by Sharyn Munro
I prefer to close my curtains only in winter, to keep the night’s cold out and the fire’s heat in.
Starlight or moonlight? I can’t choose, but the horses seem to prefer the nights around the full moon, when they stand in the open and moonbathe, silently soaking it up, statue-still for hours. Or have they been bewitched?
Once I thought I’d seen a sort of magic. My partner and I were sitting on the verandah after dinner, sipping port. Far down in the steep gully below, we saw a bobbing light approaching, like someone running uphill with a torch. As it got closer it clearly wasn’t a person, since we couldn’t see anything but the light, which was quite big and bright, flashing on and off. Despite our pursuing torch beams, its source remained elusive as it danced all around the garden. We didn’t really believe we had a fairy at the bottom of the garden, but were unable to come up with a rational explanation.
We thought of a firefly, but dismissed it as too small. Neither of us had ever seen one, and imagined a tiny dot of light, the size of a fly Thinking ours might be a giant phosphorescent moth, whose light fluctuated with the pumping of its wings, we passed on the query to an entomologist friend. The dry reply came back: ‘If it wasn’t fireflies, I don’t know what caused the light they saw, but whatever it was, it needs diluting!’
Slightly offended—we didn’t drink all that much—we accepted it must have been a firefly. I’ve since seen small groups of them come up from that gully and it’s always a treat, although never quite the same wonder of that first solitary visit. I have still never seen the actual insect in whose tiny body this magic resides.
I watch the moon and the stars on our arching nightly passing, but can name only a few. I bought a star chart, but it’s one of those things I may not get around to doing more than feeling mildly guilty about. I can’t read by starlight, and the thought of juggling a torch and the book, perhaps binoculars or a telescope, taking my reading glasses off and on, always seems too hard. Slack, I know. But the book’s there for me to study if ever I undergo a long convalescence or similar period of immobility. Perhaps I’m thinking of old age as a time for guiltless lolling about and reading, when the knees have given up, the trees are all planted, and the lists all crossed off—my last chapter.
16
LET THE SUN SHINE
By day my north-facing skybowl is full of sunshine—when it’s not full of cloud, that is. Summer is over-the-top solar power time, but I get sun nearly all day in winter too, ideal for my vegetables and my comfort as well as my power generation. And I much prefer that winter sun.
Summer once meant glorious, golden sunshine, for outdoor playing and swimming, from sunup to sundown if we could wangle it. Painful sunburn and peeling skin was inevitable, every year, for everyone except those with foreign—that is, not English, Irish or Scottish—skin. We soothed the burns by dabbing with vinegar or cut tomatoes, picked at the dry skin as it peeled, and drew satisfaction from extra long strips removed. Noses and shoulders were always the worst and most frequently burnt. As new freckles appeared we joked about ‘sunkisses’. I could count mine then.
By my fifteenth year it was all about sunbaking in bikinis, a race to ‘get a tan’ quickest, grilling our bodies like skinny sausages, assisted by a coconut oil baste. This ritual was interrupted only by an occasional stroll to the water, mainly to see and be seen by the unattainable golden boys with their goods on show in Speedos. As our costumes shrank to four brief triangles, soft and virginal bands of flesh burnt so badly the pink turned livid, yellowish, and school uniforms and seats could hardly be borne on Mondays. But we persevered, for white skin had the connotation of slugs, not porcelain. Not that I’d ever have the choice again, having by now acquired a permanent shawl of sunkisses.
Fifteen years later, summer meant the annual angst in front of unfriendly mirrors and lying saleswomen over whether we could still get away with wearing a two-piece costume. It was spent supervising sandcastles and shell collections, soggy towels and gritty kids, with hardly a minute to ourselves for sunbaking. As we still did, with suntan lotion overall, zinc cream or sunscreen only applied to acknowledged vulnerable bits. We did wear hats.
These days summer brings danger. Sunbaking, suntanning, sunkisses—such antiquated words, such tragic innocence. Forget sunscreen; with the hole we’ve made in the ozone layer, we need sunblock. Slip, slop, slap. Kids are growing up with sunblock as their second skin; they swim in neck-to-knee Lycra and aren’t allowed to play outside at school without a hat. They are taught to be as afraid of our once-beneficent sun as of strangers. It’s like science fiction come horribly true. I dread the announcement that constant exposure to sunscreen has been found to be carcinogenic, but I won’t be surprised.
My swimsuit mostly functions as a relic of my past, to be found scrunched in the back of a drawer along with lace handkerchiefs, suspender belts, French knickers and tired g-strings. Summer glare and heat are too savage for me to want to be outdoors at all. Instead of exposing winter flesh, I cover up more, never leaving my verandah without throwing on my sun-faded Akubra hat and the long-sleeved cotton shirt, usually a man’s work shirt, second-hand, that will be hanging there.
Too many threatening spots and lumps have already been removed, after hiding amongst the thousands of freckles of my inappropriate Celtic skin. I go to my skin cancer clinic every six months for a check-up. The doctor, genetically brown-skinned and unfreckle-able, shakes his head at the mottled map of my youth each time I take off my shirt.
I am in awe of the powers of the sun in more positive ways too, for without its electricity generation I could not work from here, and living would be much less convenient. I could manage, since I am not dependent on as many electrical aids as some people must be, judging by the range offered in the glossy catalogues that fall from my donated newspapers. Bread maker, sandwich maker, pie maker, pizza maker, coffee maker, rice cooker, slow cooker ... of course I do have all those things, but it’s a sort of combination machine—me!
Before I was on my own I treated the solar power shed, like all the sheds, as exclusively male. It held an array of machines and metal boxes with coloured lights and LED displays and dials and switches and buttons and leads and plugs and dangerous substances that blurped behind my back when I thought I was alone. I only ever went in there because that’s also where I store my out-of-season clothes and my fabric pieces, in four waist-high, lidded and critter-proof cardboard drums that declare they once held bulk powdered milk.
My partner had understood it all; he could talk the language with Dave from Sunrise Solar, who designed and set it up for us. It was pure magic to me. The sun shone on the solar panels, which were patterned with circles in squares like giant board games, and in doing so, somehow became something that could run down thin wires and be turned into something that lurked in the dark liquid depths of the linked rows of batteries and then ran through thicker wires, partly to the house as 24 volt for our small bar fridge and the halogen lights, and partly to the invertor which turned it into 240 volt for all the power points in house and workshop. I knew 24 volt wouldn’t kill me, but 240 volt would, just like in any suburban house.
How or why any of this was possible, I could not fathom, despite reading about it, any more than reading about radio waves made me see how and why radios worked.
There was also a battery charger and a back-up generator in this shed— more machines and manuals to deal with by myself, and tasks to be done ... or else! I cannot afford to replace any of this ageing equipment; it must be looked after to last as long as possible.
If I had a problem I could ring Dave, as his after-sale service seems to last forever, but I’d exhaust all my own resources first. As men tell me the magic spells for the starting and maintenance of any machine, I write them down in a little indexed notebook, left over from one of my Sydney jobs. So under ‘B’ I find Basins, Bidets, Bath materials, and Brass, to which I have added Brushcutter, and Batteries.
Batteries:
I must keep
the battery terminals clean and free of that green stuff and every now and then I must disconnect them and do a proper housekeeping job with warm soapy water and then Vaseline.
I must keep them topped up with distilled water.
I must be careful not to splash battery acid on myself.
I must check the batteries with the hydrometer after a few days of cloud cover.
If it reads less than full (1.25) but more than 1.18, I must keep an eye on power use and maybe run the generator and battery charger if I really must use power-hungry gadgets like the iron; 1.18 is also a good time to defrost the fridge.
I must not let the batteries get down to 1.16 [which I never do, cross my heart!], but if so, I must turn the fridge off, as my main power user. And start charging!
I follow these rules rather as I used to follow the Ten Commandments. I don’t know why I must obey except that I believe the consequences will be terrible if I don’t. I hate blind obedience and I hate my own ignorance in these matters.
It may have something to do with my inability to relate to numbers; I don’t remember them and I can’t manipulate them. Sister Augustine, exasperated at my continued B’s in maths despite A’s in everything else, verbally exploded one day. ‘Sha-aa ... ryn Munro! You are de- liberately being obtuse about maths! There is no need for this blind spot in your intelligence!’ But it wasn’t in my control, and the blind spot remains for both mathematics and machines.
And then there’s the generator. It’s supposed to be able to be started and stopped by pressing a button in the house or by a key on the generator—electric start. Unfortunately the electric start works off a little battery of the generator’s own. I discovered that this battery goes flat if I don’t run the generator much. With my ample sunlight and moderate power use, I rarely need to use the generator. So I have a ludicrous system where I must run the generator for no other reason than to keep the generator battery charged so it can start the generator if I do need it. Talk about unsustainable design!
A friend has recently suggested a trickle charge set-up from the invertor to solve this, so the solar would be keeping the generator going, which is a funny concept. I’ve put that on the ‘fairly urgent but daunting’ list.
For six months I faithfully marked on the calendar each time I went through this idiotic, noisy, wasteful, but apparently necessary, ritual every fortnight for twenty minutes or more. Not once did I actually need the generator for power. Then we had a week of rain and I did need to use the generator. Perversely, it wouldn’t start, yet it had started straight off the week before.
I got out the manual and checked what I could find, although as usual the models in the diagrams were just different enough from my machine to confuse me. I ruled out the battery, given my diligence. Remembering my success with the pump engine, I thought I’d change the oil—but I couldn’t undo the drain plug. A male friend was coming to stay in a few days; it would have to wait till then.
My friend and I changed the oil; it made no difference. ‘Never mind, ’ I said, ‘the sun’s out now.’
After he’d gone, the generator being too big to take to town, I rang my son-in-law for advice. The spark plug was once more named as the likely culprit. I couldn’t find it.
So a few more weeks went by until he came up and showed me its hiding place under a black cover at the back. How clever of them to make it both invisible and inaccessible. He had to use a screwdriver to turn the spark plug spanner in there. Next time I was in town I bought a new plug.
I got it in. Still no response. It had to be the ungrateful bloody battery. It was raining again and looked as if it was set in, so I might well need to run the generator. I decided to try the pull cord start, which had rarely been used. In doing so, because of the location of the generator, pegged to the ground close by the wall where the exhaust pipe goes out, I bashed my elbow into the wall frame—Ow-ww!—and knocked the good (and expensive) hydrometer off, which shattered on the cement floor. I swept up the glass shards.
Then I inched the very heavy generator around slightly, turning it on the peg to gain a little more room, and tried again, with my throbbing elbow pleading for mercy. No go.
‘It’s no use, ’ I snivelled pitifully as I backed away, nursing my elbow, ‘I could never start these things, not with my wrists.’ Leaning against the doorway, I cursed the generator—‘And as for you, you stupid battery!—and then I noticed that the key switch on the generator was turned to OFF, not ON. Having switched it to ON, I yanked the pull cord twice, and the generator leapt into life. Oh, you stupid woman!
I haven’t admitted that episode to anyone before; it’s so typically what males expect of women that I cringe at fitting the bill so well. How many times have I seen red, when, after describing my problem with a domestic machine to a technician, he says, ‘Have you checked if it’s turned on at the wall, luv?’
I’m claiming a deteriorating mental condition called old age.
I must be learning a little from the disasters I keep having, but it doesn’t feel like it. The brushcutter is the current machine that won’t work. I couldn’t even bear to look for its spark plug—if it has one; I wasn’t feeling strong enough. Instead I put it back in the shed, gnashed my teeth and did its intended job by hand. One day another male will visit and be only too pleased to start it. First go, I expect. It’ll be something simple that I’ve overlooked.
But recently I was given a precious piece of knowledge that men have been withholding from me for decades. I had bought a connection for using a smaller LPG gas bottle with my old camping stove. It fitted at the stove end, but not at the bottle end. It would not screw on; was it a metric/imperial problem?
Not wanting to strip the thread—which, like ripping pool table felt, is another of those things men think women are likely to do—I took it back to the shop, with the bottle this time, when next I went to town. He had clearly sold me the wrong fitting.
The man heard me out, smiled, and took the items from me. He gave me that look—pitying, knowing—and screwed the fitting on with no trouble. ‘Reverse thread, luv.’
I threw up my hands and went into a rave about why weren’t they all standardised and how was anyone supposed to know which way was on or off if they kept changing it ... but his raised eyebrows halted me. He jabbed his finger at the brass top piece.
‘See that nick?’ he said.
I saw it.
‘That means it’s reverse.’
I could have kissed him, I was so grateful for being let in on the secret.
I wonder, if I’d been a boy, would my dad have taught me about things mechanical? Only once did he ask me to help with a machine, when I was about twelve. The little Austin panel van had broken down in an awkward spot on the track and he’d got the tractor into position to tow the van out backwards. I can’t remember why I was to drive the tractor instead of steering the van.
We went through the procedure a dozen times—‘Take it slowly, ease off the clutch, slowly, slowly...’—until I thought I had it right.
Feet balanced on the pedals, palms sweating, I waited for the signal.
‘Right!’ he yelled. The tractor and I lurched forward down the track, pulling the back doors clean off the Austin like the wings off a fly. We stalled shortly after. Dad was such a gentle man that he didn’t even swear, or not so I heard. But he never let me near anything more mechanical than a hoe after that.
Not that he was especially gifted that way himself. I mean, why had he tied the towrope to the doors? The one time he tried to use a more-than-manual farming method, it was a disaster; in fact, a tragedy of epic proportions to nine-year-old me. Going broke fast with the oranges and vegetables, Dad had a go at raising chickens. Built a small shed, strewed sawdust on the ground, and installed a special kerosene contraption in the centre, that from memory was supposed to not only keep the hundreds of cheeping yellow balls of fluff warm, but feed and water them. It blew up, burnt the shed down and fried the chickens to small crispy debts.
No, Dad and I had a simpler, outdoor relationship. Next to trees, I like growing vegetables best, and I got that from him.
For market, Dad grew mainly beans. Brown Beauty. I can still remember my sense of importance the first time I was allowed to plant the smooth seeds, like dried kidney beans, walking alongside the furrow, dropping them carefully and evenly. He’d be following behind, walking backwards, hoeing dirt over the seeds.
They grew into neat rows of fragile green bushes bearing vegetables that I loved eating raw, but dreaded once Mum had cooked them according to the practice of the day—long boiled to a greyish green, with salt and bicarbonate of soda added, till even burying them in forkfuls of mashed potato could not disguise their slimy yet sharp texture and horribly familiar taste. She wouldn’t let me eat them raw in a meal; it wasn’t a proper tea without cooked vegetables.
Dad also grew Swede turnips, which I scrubbed clean in the cement laundry tubs before he bagged them, and tomatoes that I picked and sorted, my fingers stained greenish-brown, into green, semi and coloured, and packed into shallow boxes. Making them fit was very satisfying, like a 3D jigsaw.
Summer was bean-picking time. I’d always helped Dad pick and bag, and from the age of twelve, I picked beans in the holidays and on weekends for a neighbouring farmer as well, but for money. I became a fairly fast picker and could put in a full day’s work without too much backache, although I finished some days on my bare knees because I could no longer bend. Then I’d have to decide which was more painful—back or knees—as the latter became too red and tender to shuffle along on the gritty dirt, pushing my square kero tin of beans in front of me.
All the female pickers wore shorts or skirts. Jeans were then only seen in American films, but Mum wouldn’t have let me kneel in them, or slacks, as we called ladies’ trousers, since they’d get dirty. Almost none of us wore hats, but I suppose we had our heads down most of the time.
