Sugarplums*

Plum Tree

Secret summer scarlet
Peeping through
This anonymous child-tree
In an unremarkable corner of our garden
Huddled between the limbs
Of a dead tree
And the concrete watertank

I reach into the dusky green
And pluck a small glowing orb

Expect:
hard
bitter
poisonous

Discover:
yielding
sweet
familiar

The taste of the mild summers of my childhood

(Christmas, Mornington, Tasmania
Brown house on a corner block
Green lawns, gossipy fuchsias,
Cousins, grandparents, aunts, uncles,
Gathering at nightfall
Under the plum tree
Saying our goodbyes)


*so it turns out we have a plum tree.

New Moon

We have a new calendar. It was Fred's self-appointed project the other day to begin filling it in - taking the empty year, the one that belongs to everyone, and giving it a distinct Russon-Jorgensen shape with birthdays, dinners with friends, impending interstate and overseas visitors and upcoming holidays. All these promises, and yet those days too will tumble by, fall into the past and earn their etched in 'x' drawn in turn by Una and Fred at days end*.

This morning: 'It's a new moon!' Fred called, as though it was an event on our social calendar. The phrase rang in my ears, suddenly absurd, and became the title of today's month of poetry attempt (rather hurried, which is fitting, because we had a busy day of rushing around achieving nothing).

Time rushes past. Avery is seven weeks old. All of us are longing for him to stretch out and grow, to laugh, to play. And yet today, as the girls observed that Avery's carseat needed adjusting, Una said sternly: 'No more growing Avery.' It's a delicious state though melancholy, living mindfully of time passing, knowing how precious the days are, how temporary.

*Today Fred asks to cross out today's date at 4.30 in the afternoon. I'm not ready to call it.

NEW MOON

A new moon
For a new year

Both rise
From the same ancient source

The flare of light
The beginning of all things

Sweet spot

When Fred was a baby a friend told us of a magic trick. She said apparently if you stroke a gentle fingertip down from between their eyebrows to their tip of their nose it induces sleep as their eyes drift closed. It didn't work for her newborn but lo and behold, it worked for Fred. It wasn't foolproof, and as she got older and resisted sleep with every fibre of her being, it fell into disuse. Instead we would lie with her and recite the times table, often getting up to twelve before she would finally submit. It seems bizarre now, the lengths we went to, when at seven she is entirely sleep independent.

With Una, we were dismayed to find the old trick was ineffective: her eyes would spring open, wider and wider with every stroke (and if anything she was better left to her own devices). But on those rare restless days, we somehow discovered for her it was a matter of starting from her temple and tracing down her cheekbone.

'Show me,' she demands now, as we tell her this in yet another session of family mythmaking, which is daily since Avery arrived. Martin shows her and though she is wide awake, her eyelids flutter, her eyes inadvertantly roll back and for a moment we see those sleepy whites, some residual body memory has kicked in, more primal and more powerful than her cognisant one.

For Avery, who sleeps well but cries more than the others, it is a flat firm stroke of the forehead, my hand almost covering his downy head. In the time it takes the string of his musical elephant to retract, he will fall into sleep. He might wake and fuss, but a few steady applications of this ritual and he will eventually fall deep into a proper, lasting sleep.

Month of Poetry

One of my New Year's resolutions was to write poetry. When someone tweeted that they were joining a month of poetry challenge I thought it would probably be a good start. I've signed on to write a poem every day in January (I missed the first two days. I have terrible commitment issues so it may all come to nothing, but I have written one poem so far which is as many as I wrote all last year).

Anyway, because blogging more regularly is another one of my new year's resolutions, I thought I'd post my poems here. Fred made banana choc-chip muffins this morning, we bought her a cupcake maker for Christmas (like a big sandwich press). In some ways it's kinda silly (it's not that different from making cupcakes in the oven but Fred has a wonderful sense of ownership and productivity when she uses it, and it does actually make especially nice muffins).

My Seven Year Old Daughter is Making Muffins

1. Ingredients

Flour scatters the dust of itself

Milk runneth over

C₁₂H₂₂O₁₁ (sucrose molecules arranged by science

In orderly cubes) tumble across the bench

Chocolate drops are measured out covetously

(You are jealous of the riches of your own creation)

Butter, a banana grown old and almost beyond usefulness

And lastly a single brown egg laid by your own hen

(Each warm discovery still a surprise

Like the same astonishing secret told over and over)

2. Making

There is more substance here than in the making of you

You began out of nothing

Merely there was two specks of indifferent matter

Meeting in darkness

3. Eating

You bring me confections

Made of stuff and air

Made of gravity and weightlessness

Of heat and alchemy

Of the labour of the body

Of the transcendence of spirit over matter.

2010 wrap up

I had a baby.

And did some other stuff.

An Eglantine Christmas

This is one of those muzzy catch up posts with no particular point, so if you're hoping to find the meaning of Christmas I suggest you look here or here (depending on where your spiritual beliefs lie).

December began with Martin working, me at home with Avery and no car or public transport and the problem of getting Una to and from kinder (which is a ten minute drive on open roads at 80km/h and so not at all walkable) in the lead up to her kinder play (in which she had a Very Important Role) and a fugitive on the loose in our town. Somehow I got through it with minimal upset, despite sleep deprivation and crappy weather and a few days of acute cabin fever. Most of my Christmas shopping has been done online, trawling through websites until my tired eyes are dry and squinty. Luckily we have lovely neighbours, which means I've been able to regularly interact with people who are not me. And good friends who have taken the girls out or fed them dinner. And good family, including my mother in law who has regularly driven up from Blackburn to do the school and kinder run.

Despite everything (or because of) we have attempted to keep up the Advent activity house tradition. Popular activities have included: making Christmas pinatas, making and decorating gingerbread houses, playing parlour games (he said, she said which was HILARIOUS and featured a lot of toilet humour), and getting the girls to write their own activity together (they agreed on the zoo with no fuss).

Una was brilliant in her kinder play, in which she played the lead (if not the title) role of the bossy emu in Wombat Divine, and then she graduated, with a hat and everything, which would have been extremely tacky if I'd been able to see it through the TEARS. Fred was great in her school play too - though her role was part of the chorus she proved that there are no small roles, she was really switched on and clearly knew exactly what she was doing. She sang in a clear, sweet voice, which carried over the little community hall (oh yes, all right, I am a Proud Parent). The funny thing was the topic of the play was wobbly teeth, and a few days before the performance she got her very first wobble (and a day after she lost that tooth, which she tells me led to an impromptu encore performance of the play in class - aww).

Avery also got his first cold last week and on Saturday night developed a nasty wheeze and cough and seemed to be breathing a little fast. We were sure he was probably fine, but rang the maternal health line, and then Martin's mum (who used to be a nurse) and in the end took him to Box Hill Emergency, dropping the girls off at their Nana's first. They seemed to think it was Something. We were lucky enough to be put in a private Infectious Diseases room (woohoo!), sealed with a glass door, with our own ensuite, and a kitchen round the corner with sandwiches and hot milo. Avery's breathing improved pretty much the moment we arrived at Emergency so we relaxed and enjoyed our Saturday night date. It turned out he had bronchiolitis, but all his stats were good so we were sent home, with strict instructions to ring an ambulance if he was having trouble breathing. But it was obvious he was on the mend, and he has continued to improve. He even slept for five uninterrupted hours last night.

And now it is holidays and we are all at home. We are waiting on our tax returns so we can get a car loan and then a car. We are Christmas cooking and scowling at the rain and smiling at the sunshine. We are getting on each other's nerves and singing Christmas carols in the car and busying ourselves and playing games together and reading books and eating dinners and going for walks and to the library and cooing at the baby. Martin and I are quietly buying big screen televisions. Avery is prodigiously growing and even Una and Fred look bigger. We are grocery shopping and some of us are eating too many lollies and some of us aren't because some of us have to book in a diabetes test for next week. We have encountered the odd Santa (both in the occasional sense and in the weirdy sense) and continued to add decorations to the Christmas tree and opened many cards and forgot to send any and I bought shoes on the Internet.

AND THAT BE THE MEANING OF CHRISTMAS (oh look, there it was, all this time).

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