Another warm autumn day, the air completely still. CFA burn-offs continue on the ciy's fringes. Geographically (or is it topographically?), Melbourne is a bowl with a lip, a circle ringed by low mountain range. The smoke has dropped into the bowl and the sky is a haze.
I drove down Beaconsfield Parade towards St Kilda and you couldn't see where bay met sky, an optical illusion in which the view to items in the water - boats, depth markers, buoys - was foreshortened and they seemed to hang in the haze like small pictures in oil on a grey wall. Coffee at Scheherezade, strong and bitter and necessary.
Late in the day the sun was deep gold, then red. It slipped down the sky and disappeared through a slit in the cloudy murk like a coin dropping into an envelope.
ANZAC Day tomorrow: the dawn march and service will take place under more haze unless an April wind whips up tonight. I doubt it. We'll remember all of them of course, and especially my unknown uncle, lost in Malaya in 1942 and never found.
*
To Neerim South in the morning for a picnic at my mother-in-law's, perhaps by the Tarago River. There will be too much food. Saturday will be my mother's 80th birthday dinner. Someone will distract her in the afternoon and she will be returned to a house full of friends and relations and even a neighbour or two. She has a strong heart. There will again be too much food.
Sunday? Rest, of course. No wait, we have children.
I drove down Beaconsfield Parade towards St Kilda and you couldn't see where bay met sky, an optical illusion in which the view to items in the water - boats, depth markers, buoys - was foreshortened and they seemed to hang in the haze like small pictures in oil on a grey wall. Coffee at Scheherezade, strong and bitter and necessary.
Late in the day the sun was deep gold, then red. It slipped down the sky and disappeared through a slit in the cloudy murk like a coin dropping into an envelope.
ANZAC Day tomorrow: the dawn march and service will take place under more haze unless an April wind whips up tonight. I doubt it. We'll remember all of them of course, and especially my unknown uncle, lost in Malaya in 1942 and never found.
*
To Neerim South in the morning for a picnic at my mother-in-law's, perhaps by the Tarago River. There will be too much food. Saturday will be my mother's 80th birthday dinner. Someone will distract her in the afternoon and she will be returned to a house full of friends and relations and even a neighbour or two. She has a strong heart. There will again be too much food.
Sunday? Rest, of course. No wait, we have children.
Sounds positively lovely! I had to google ANZAC, I was unawares with what the term meant. Thanks for teaching me a new term. ;)
ReplyDeleteNo rest on Sundays for those of us with children. Coffee, yes. Newspaper?
ReplyDeleteIt's a pleasure, Monster Librarian.
ReplyDeleteYes, Anne, always the newspaper. Try as I may, I haven't been able to break the habit.