Living in a place where there’s next to no creative activity, where fishing, prejudice, bad driving & assaults on humans & animals seem to be the way of life for much of the populace, I found that, after the initial new place attraction wore off & familiarity crept, too rapidly, in, the only way I could seek solace &, sometimes, stimulation was to take off driving around the countryside, the hinterland.
Lots of little things to see, to discover, much unexpected. The wildlife — wallabies & kangaroos grazing by the side of the road, cautious, watching, as was I who usually only saw them as roadkill, run over by some long haultruck charging through the early morning, dusk; brolgas dancing; a jabiru balanced gracefully in a lagoon; small birds rising up like dust from the grass at the side of the road. The not so nice — an ostrich farm neglected to the extent that there were ostrich carcasses in the yards, with crows feeding on them. The delicate — pools of water lilies. The commercial — salt pans stretching out, the stockyards, the meatworks. The humorous — coming across stretches of sealed road a kilometre each side of the entrance to the properties of someone who had some clout in the local shire. The landscape seen from different points of view, refreshing it.
Now that I’ve re-retired, I was looking forward to retracing my steps. But it’s been raining &/or flooded for most of the two months since I stopped working, & most of the roads are unsealed, & my little two litre hatchback isn’t designed for that sort of thing. So I’ve been pretty much housebound, & I’m going stircrazy. Can’t open the house up because of the smell of rotting vegetation from the flood, can’t potter around in the garden because it’s so bloody humid that you have to change T-shirts after every time you go out because they’re drenched within minutes with the sweat of doing nothing, don’t feel like writing, don’t know if I even could if I could bring myself to sit down & try.
No comments:
Post a Comment