The race to the solstice had been easily won; the weeks had flown and been flung aside, bits of history never to happen again.
But then the hard part. The solstice was a chimera; the promise of daylight remaining a few minutes longer masked the prospect of a long cold wet miserable July and August. Inhabitants of other climes might jeer, and point to their winters of ten below, or their blinding snowstorms. But snow is romantic; a Melbourne winter is a bone-chilling wind-blown marathon, without the northern hemisphere’s Christmas - with its logfire-and-sleigh bells imagery - in the middle. (We get to endure that hokey European nonsense when it’s forty in the shade: Celsius.) A fellow runner - a Canadian - once admitted to me one bleak winter night that the chill wind that whipped frozen Antarctic air and dropped its cut-throat icicles onto Olympic Park, the Botanical Gardens and their surrounding pathways on which we were running, Lycra-tighted and gloved, was colder, more glacial than anything she had ever experienced in the Great White North, with only the merest hint of exaggeration or irony. (One had then wondered, tangentially, as we ran up the Anderson Street hill, if Canada’s puffins, polar bears and arctic wolves stayed warm thanks to their high insulation, how our own less-padded creatures; kangaroos, koalas, kookaburras etc., survived winter. Caves, perhaps?) These thoughts occurred in the garden, late in the afternoon, and they had context: I was casting glances to the western sky where the light was draining like water from a laundry trough.
I had been cutting the top half of a gnarled 20-year-old Weigela (its younger existence mentioned here) into bin-sized shards. I had noticed that Mme. Zéphirine Drouhin, the thornless French comtesse, had finally reached her full height, delicate willowy rose limbs arched and striving for support. The next job, I noted mentally, searching for a place to lodge the virtual reminder in a brain instinctively tuned to remember only seven things. My problem - Miller might posthumously want to amend his law - is that my seven keep having offshoots; mental ramifications.
The far western sky’s draining cinema screen was now pale yellow, curtained by pink-tinged golden clouds puffed out like apocalyptic pigeons. The whole thing seemed to collapse within minutes into a red-rimmed dark oval on the horizon, like a sad eye.
Ridiculous, I told myself, reverting - and referring to - the animal-in-winter problem. How much fur a koala needs to keep itself warm constitutes entertainment, not a concern for animal welfare - evolution looks after that. On the subject of evolution, (mentally leapfrogging again) is God actually evolution itself, or an evolutionary function? Did we invent a mythical God to justify the process by which we descended from trees? Such thoughts, if spoken, once could get you burned at the stake. The dry main branch at which I had been hacking suddenly broke off with a report like a gun. Maybe we were intelligent enough to tire of falling out. And that intelligence trumped our physical ability to adapt. Like monkeys.
The sad eye had disappeared. I was pruning in the dark. A redolence of chicken stock and garlic and tomato and herbs and something else crept out of somewhere. I went inside.
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