Through Visitors' Eyes

Recently I had some friends visit Melbourne, my city, and we went wandering for a few hours down Brunswick St. I've been wandering that street for years — it's very close to my home and I know it really well. But seeing it through my visitors' eyes was so interesting, and I appreciated it all over again.

We poked through the tea house, sniffing, and tasting so many gorgeous teas and admiring tea pots, teacups, tea-glasses and all sorts of tea-making paraphernalia.

We browsed in a leisurely way through the various book and gift shops, and found a fun book for a romance writer.

My visitors became fascinated by the variety of different sculptural signs that adorn many of the Brunswick St shops. Some signs proclaim businesses that no longer exist, like the cow over the former Charmaine's, who used to make the most wonderful ice-cream. My favorite was chocolate-chilli ice-cream, a taste sensation.  Charmaine's, I do miss you.

There are lots more, and I like the idea of them, even though not all the sculptures appeal to me aesthetically.

We sniffed our way through Kleins, the shop of amazing scents and giggled a bit at some of the labels for the scented candles. This one reads "Trianon. Flourished Smell of Marie Antoinette Dream." We decided she was having a good dream, not one that reeked of guillotines.

We stopped at one of the many restaurants for lunch and ordered some green refresh-and-revitalizer drinks, having no idea what they were but being intrigued and, after the previous night,  in need of revitalization. 

When the drinks arrived, they looked exactly like a healthy drink should look, sludgy green and unappetising. Spinach juice? Essence of compost? 

But they were, in fact, delicious and fruity and I'll definitely order them again next time.

The green stuff is spirulina, a healthy algae weedy thingy, but the drink tasted of the other fruit juices that were in the drink. It didn't taste green or weedy at all.

We all loved Flowers Vasette, my favorite flower shop in all the world, a cool dim cave of gorgeousness —banks of the most glorious flowers, arranged in shades of colour, and scented like a dream. Of the Marie Antoinette good sort. Better actually.

Then we shopped and wandered some more, and finally whizzed up to Carlton to Brunetti's and some hot chocolate and possibly a cake. If we could fit one in.

All in all, a sleepy, indulgent afternoon.

We finished up eating delicious Vietnamese food at one of my favorite restaurants in Victoria St, Richmond.

Even though all these places are so familiar to me, showing them to visitors make me feel like I'd viewed them with fresh eyes. It's good to play tourist in your home town.

Spontaneous Poetry

My habit most mornings, during my coffee break, is to read something from the pile of books on my bedside table.

This morning I opened Natalie Goldberg's WRITING DOWN THE BONES at random and found a piece where she'd written poems on demand at a stall, like a school cake stall. Any topic, a page of poetry, no crossings out, for 50 cents a poem.

It was amazingly popular, she said. People queued up to buy her  poems all day — kids, men, women, old and young from all walks of life. The next year she did it again and charged a dollar.

Years later she got a letter from a man who still carried the poem she'd written for him around in his wallet. It and some photos of his family were the only possessions he took with him when he joined the coastguard service.

What a beautiful idea, selling spontaneous poems at a stall.

And how brave. Half the time I can't think what to write when someone asks me to sign their book.
But maybe I'll try it some time.

My favourite Easter picture book

I made some paper earrings for a friend the other day and the colours reminded me of my favourite easter picture book when I was a kid, The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes. It was my mother's book, and I have it still.

The story is very sweet, and with a nice moral to it — mother rabbit, despite having 21 kids and living in the backblocks of the country, still gets plum job over noisy show-off buckrabbit boys and frightful snobby city rabbits. Basically by using her kids as slave labour.

The story is about being selected to wear the magic gold shoes and being one of the five Easter Bunnies who deliver the eggs to the children of the world. It's a huge honour, of course, and everyone wants it. But when the country bunny Cottontail says that one day she will be an Easter Bunny, the others laugh at her.

So fast forward and our Cottontail is a mother of 21 little rabbits, but she applies for the job and again she's laughed at for dreaming foolish dreams. Even the wise old rabbit who does the choosing asks her gently if she shouldn't be home looking after her kids. But our girl has the kids well trained. Working in pairs they do everything that needs to be done, from cooking and cleaning to dancing, making music and painting cheery pictures.

The illustrations are lovely, aren't they? They're simple but quite detailed and with a limited palette of colours, and quite unusual colours, at that.

For me then and now, they're entrancing, but more than that, the story is quite touching.
The job of being the easter bunny is hard and exhausting and little Cottontail doesn't have an easy time of it. After all her deliveries are done, there's still one more job for her — to take an especially beautiful egg to a far-distant mountain where there is a sick little boy, who is very good and never complains. She travels far, over high mountains,  and is climbing the last, highest mountain when she falls... but saves the egg. But it's almost dawn. How can she ever find the energy to climb the mountain again, in time.

Then the wise old rabbit appears and tells her she's not only wise and kind and swift, but she's brave. And he gives her a pair of magic gold shoes. And suddenly her aching feet are no longer tired... and she takes the beautiful egg to the sick little boy and is soon home... where her house is in perfect order, and all her kids are still asleep in bed.

It's a gorgeous book, and even though it's older than me, it's still in print, which goes to show that I'm not the only person who loves this story.
Happy Easter. Do you have any favorite Easter stories?

On ducks...

 I found these ducks in a box of my mum's things and thought they might be nice for a small Easter post. 

Mum was an infant teacher and made and collected teaching aids all her life and she didn't often throw things away. These ducks are probably older than me. Anyway they got me thinking about the ducks of my childhood.

My folks were into self-sufficiency -- a kind of pre-hippy thing, and we had loads of animals, and among the various kinds of poultry, we had white muscovy ducks and lovely browny Khaki Campbell ducks, and I bet you can guess which ones I liked best.

Yep, the Khaki Campbells. They seemed somehow gentler and more friendly than the other ducks. They were my dad's favourites, too. There's something about ducks. They make me smile.

I especially loved the ducklings, little balls of cheeping tortoise-shell fluff. Sometimes not all the eggs of a nest hatched, but the mother and ducklings had moved off. In those cases my sister Jan used to hatch them herself, wrapped in old woollen jumpers and placed in the electric frypan on the lowest setting.

When the orphaned ducklings hatched, they used to follow us around, cheeping like mad. The best day was when they first discovered water. They took to it like... yeah, that. Absolute joy and delight.

These days people are coming back to self-sufficiency, but though many of my friends grow their own vegies and some fruit and some keep chickens, nobody I know keeps ducks. It's a shame. Joyful creatures, ducks. Though possibly a bit messy for suburban back yards.

What about you? Any experience with ducks? Grow your own? Yearn after a little self-sufficiency? Or do you prefer your ducks roasted?

The power of gratitude

I came across this wonderful little video. Sometimes the simplest things can be the most life-changing.


365grateful.com from hailey bartholomew on Vimeo.

A splash of scarlet

My study looks out on a fence that's usually covered by Virginia creeper and each autumn it really comes into its own. I love this time of year when one by one the deciduous plants —which are all exotic species in Australia — change color. 

I particularly love the way the Virginia creeper twines through other plants, leaving a splash of scarlet — in this case over the bronzed green leaves of my self-sown tree fern.

The Virginia Creeper is always the first. Now I'm waiting for the Japanese Maple.

What about you? What signs of the new season — autumn down under or spring in the Northern Hemisphere — are you looking forward to?

Spider and bee

When I recently went away for couple weeks, I left a matching small and large spider sharing a web near my front door. When I got home there was only the bigger spider there. It's doubled in size and is quite lovely -- in a creepy sort of way, with a velvety grey abdomen, a black and white speckled thorax and a little black heat. And the web is delicate and simply gorgeous in the misty rain. I'll try and get a photo if we get some rain or mist later.

I photographed it this morning in the process of devouring a bee. You can see the bee hanging in the web at the bottom of this pic. It's been there for at least a week.

Today, as I was watching, the spider made its move, gathering in the nicely ripened bee.

And the poor old bee is now history.

I'm wondering how large the spider will get. And also whether the smaller web-mate that was there went the same way as the bee...

And whether the spider, only a foot away from the path to my door, will deter door-to-door sales people. :)

Or maybe my friends. :(