Back home after a month away. It was a month of connecting with families – Steve’s at the family holiday house, and mine when Duncan, Becky and their little boys Felix and Hugo had Hugo’s First Birthday weekend with us there. We went away with them to the south coast for dad, Maggie and my birthday in early December and met up for meals, but this visit was the longest period I had ever spent with all of them, and the longest I have spent with Duncan for, I calculated,17 years, when Maggie, Oli, Duncan and I touristed in New York for a few days and I stayed with him in his uni room.
It was a highlight of my holidays to make a gingerbread house during the rainy day; to read them stories and sit in at bathtime; and to observe Felix’s articulate cheekiness, commenting that he wanted other people to stop talking, but agreeing that of all the people, he was the one who was talking the most. He interrupted the adults a couple of times to thank us for the lovely food during dinner. Apparently, the inner voice of toddlers has been documented as early as 18 months. Felix is almost three.
After helping look after both of them for 24 hours and having Felix share their bunk room with them, the girls were exhausted and fell asleep in front of the TV on the first night. The next day Rhea asked me how I could look after two babies at the same time. Like Duncan, Steve being home with us for more than seven months was part of the recipe for me, together with practical, regular help from mum, Di and Heidi.
In our last week, the girls and I were camping with Jessie and her younger girls Jolan and Tara. We used her billie to boil water and cooked our hot dogs with roasted corn on the first night; and curried veggies with rice on the second night at our campsite near a beach at the Otway ranges. During the days we swam and beachcombed, played long card games of Cheat and Spoons/ Tongues (a fast-paced game requiring each person to collect a suit and either quickly grab a spoon/ stick like musical chairs or unobtrusively put their tongue out once done, the winner being the one to claim the last spoon/ stick or be the one who puts their tongue out first from the elimination game).
Jessie and Jolan and I went for one walk through the coastland scrub, turning back when Jolan saw a snake. On our second night, Rhea and Jessie and I had another walk 200m uphill along a fire trail until we could see the bay spreading like a postcard vista below us, complete with rainbow. I managed to have enough phone coverage to do Wordle up there, though I had lost my streak as I hadn’t thought of relocating to maximise my phone coverage on the first night.
My other highlight was spending time with the girls. I was proud of them for both helping the younger nippers this year, sometimes standing is the cold water for an hour and a half so the younger kids were well supported. Rhea and I had a morning swim on many mornings, especially when our holiday time was starting to run out. Rhea swam with Maggie once last year at Anglesea early one morning, and once with Penny while it was raining, and was hooked on these glistening experiences.
On one of the early morning swims, after we had seen the ocean swimming crew of around 25 people strike off towards a distant beach and had then ourselves braved the cool weather and frolicked like fish, we got out and ordered our cappuccino and chai teas from the beachside kiosk. Who did I see there behind us but the author of a book I had finished reading two weeks prior, Virginia Trioli, whose food memoir A Bit on the Side I savoured every page of. She was with her teenage son. Should I say something? I decided I would. I walked up to her and said ‘Excuse me. I really loved your book.’ And then, feeling that I should say something more, added ‘my sister gave it to me. She really liked it too.’ Our subsequent interaction – about this beach, beaches near our home, her experience of being caught in the Black Saturday fires with her son at that beach and his subsequent fear of returning there – might have taken three minutes, but it made my day, and hopefully hers too.
I was bowled over by some other books I read during my holidays: the fiction books The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, a dazzling epic of immersion into the lives and culture of an American evangelical family living in the Congo from the late 1950s and the impact it had on their lives; and Shankari Chandran’s Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens, also unputdownable about the civil war in Sri Lanka from the perspective of generations of survivors of it now living in Sydney. Steve’s mum, Lara, Steve and I all gulped up Bonnie Garmus’s Lessons in Chemistry and we relished the movie based on the book, which sustained our holiday relaxation. I also read Joelle Gergis’s Quarterly Essay Highway to Hell: a climate scientist’s patient and irrefutable exposition of what needs to be done to get us back on track to address climate change, which Australia needs to do by keeping coal in the ground and investing in renewables. She urged us not to look away at this critical time and to keep our politicians accountable to take these actions for ourselves and future generations.
I put in a week of work and achieved what I needed to in that time, and also met up with a former colleague and her family at the Chocolaterie, another encounter that filled me with happiness as we only see each other a few times a year, and it was lovely to see her little boys growing a little bigger, and to meet her husband.
Lara and I had some epic table tennis games in which I often led by several points until the very end, and then she overtook me. We also played some singles and doubles games with Steve and Rhea in which Lotus sat on the table. She was trying to avoid her dog-cousin Goose, who is in love with her.
Lara is at another coast now with her friend and friend’s family and will be away from us for ten days, the longest we have spent apart.
Time to catch up with my good friends now, perhaps swim some pool laps, and find other books to read. In a few days I have a work retreat too, so Steve and Rhea will be alone for a few days. We are planning our other holidays for the year.
