Year in the Valley

by Jackie French

  As usual, there were more staff in the kitchen than customers out the front, though most of the ‘staff’ are probably just visiting – it’s called ‘sink therapy’. Jen and Natalie and Angela stick all their world-weary city friends at the washing-up, and after a week of talk and laughter the weltschmerz has disappeared.

  Angela’s laughter gurgles out through the studio, to the footpath. (Her ex-headmistress from three decades ago heard it last Christmas, and wandered in muttering: ‘I thought it was you Marshall, I recognised the laughter, what are you doing now?’, and Angela wilted as she must have done at thirteen.)

  Everyone sat watching the windows in the cafe, as though counting the raindrops…one two three four…

  The nights are full of wombat screams. Chocolate is defending his territory. Not from Gabby. Gabby is still no threat to anyone. There was a strange mother and baby here last week – the baby was small and round and brown and climbing between its mother’s legs and under her and over her, while she concentrated on munching grass.

  ‘Let’s call it Caramel,’ said E, but they were gone next day. Chocolate had hunted them off. I don’t think Gabby even noticed, and Chocolate only seems to register Gabby when he pinches her carrots. Gabby is still entirely human orientated; if a visitor drives up she’s padding out immediately, but doesn’t even sniff at wombat dung.

  Another almost Chocolate-sized wombat is lurking round the edges of the garden, staying downwind of Chocolate, just far enough away not to make it worth his while to charge the newcomer, though I think there must be collisions later at night, judging by all the noise. There was a massive roo at the bottom of the garden this afternoon too; great shoulder muscles like he’s been lifting weights or odd jobbing as a fencing contractor – the first roo I’ve seen in the garden since the last drought (normally all we get are wallabies).

  I’ve never seen so many roadkills either. The roadside verges are the only greenery that’s left.

  Lime-Juice Cordial

  The lime trees are laden now; one good wind and there’ll be fruit all over the ground. This stuff is wonderful – better than any so-called lime cordial you’ll buy in the shops.

  1 kilogram sugar

  2 cups water

  2 cups lime juice

  1 dessertspoon citric acid

  1 dessertspoon tartaric acid

  Combine ingredients in a large saucepan. Bring to the boil over medium-high heat. Allow to boil for 5 minutes, then remove from the heat.

  Pour cordial into bottles and seal.

  Keep bottles in a cool place. They should keep for months; but may not. If cordial starts to ferment or smells or looks odd, throw it out.

  October 4

  Too much asparagus and dandelion leaves last night: both diuretics. Actually it was only one dandelion leaf – I’m not really fond of them, but it’s good to blame something other than my asparagus gluttony. Do other people eat kilos of asparagus at a time? How can you resist it when it’s there, poking inquiringly out of the soil as though to say: ‘Here I am, come eat me!’, and you’ve been eating Brussels sprouts, cabbages and broccoli for months…

  Which is why I wandered onto the balcony sometime in the early morning, to relieve my bladder in the bucket that serves as a chamber pot – an en suite would be boring after years of moonlight, and anyway the roses like the urine; we choose a different rose to throw it onto every morning. You’d think the smell would stop the wallabies munching the rose leaves – but it doesn’t. Obviously they don’t find the scent of Bryan or me at all threatening.

  The sky always seems higher at 4 a.m., as though someone is standing above it and stretching it as high as it will go. Stars like moth holes in the fabric of space–time and last night a lattice of cloud: a high wind above the ridges blowing from the east and an even higher one perhaps blowing from the west, so the sky was crisscrossed with the thinnest webs of mist.

  Back to bed, which always seems more comfortable when you’ve been out of it; but of course by then sleep was impossible, and so I thought about death instead. Four a.m. is the perfect time to consider death, especially if it’s towards the end of my monthly cycle and there’s a whisper of depression in my mind.

  Not that I’m depressed about death. Angry sometimes: I think this was my first reaction when I really accepted for the first time that I would die (I was about twenty-one, sitting in front of a fire watching the flames snicker back into the coals and suddenly I knew…). It seemed the most outrageous trick of fate to give you consciousness then take it away. And worse – to leave you knowing all through your life that consciousness was temporary, borrowed from the universe.

  The rage subsided somewhat over the next few years. I reasoned that as an instinctive animal of course I wanted more than anything to escape death; it was programmed into me. That if it wasn’t, my ancestors would have cast themselves into tar pits or the jaws of tigers long before they’d had a chance to breed, that there was nothing intrinsically malicious about death.

  Now my feelings about death wander with the years, and probably with my monthly cycle too. But last night, lying in a comfortable bed in a room I love, with a wombat scratching itself on the garden table outside and Bryan snuffling beside me and E down below – things that I hold very dear, and would feel extraordinary sadness to let go – I realised that I have never heard a tale of afterlife that wasn’t human based, an extrapolation of our existence here.

  Everything I’ve heard or read about an afterlife is an extension somehow of existing consciousness; and much as I love the world around me now, I think I would feel cheated if I woke up after death and found it even a little bit the same.

  Of course one can say that the only way we limited humans can think of death or its aftermath is in terms of what we know; it is impossible to describe the totally unexperienced. But I don’t want any of the afterlives I’ve read about. I don’t want non-existence either. Not that I reckon I’ll have much choice.

  Sometime after the first rooster hiccup I fell asleep (probably conditioned by now, as I expect to go to sleep as soon as the rooster crows).

  The insomnia’s genetic: my mother always wakes between four and dawn. I don’t think Grandma did. She preferred to get up at rooster crow, or whatever the city equivalent was, in her middle and old age, and sit with a cup of tea and two Sao biscuits with butter and sliced tomato, facing a blank wall – a practice I wondered at as a child (why not a book or at least a window with a view) till lately I’ve found myself also facing blank walls, though not with a cup of tea, for the sort of peaceful thought that doesn’t want distractions.

  I wonder what my grandmother thought about death? I asked her once, but she was noncommittal.

  October 6

  The pittosporums are flowering. Pittosporum blossom is supposed to send bees mad and, according to (male) Aboriginal lore, send women mad with passion too. Male hope springs eternal, no matter what the culture, especially in spring – no woman who has stood under a flowering pittosporum here has been driven mad with lust, and the bees mostly ignore the flowers too.

  Gabby had a pittosporum flower in her fur this morning. At least with the anti-mange injections she doesn’t have ticks yet; I used to spend hours deticking Ricki – not that I think he noticed if the ticks were there or not.

  Hot Dried-Fruit Salad for Breakfast

  1 cup dried peaches

  1 cup dried apricots

  1 cup dried prunes

  1 cup dried apple

  1 cup dried apricots

  2 whole cloves

  a sliver of cinnamon bark (not the dried stuff…it looks like the remnants dried in your hanky after a cold)

  Simmer all the dried fruit in 3 cups of water for 10 minutes. Cool in the syrup. Store in the fridge for up to two weeks.

  Scoop out what you want for breakfast and reheat. A little grated lemon zest or a squeeze of lime juice before reheating helps bring the flavours out.

  October 9

  It’s snowing –
except the flakes are crab-apple petals. Every time the breeze gusts, the garden is filled with them, fluttering across the lawn and slipping down to almost pink drifts along the windows.

  ‘Mum!’ yelled E this morning, ‘Gabby’s asleep on the doormat and I can’t get out!’

  I lifted her – minus the doormat – and carried her into the shade. She didn’t wake up. Sometimes I’m terrified for her – it only takes a few hours for a wombat to die in full sunlight, and Gabby doesn’t seem to notice if it’s night or day.

  October 10

  Inspected our peach trees this morning. We only have half a dozen now. There used to be hundreds when I first came here, mostly half dead from old age, starvation and cattle damage. Now we’re down to two new ones, and four old ones that still produce that lovely white, totally squashable fruit that never reaches the markets (it would be one large bruise if it did) and tastes like heaven might if you could squeeze the juice from it.

  Hundreds of peaches, nut sized and just as hard, on the early season white (they’ll all be small but sweet), and nearly as many on the Golden Queen – a late variety that really is the queen of peaches. I’m salivating at the memory but it’ll be six months before I taste another Golden Queen.

  Dried-Peach Fool with Macadamias

  1 cup dried peaches

  1 cup water

  1 cup cream

  1 teaspoon Cointreau

  1 teaspoon finely grated zest and juice of 1 orange

  2 tablespoons caster sugar

  1–2 tablespoons finely chopped macadamias

  Simmer the dried peaches in 1 cup of water till soft (about 20 minutes) and mash well so it becomes a purée.

  In a separate bowl, whip the cream with the Cointreau, zest, juice and caster sugar. Sprinkle the macadamias onto the peaches, then swirl the peach purée carefully through the cream – it should stay in discrete stripes, not amalgamate.

  Spoon into glasses. Serve within an hour or it may separate.

  October 12

  Hauled back a jumper full of avocados this morning (they take a week or two to soften after picking – unlike the oranges, lemons, limes and so on, we can’t just wander out and pick them when we want them). Also a couple of Seville oranges (lovely bitter things – I’ll grill them dotted with brown sugar), six navel oranges, two limes, one very small custard apple (they don’t grow big here, which doesn’t matter as none of us really like them, I just bung them in fruit salad) and more asparagus, a whole plastic bag full for lunch, the purple spears peering out the top. E and I will pick more asparagus for dinner. He’s the best asparagus spotter I know: has a real eye for the odd spear lurking under the bracken or behind a comfrey leaf.

  I suppose we’ve earned a bit of the fat of the land since I planted my first tree here, twenty years ago. The soil was pale yellow powder then. Not even grass would grow – there were blackberries instead. Now the trees are trees, not just sticks nibbled by wallabies and shrivelled by drought; and the larder’s full of honey and the garden’s full of veg and the soil is full of worms. This is truly harvest time.

  And the herb garden, which changes with the years as our needs change (it’s no longer filled with aloe vera plants for nappy rash, or parsley to chop into everything as a way of getting a three-year-old to eat his greens without being aware of them), is filled now with tarragon and oregano and lettuce-leafed basil, because somehow during the past couple of years I seem to have found time to cook again, which I never seemed to have time to do when E was a toddler.

  Bryan counted 127 different sorts of birds last year – the garden’s filled with the descendants of birds who moved in five, eight, ten years ago and stayed and bred…

  There are hoverflies on the alyssum and hanging space for the clothes…

  This is both harvest time and blossom time…

  October 16

  When we drove down to the school bus Rod and ‘the boys’ were up the ladders among the orchards, thinning the peaches.

  Too many peaches on each branch means tiny peaches and customers only want great fat ones. I find large peaches too much of a good thing – I’d rather eat four small ones than one big one, but the big ones do look stunningly pulchritudinous, as though if you poked your finger at them they’d spurt out juice.

  Still can’t get over the light and the colours. The sun here hovers on the edges of the ridges all winter so you never get direct light at all; and now it’s climbing the sky and you realise you’ve forgotten quite what depth green can have, or how brilliant red can be…

  October 19

  Gabby’s eczema is getting worse, despite the injections. I’m pretty sure now it is eczema, not mange. I rang WIRES again. They recommended a mix of sorbolene and sulphur. I applied it liberally. Gabby didn’t object. I think it took her five minutes to work out what was happening. By that time I’d got it done. She looks ridiculous – brown with yellow streaks and spiky fur. Punk wombat.

  I stink of sulphur, like I’ve been bathing in a volcano.

  The cream seems to soothe her, but not enough to stop her scratching…

  The water jets were sparkling under the peach trees as we drove back through the orchards after school – the scent of cold water on hot soil, with the faintest almond tang of peach leaves.

  ‘When will the peaches be ready?’ demands E, peering out the car window to see how they’ve swollen among the leaves.

  ‘By your birthday. Maybe,’ I say.

  October 20

  The chemist is out of sulphur and so am I. It does seem to soothe the eczema a bit; or maybe I’m just grasping at straws. They ordered it in but apparently the distributor is out of sulphur too. Maybe every wombat on the eastern seaboard is being treated for the itch. Meanwhile Gabby keeps scratching.

  The avocado leaves are drooping as the trees begin to flower – incredibly huge bunches of cream blossom poking up towards the sky.

  The avocados are at their most luscious now – so smooth you feel like stroking them. There hardly seem to be any when the blossom falls – only one flower in about twenty sets fruit and then they begin to swell and swell, and the branches droop with the weight of them.

  Theoretically, most should be picked now, but we leave a lot on the tree, to get bigger and lighter and even more delicious – overripe avocados, though they aren’t really. Avocados don’t ripen till you pick them or till a currawong pecks a hole in the side and they ripen and fall off. (To be finished off by the wallabies below – happy wallabies – they love ripe avocado.)

  October 24

  The woman from the chemist hailed me triumphantly at the post office when I was picking up the mail. She’s tracked down four jars of sulphur.

  I mixed a good batch of yellow goo and applied it to Gabby’s bald patches but she wasn’t grateful. It’s not so much that she’s strong – for a wombat she’s small and very gentle and even when she bites you it doesn’t break the skin (Ricki could chomp a steel girder in half and probably munched granite boulders for breakfast) – she’s just so compact there’s really nothing to get a grip on.

  Maybe I should add some comfrey juice and calendula to the mixture, and heart’s-ease flowers too…just accept that it’s eczema not mange and needs soothing, not killing. I’ve got some already mixed in the larder, leftover from a batch I made last year for Noel. I’ll try it tomorrow.

  October 25

  By now we’ve been picking asparagus for about a month – a few fat spears at first, not enough each time to cook, so we nibble them raw as we inspect the beds. They have a slightly bitter greenish taste, still with the tang of winter soil.

  Today’s harvest was about three kilos. Most days we pick about half a kilo, but yesterday we went bushwalking and the day before we went to town to get the groceries and the day before…Anyway, it’s been four days since we picked over the beds. The biggest spears were up to my knees, fat as my big toe, with thin shoots from last year’s seedlings even taller with a ferny brush on top.

  The asparagu
s bed doesn’t get weeded, fed or watered – just picked. It grows on top of an old blackberry bed.

  About twenty years ago I covered it in carpet then in mulch – two months of truck loads of stable tailings from the bedding of (Melbourne Cup winner) Whiskey Road, whose progeny were later to win race after race. He imbues the asparagus with the same spirit.

  The asparagus has grown steadily ever since, sprinting away in spring and settling down to a good steady lope for the rest of the year, till the red berries burst in later summer and it dies down in winter. Then we mow what’s left of it – and the comfrey that spread from an accidental tilling and the blackberries that have crept back – and the weeds feed and mulch the asparagus, and sometime (maybe this year) I may get round to spreading on some hen manure, so the little shoots can keep on growing fatter.

  Today’s pick had tough white stalks at the soil end, and some of the green stalk was tough as well. But the tips were wonderful.

  Bryan has his usual spring lunch of asparagus omelette, while E and I just had big bowls of boiled asparagus – the giant spears broken up into a pot with water halfway up, and boiled till they turn a deeper green (a minute or two only), then thrown out of the saucepan into the sink to cool down under the tank water from the cold tap. Then a dribble of salad dressing.

  Our taste in salad dressing changes from week to week, sometimes thick with garlic chives, or fragrant with seedy mustard, or lemony, or tart with lime juice. But the asparagus never changes, always the same big bowlful till the end of the season – and I do mean big bowlful – I put on weight in asparagus season, never mind that it’s supposed to be low calorie (but not in the quantities that I eat it). The same goes for the first few weeks of Jonathan and Golden Delicious apples too.