Sunset.

That sapling mentioned in the previous post had grown and grown and ended up decades later as a jasmine-encrusted mature, and then dead, tree. The 'tree people' arrived that afternoon with their tree-munching machine, a thing I cannot look at without thinking of that scene from a movie, can't remember the title, in which they feed the bad guy into it. Of course, the director or scriptwriter or art director or whoever decides these things had it situated in snow, to accentuate the bloody mess that came out the other end.

They shored up the trunk, slashed the jasmine cables, and got the chainsaw to work. It had plenty of kickback on the flint-like dead trunk but after an hour or so they had the job done. The garden already looked lighter, sunnier. And the clothesline was still standing. I went inside the house and told her it was safe to go outside. She was reliving history again. You could go in there with a dictaphone and come out with a book.

1942. She is an Intermediate student at St. Aloysius Girls' College, North Melbourne. A block away, American soldiers are camped in Royal Park. Some are billeted across Melbourne in households. The black Americans in particular cannot believe the breezy welcoming hospitality Australians afford them. But at the school, there is trouble at the gate. The head nun is showing none of the same welcome to the knots of soldiers, seventeen or eighteen years old, gathered at the entrance and waiting for the dismissal bell. Several girls escape early and make clandestine meetings. (Much later, some of her friends would follow soldiers back to the US. A few would made a success of it, never to return; others would repatriate, alone or with a baby or two, their dreams of described riches on a farm in a rolling US wheatfield foundering on the reality of an out-of-town frame house on a tired block with a scrawny goat eating thistle the only concession to agriculture.)

That evening when I sat at the kitchen table rays of pixillated gold shot directly through the west-facing window for the first time in decades, and the shadowline crept slowly across the holed linen tablecloth as it used to do when the teenage me sat reading the evening paper bathed in late spring sunshine.