rosellas and chillis
Dear Ciara,
Work for the year is almost done. I won’t lie, it’s been a tense last few weeks—both professionally and personally—but there are friarbirds chirruping on the telephone wires this morning and I trust that everything will work out. The Organist and I are preparing for the arrival of my sister on Saturday. I haven’t seen her since June, and this will be her first real travel experience without our parents. She recently turned 18, so I am eager to take her out and celebrate with her.
She will stay for a week, and then the three of us will return to NSW together. The Organist and I plan to stay for four weeks or so, visit family and friends, before returning to Tropical Queensland at the end of January. It will be nice to return to the place of my birth: to soak up the temperate forests the smell of banksia and sound of wattlebirds; to swim in the deep blue irukandji-free waters. A holiday The Organist and I have most certainly earned.
This last week I’ve done a couple of jobs in the garden. I transplanted some more rosellas and chillis into the back garden bed. They are thriving. We already have our first chillis beginning to swell with spice. The sweet potato vine, much to my frustration, has resurrected itself from the dead and begun to take over the bed again. I have trimmed the new shoots back, but I expect to return to a smothered garden bed after our trip down south.
I also pulled out some dead flowers that have been unable to withstand the intense wet season heat. Only a single cosmos, which stands almost two metres tall now, seems to be surviving the intense UV. Every few days, it throws another brilliant, orange flower.
The song for today is:
Sitting Up — Spacey Jane
There is something about this time for the year that makes me want to listen to indie/surf rock. Perhaps it’s the long summer days, the time spent at the beach…
Love,
The Gardener