Tales of a garden long, long ago...

A couple of days ago Dave called in the evening to tell me he'd be working later than expected, covering for a teammate who wasn't well. Given time to kill, I got to rummaging through the old hard drives, looking at pictures from years ago ... and stumbled over rafts of them, which I'd either lost or simply forgotten. Treasure trove! What are memories worth?!

I have literally thousands of photos from 2007 - 2012, the years when we were at Miller Street. Those were the years when we had the bird feeder, and the back garden was always brimming with parrots ... when Bagheera was in his prime, and ruled his domain. Memory is odd. One simply begins to forget, and it's a source of enormous pleasure to stumble over archives of photos!

The camera I'd have been using for these shots would have been either the Fuji Finepix 6500 or the  HS10. The resolution is higher than the 5MP of the 5600, certainly, but I didn't get the HS50 till Christmas 2015 (that was the one which didn't last very long before it began to malfunction and physically fall apart). I'm agreeably surprised by the pictures -- the camera also recorded color brilliantly. Some of these photos have hardly been enhanced at all; they're just brilliant, straight out of the box! I also have lots of videos from these years, but those are not so good. Video was very low rez at the time, so we'll just bypass those ... except to remember the ducks in the swimming pool!

The bird feeder was so much fun ... I'd forgotten how much. Although we're currently living much further out of town than Miller Street, so you'd assume there's have to be more birds in the garden here, actually the reverse is true. Very few birds come down into the garden, and those that do don't stay for long (a few New Holland honeyeaters, the very occasion sparrow, a blackbird or two; the rest fly over). At Miller Street, the bird feeder attracted them by the flocks, and they became so accustomed to the place, they'd spend summer evenings in the trees, chattering and grooming. Lorikeets, cockatoos, galahs, crested pigeons, turtledoves, sparrows, wattlebirds, and once, a sparrowhawk, looking to try its luck. It didn't stay long; other birds mobbed it till it departed. And ducks in the pool!

The garden we have now didn't have much in the way of flowers before the self-seeding stock got in. It was almost all pavers and pebbles, hardly attractive to birds. We've let the flowers take over, so it's a great garden for bees, but I could wish there were more birds.

Each house is different, with its own character and personality. We were at Miller Street for five and a half years, and we've already been here for seven and a half! Time flies. In fact, after over 35 years of the gypsy life, moving from house to house on what is smilingly referred to as "the rental roundabout," a large part of my brain is wondering, "Where next?" We've been here so long, subconsciously, I'm always wondering about "the move" as if it's inevitable.

It just occurs to me, as I write that, how sad a statement this actually is. Dang.

The persistence of memory? Bwahaha! I wish!

Ever wondered how long your memory of something important will last? Like, for example, how to drive a particular piece of software that you used to drive all day, every day, until you took about ten months away from it with a headache that wouldn't quit? Uh huh.

I do this kind of stuff:

And there's quite a lot of skill involved in doing it right. Now: take ten months out and come back to it. Turn the computer on. Boot up the software.

Go utterly blank.

Make tea. Think. Hard. Jog your memory ... and tell yourself, don't do it again! Because you think this stuff is hard-wired into your brain, but the truth is, it's floating on the surface like apples in a big bath of cider. Suddenly you're bobbing for memories and trying not to panic!

Carl Sagan coined the phrase, "The persistence of memory." There's an episode of the classic Cosmos bearing that title. I wonder whose memory he was referring to? Not mine! Mine seems to be as ephemeral as the thistledown that was so iconic in Professor Sagan's fingers!

As Dave says, "Fudgesickles." So, have some more of my art, just for the fun of it, while you're here:

Yes, this artwork is done with a computer. It's not done by a computer ... believe me, there's a world of difference! 

Like a movie you've seen too often. Or, just shoot me.

Yes -- exactly, life reaches a point where it seems like a movie you've seen too often. You know the plot and everything about it so well, you doze off ... not so much out of boredom (because Harrison Ford will always be a charmer, no matter how many times you've seen him in this), but with the simple familiarityof the action. It's not that this movie is one iota less than it was the first time you saw it --

Just shoot me. Seriously.
Would it be too droll to add "copyright Lucasfilm"or words along those lines?
Fair usage: call it a free promo for Star Wars. (Don't worry, Walt: I won't bill you, LOL)

-- but there's not enough freshness left to keep you awake and aware for two hours. And the real problem starts when LIFE has reached this same point...

Mom's sick again today. Screen door needs fixing. Shower's not draining properly. Garden needs weeding. I'm tired. I have a headache. This laptop is so getting so slow, I think it's having the cybernetic equivalent of a stroke. Blah, etcetera, blah, so forth, blah, such like.

You can always turn off a movie, but what happens if you turn off LIFE?!

Well, the screen door is booked in for a fix-it session on July 25. I have an appointment for an MRI on the 20th. Dave needs to wiggle the wire "snakes" down the shower drain -- again. Mike and I need to get some fresh air and sunshine, and do some work in the garden -- again. I guess I'll take a nap (again) while I have the chance; and I already took the pills for the headache...uh, again.

What the movie of my life need is a new plot, or new characters!

I listened to a podcast last week: turns out, up to 80% of everything we (think we) see with our physical eyeballs is no more than a memory feed. Your brain is showing you old data; most of the time it's not even taking fresh scans of the house, which is why you can be tearing the place apart, looking for something when in fact it's right in front of you all the time, but you can't see it. You're looking an an old scan, in which you glasses were not sitting in front of the TV, or your coffee cup was not sitting on top of the microwave. We see what we expect to see, and only seem to "come alive" when we travel, and the brain/eyes combination is forced to scan new places, new things, or else walk face-first into a camel.

I guess, Step One would be learning how to actually see every day, even while we're not on vacation.

Of course, if I did that, I'd see I also need to dust and vacuum and wash and scrub and...

Uh, tomorrow. Don't want to see all that dust right now.

And LIFE itself begs the question, what does happen if you turn it off or change the channel? But chasing down those answers will take you out of realms of philosophy and into metaphysics.

I wonder if I'll be cross or just bemused if the answer turns out to be 42.

Caring ... because I do actually care

Image of the day: a courtyard under the wines in the Barossa Valley. Why this image?
Because of the peace and tranquility of it ... and the good memories associated with the day I took it.

I've been a carer (or "care giver," as our American cousins say) for a very long time, and I've done the job full time for around twelve years now. Sometimes it seems longer. Other times it seems like just yesterday I was a kid myself, and the frail aged mother for whom I'm now caring was young and vital. But as you go on and on as a carer, and the person for whom you're caring grows ever older and more feeble, the old memories -- the good ones -- begin to fade.

Even now I'm doing the job; I do it to the best of my ability, and I do it every day. I'll do it to The End, however long it takes, because ... well, she's my mother. But I've come to nurse one fear.

The end of this particular trail can't be very far away now, because too much is physically wrong with Mom for there to be a lot of time left. The caring has become a full time job which has overflowed from occupying all my time and brainpower, and is now making deep inroads on Dave's and Mike's time too. Between the three of us we're coping, and we have  great family GP who's as supportive as a family GP can possibly be.

My fear? Simply this: that by the time we reach the end of the trail, the good old memories of Mom as she used to be, in another world -- or is it another dimension? -- known as "The Past" will have been buried so thoroughly under the ocean of more recent memories of pain, mess, exhaustion, that they'll become inaccessible. Lost.

Sometimes when I sit down to meditate I try to open the gateway to the past. It's supposed to be stored in indelible memory and redundant detail, somewhere in this biological miracle, the specific human brain belonging to me.  But I can't seem to find the keys to the gateway. It's closed to me now, and I'd dearly love to be able to jimmy it open.

Strange thoughts to be thrashing out in a blog post, I know; but I have to wonder how many carers are in the same situation.

What I wouldn't give for a Tardis right now!

So Dave and I grabbed a couple of hours while Mike was available to sit with her, and went for a walk among the McLaren Vale vineyards. I'd wanted to "walk a country lane," and Dave made it happen for me. Wonderful.