food either. The urge runs to making clothes memories, toy memories, book memories, the lot. I’m making a quilt for Jack made up of fabric he chose. I’m hand sewing this quilt on time that I don’t have. We live in the tropics and we certainly do not require a quilt any more than one week a year or the odd sick day. But it is the thought, the look, the memory that I am chasing on his behalf. Madness.

But don’t get me wrong. It is a wonderful madness. It is a pleasing one to me. Perhaps 10% of what I do in this regard will seep through to his long-term memory. That 10%, how precious!

I am coming up for air after a long period of frantic, frantic activity. Toward what? I’m on the road to everywhere.
House stuff; looking at houses, not buying houses, renovating to sell, not ready to sell, firing architect amid disgruntled emails of mutual disappointment and frustration, hiring new architect amid serious financial flummery.
The very latest is that we are building on our land but building a take away home; that is, a kind of kit home. Amazing to think that once they begin to build the home, it will take just 12 weeks to complete. But, here’s the catch! We are in the queue. The queue is long. It could take ten weeks for them to begin our build.  

then, of course…

dossier |ˈdôsēˌā; ˈdäs-|noun a collection of documents about a particular person, event, or subject.
ORIGIN late 19th cent.: from French, denoting a bundle of papers with a label on the back, from dos ‘back,’ based on Latin dorsum.

Our “bundle of papers” made in the hope of receiving a little bundle of joy. Yes. Gathering this massive dossier of the final adoption home file to be forwarded to the Philippines adoption authorities has been a major focus. How hard could it be? Plenty hard. Most of it is now done. Just awaiting a few bibs and bobs to complete the dossier. It goes on.

When this final dossier is finally shipped off, I am told one feels enormous relief. I suspect this may be the case because once it leaves our shores and is in the hands of the Philippine adoption authority, it is out of our control. We will have said our piece, made our case, laid it all out in all its great detail. We will have reached a point where we can safely say, we did our best, we can do no more, it is with God.

I think of who might be the child waiting in the wings for us. I see pictures of Filipino children, or see young children who might be from the Philippines, and I cannot help but fantasize about them being my child. I am so nervous, so impatient, so completely excited about it, all at once.

I think I do believe in race memory, whatever that may be. It is quite an intangible feeling of knowing you belong to some place, being pleasantly aware of the weight of your own ancestry, seeing unfamiliar things and having an emotional response to them that comes not from the head but from a place somewhere in the heart.

They say the heart has a brain. Scientists have discovered we do some of our thinking from a place inside our own hearts. There is evidence to show ‘brain-like’ activity occurring within the human heart, and most commonly thoughts to do with our emotional life. This is something we kind of know metaphorically, but this discovery means expressions like “thinking with your heart’ and “heart-felt” are based in fact.

When I go to Sherwood I am overcome with heart-felt memories of my race. These feelings are so easy to dismiss as fancy, but I do allow for the possibility that humans do not understand everything, and do allow for the notion that I am somehow emotionally linked to forests and especially the forests of England. It is only two generations ago my people lived there, as they had lived for thousands of years. We are all but vanished from that island now.

As we sat about Sherwood Forest and watched Harry and Jack play in the hollow log of a giant fallen Oak for well over an hour, as I took magic photos one after the other of these two boisterous and calamitous friends, it became so clear to me that a part of my being never left this island at all. In England I feel a constant sense of being drawn into the earth.

Continuum is beautiful. It is the meaning of having children. It is overwhelmingly truthful. Implanted within the idea of continuum is the utter and peaceful acceptance of life, death, joy and hardship. Continuum is almost “Zen”.

Another layer to this photo is that Jack and Harry are the sons of two friends, John (my husband) and Nick, who have been best friends since the age of three. Jack and Harry are both three in this photo, and they too have only just met. Like their fathers, they took to each other so well it was a pill to separate them at the end of the day. Nick’s mother commented to me that she was struck by the physical likeness between Harry and her son Nick when he was a boy, and Jack and John when he was a boy. So, John and I, and Nick and his partner Jo, had in effect re-created a strikingly similar image of the friendship between two boys forty years after it had first been seen.

Does it ever occur to you that your face is by no means unique? There are quite possibly relatives of yours walking the earth who you don’t know about who look spookily similar to you? They are part of your continuum and you don’t even know it. Even more intriguing for me is the absolute possibility that copies of your face have been seen on the earth quite a few times over the many centuries, as members of your continuum strutted and fretted their hours upon the stage, and then were heard no more.

Ellen and Jack, cousins in a cuddle. I took this photo beside the site of an ancient ring of stones near Ellen’s house in the far North of England. I just adore the shapes and the sensibility of this photo. I love Ellen’s hands, and the way she is staring so fondly at the camera lens. There is something magnificent about Jack and Ellen embracing in such a sacred place: a sense of continuity, of culture, of bloodline and love. 

Speaking of unfinished projects, this photo reminds me of a series of really lovely photos I’ve been threatening to have framed and hung in my house for over a year. Now it looks unlikely to happen until the new house is up.

And tomorrow is huge. I’m working.  I should go to bed, but sleeping in so boring when there is so much to think about, so much to do and see. I hate sleep. I have always hated sleep.

These two egg cups (they’re hardly cups!) are just ripping me up with their cuteness. I bought them from the local suburban mall gift shop the other day. They’ll be used on Easter morning this year and hopefully years to come. I remember cups, plates and special china objects like these from my own childhood. Remembering those long-gone pretty pieces fills me with smiles. I’m hoping these beautiful egg cups will do something of the same from Jack. But why did I buy two, not one? For that matter why did I buy only two, when there are three in our small family of Mum, Dad and boy? Surely I should have bought only one (for Jack) or three altogether (one for John, Jack and I each). My reasoning is, as always, about the second child, the long-time-still-coming adopted son or daughter whomever, where-ever they may be.  He or she will have one, and Jack will have one. So often I make allowance like this.

In any case, I have two of them and they are excruciatingly sweet. I found some pastel paper eggs as well, which you can see in the background, resting inside some antique egg cups my friend Susan gave me. Susan’s coming to town to spend Easter with us.

And yes, as promised, here above is the detailed fruit of my labour on mini bits of fabric last night. I sewed this one up today and put a little puff in it. I love the wee puff of stuff look, like a painted samosa, and to feel it’s soft spongey vulnerability is heavenly.

I finished two actually. The prototype is the round one, which was rather silly and raggedy about the edges. That’s what proto-types are for…..note to self; no round birdie num-nums, just square ones!