notes from a sunny corner

made on two separate days

December 9

Sixty years ago today I woke early, dressed in my school uniform and joined my parents for breakfast in the little house in Elsternwick that belonged to my grandmother. By the time my next birthday swung around (or it may have been the next week) we had moved into a house of our own, in Surrey Hills, but my memory has us still living with grandmother in late ‘65.

There is a driveway now, where before there was a narrow cement path leading to the back garden, an equally slim paved diversion making its way to the modest, muscatel grapevine covered porch that sheltered the front door. Where there is now concrete, there were once the darkest of black-red roses bordered by forget-me-nots and primulas. The Myrtus communis ssp tarentina that stood sentinel the front gate is no longer, nor is the Picea abies, but the silver birch that grandmother planted there in the 1950s is still visible. In the sixties you could play “spot the Latvian” by the contents of their front gardens. If there was a birch, a fir, a lilac and a philadelphus then you could be confident the inhabitants were of Baltic origin.

December 9, 1965 was a Thursday , so I would normally have carried my violin along with my school bag as I walked up Park street and past Lottie’s Milk Bar to cross Glen Eira road to Shelford school, except that being my birthday breakfast had taken a little longer than usual, and Pa dropped me off on his way to university. I have to confess that Thursdays weren’t my favourite…it was orchestra practice day and I found the sound of the E string on a quarter-size violin so close to my shell-like ear excruciating (I’m more of a viola girl). Tuesdays, on the other hand, were much anticipated. It was the day when (provided it wasn’t raining) my class would totter across the road to weed the vicarage garden at St Mary’s.

I was reminded of the many gardens it has been my joy to know this morning having been given a marvellous book, “The Garden Against Time” which it is impossible not to devour. I’m already a quarter of the way through and will have to re-read it more slowly, but in the intervals of making cups of tea I have been time-travelling, not only to grandmother’s garden, and then the fruit-tree-filled paradise that we moved to thereafter, but also to the narrow, redbrick-walled garden that ran alongside the terrace house that was once the Department of Meteorology at Melbourne Uni. Every now and then Ma would drop me into Pa’s care while she went shopping in the city (my baby brother was generally left with his adoring grandmother) which meant I could play in the garden quite by myself. Roses spilled along the wall, where on one side there was a glorious grey metal cut-out unicorn affixed to the wall, that I still wish was mine. There was a small pond too, made by my father who had a habit of constructing ponds in every garden he was allowed to tamper with. It’s a habit I seem to have inherited.

I’ve begun digging several ponds in the garden pictured above, but they may take some time to realise, as summer is upon us and the soil is setting like concrete. Ah well, good things take time.

December 12

This day is significant because it’s the birthday of my Border Collie, Kip, who I purchased from the (once famous) Honeyvale Kennels with the proceeds from the sale of the small rug pictured below.

The image is a bit blurry, being a snap of an already blurry print, but you get the idea. I made the rug in 1996, building up the pattern from front to back, inspired by rugs made by Mongolian felters. I liked the relative unpredictability of this technique, in that you never really knew what it would look like until the first flip.

Kip was a fabulous sheepdog. If I left a gate open as we entered a paddock, she knew it was because I wanted to bring sheep through it, so she would streak around the perimeter, hustle the woollies into a tight group, and chivvy them neatly through the gate. If we’d been setting up the wool shed earlier she would (rightly) assume that to be their destination and take them straight there while I tottered along behind.

Photo below taken on December 9, 2008. Kip on the remains of the sofa with her young friend Rex.

Kip crossed the rainbow bridge in 2010. We miss her still.

In a response to a recent comment I think I flippantly offered to share an image of me wearing the rather lurid felt piece that was the last synthetically dyed piece I made. `it really is truly hideous and so is only available to those of you who have made a serious commitment to supporting my rambles.