It is now May. While my mind feels as though the dust is
still swirling, my body and the calendar tell me that a lot has settled in the
last five months (mainly that my Superhusband is a green-card-carrying
permanent resident of the U S of A!). Spring has sprung in North Alabama, and
as my BEST cousin “Kitty” said, “Now that you’ve got an apartment, a garden,
and a new stove, it’s time for another blog.” We have tallied many adventures
betwixt then and now, so don’t hold your breath while you read. It’s going to
be a doozie.
Between November 7 and December 9, 2012, Superhusband and I
drove the entire width of Australia. Twice. That’s a little over 2,000 miles in
a four-door Ford Falcon pulling our beloved 14-foot caravan. We conquered deserts, forests, inland
metropolises like Salmon Gums and Eucla, and even drove the Nullarbor Plain
where the horizon was set by spirit level. We paid, in American terms, roughly
$15 a gallon for gas. We witnessed a dust storm first hand, changed a flat tire
on the crispy South Australian asphalt, and met countless Irish
twenty-somethings earning five times their normal wage to spend their gap years
bartending in forsaken outposts. Superhusband I together visited our first American
Consulate in Sydney, and had the interview of our lives in a room reminiscent
of a DMV. (If there are any Australian readers here, that interview was given
to us by a woman who freakishly resembled the large, island woman in the
insurance commercials who proclaims “Rhonda is mine!” Americans, you can google
it.) We even celebrated our first anniversary and our second Thanksgiving on
the road. That Thanksgiving dinner was complete with a turkey roast, dressing,
asparagus and cheese sauce, cranberry sauce, and roasted sweet potatoes—ALL made
in the caravan parked in the Lane Cove River nature preserve north of Sydney. I
even got to SEE a live turkey that morning.
Unfortunately he was pecking through our garbage. What a trip.
The summer had
started to swelter in WA, and I tried to stamp all of the colors into my memory
before our long journeys outward. There
is a reason that few impressionist painters are bred in Australia—those hazy, smooshy,
feathered colors are part of reality in France, or Virginia, or even around the
smoky swamps of Louisiana. They are far from the vision of Australia,
especially its West. Somewhere between
Toodyay and Cocklebiddy, God cleaned off his palate knife, scraping huge clumps
of color into the landscape. The gum trees
have a dark green-black oiliness that shimmers like taffy above the brick red
rocks. The sky is Looney-Tunes blue with
creamy, muscular white clouds that make you think there’s a tiny train puffing
away on a track just out of view. The
Indian Ocean is unadulterated turquoise; the sand stark eggshell. It’s a place
of dust and sun and waves and bizarre creatures and musical, guttural language.
There is no subtly in Australia. The land and the people are equally bold. It
has made a dent in my psyche, and I will be forever changed and grateful.
We left Australia for England on Christmas Eve 2012. Then
there’s English Christmas. After a roughly 20-hour flight and a surreal
stop-over in Singapore where forty-foot Christmas trees bubbled with orchids of
every description in every corner of the airport, we touched down in Manchester
at 8am on Christmas day. Uncle Alec was
our welcoming committee in the frigid drizzle, and in just over an hour we were
enveloped in the arms and 80-degrees-warm house of Auntie Maureen. We had coffee and home-made mince pies (there
should be a whole post devoted to these later.
Maybe I’ll write one post for the sugar-coated, perfectly crumbly
pastry, and a WHOLE ‘nother post for the spicy fruit filling. You just can’t understand.) We got freshened
up a bit and then walked to “pop ‘round” to Superhusband’s cousin’s house. We “rugged up” in our scarves and hats and
boots and clomped intrepidly through a back lane from one side of Moss Side, Leyland
to the other. The cold, damp air was
almost unbreathable, and the sound of my boots on the broken asphalt was so
sharp and loud (after some jetlag, to be fair) it was unnerving. It was as though Singapore Airlines had
developed a wormhole and spit us out on another planet—the realities of
Australia and England could not have been further apart without including extra
terrestrials. The next few days were a flurry of new family faces,
bone-chilling winds, ivy-covered cottages gripping the damp, green hills, and
more roasted food than I have ever encountered in one place in my life. I developed a love for my new family and for
parsnips, in that order.
Unfortunately, while I was meeting and/or reconnecting with
my new family, my old family was straining under the weight of new burdens. My
newest nephew was delivered a month early because of my sister-in-law’s ill
health; my grandfather was put in the hospital that same time. As my parents
tried to cope with round-the-clock care for them, my father’s health was in
decline. We got the call on December 29th
that Dad was in the hospital for emergency amputation of his left leg. His father,
my Pappaw, died on January 5. Dad didn’t even get to go to the funeral. And I
was left to play out all of this range of emotions in front of caring, yet
fairly unfamiliar, people a half-world away from home. All of England’s beauty couldn’t buy me
comfort.
But it was useless being depressed. Superhusband and I plucked up our spirits and
saw some of the most breath-taking things on the planet. I stood in the room
where Shakespeare was born. I ate icecream made on-site at a dairy farm near
Blackpool. I met my husband’s best friend that he’s known since the age of 4. I
got to stand on a mountain in Wales. (Every inch of that tiny highland nation
is fascinating, and our family in
Ruthin gives the best guided tours. If you need some vacation ideas, let me
know—I will hook you up!) And then our three weeks of the old country were
done, and it was time to move on. We flew
back to Australia for three weeks and final goodbyes, and after a serendipitously
missed flight and a grand overnight stay in Sydney, we were off to America to
start over.
I have found that you never really understand a place until
you’ve seen it through someone else’s eyes.
This has been my experience with Superhusband’s adjustment to my
childhood home of Florence, AL. Just like I was in Australia, now he is here:
struggling with feeling grown-up and self-sufficient in a place with all
different rules, different notions of correctness, different practices of the
postal service, etc. I never knew how many burger joints there were in Florence
until we started looking for something other than burgers to eat. Before I travelled to Australia I had a
sneaking suspicion that cream cheese wontons weren’t authentically Chinese, but
now I know for certain, and it has cast a different light on my beloved Peking
Buffet. And if it weren’t for a new Publix opening up on Cox Creek Parkway, we
would have had to send to Perth to get our HP Sauce! So many differences. So
many challenges. I’m waiting for the “so much reward” part.
On top of this, we have been working our fingers to the bone
and have not earned one, red cent. As you may have guessed, we are not a couple
who settles for predictability, our new life here has started with some
overwhelmingly huge tasks. Well, task. We are currently renovating a house my
father sold to us for $10. And by renovating, I mean excavating. Let me explain.
The house has been un-lived-in for about ten years, and unlivable
for five. It’s a 1940’s dormer bungalow with three bedrooms and ¾ acre of land.
Two of the bedrooms, all of the common rooms, and half of the land were filled
with my father’s “collections.” We are not talking art, were talking junk. Out
of date car seats, soda bottles, pesticide pumps, boxes of screws, a 1970 year
book from a school that none of our family attended, paint rollers still in
their packaging, plastic beads, play-doh, aluminum cans, boxes of fabric,
pictures of people we don’t know, funeral flowers, 1960’s elementary science
books, my homework papers from 1988, ruined shoes, dirty blankets, roughly 200 cans
of paint in rusty buckets, old shingles, two derelict water heaters, three
rolls of waterlogged fiberglass insulation, dolls, keepsakes, angle iron, five
non-functioning chainsaws, good china, McDonald’s happy meal toys….and in the
back room which had been partially knocked off the house by a tree, a blue shag
carpet so old and rotten that it had to be removed with shovels…….all coexist
and molder on the property. Some days I feel like I must know how those mucking
out after hurricane Katrina must felt—only the hurricane is someone I love. It
started out as a desire to help others; to fix and mend and restore and bless,
just like a hurricane starts as a small trough of low pressure which brings
much-needed rain to a parched region. It breaks my heart to hear all of the “shouldn’t
haves” that are echoed from the piles.
No comments:
Post a Comment