Property of a Lady

Property of a Lady

I grew up surrounded by bushland not far from the beach. The water was clear and cold for 9 months of the year, and cloudy and warm as the post christmas holidays winds and waves finally swept the cold currents away, replacing it with big surf, sand filled swirling sea and water at 21 degrees that you could stay in for hours and still feel your toes. My parents had changed our life from a city to a country one. All we understood was that we could surf more easily and wetsuits were a form of everyday clothing. For them, I realise in hindsight, it was a lifeline.

They bought a hilly forest and scrubland with undulations of green, grey and brown. When the eucalypts bloomed there would be splashes of yellow, red and pink from the gum nodules. The galah's would rip them off in delight crying out as they completed the dawn shredding, creating a carpet of colour around each tree. There was a sundial by the back door and mum would go walking on the property, in a straight line, having put a pebble on the sundial to tell dad which direction she was trying today, and she would forage for whatever she felt like and be back within 3 hours each time. Those were the rules.

She was most fascinated with these podlike natives that I have now learned are fingerlimes. By accident she had come upon a grove of them and didn't know what they were. They were in the summer sun, protected by the gums around with some dappled light. She brought home the fruit/pods to show us. The thorns on the bush were very sharp, she showed is where she had been pricked and skewered to get her parcels. She broke them up and the seeds spewed out on the wooden benchtop. They were pale translucent green and looked like magic. On another walk to another hill she found pink ones, and then yellow globules in another grove. She became obsessed with finding slight variations and flavours and used them in different desserts with cream and sweet chewy meringues, the colours floating on the crisp white of the cream. She started drawing maps in her little black book so that we could find each of the different groves, describing the changing landscape around each one, trying to work out how the sun and soil changed the flavour. The maps became our way of finding her as she began to stay away longer and longer. She travelled in rotation around the land, clockwise. Each day to a different grove. Each day coming back with soil and leaves in bags and jars, adding them to the maps and the data. Then she started to propagate these multicoloured jewels. And as we grew, and surfed and coated our skin in salt and suncream, she spent more and more time creating orchards of different soil to grow the different fingerlimes in.

Gradually she spiralled closer to the house, spending less time in the natural groves and more time in the orchards around the house she had created. We were unaware of the fuzzing vision, the arthritis in the fingers, the early dementia, the fear of being lost, we just thought she was more absent minded and too busy with the plants and not busy enough with us. We came home from surfing. There was no stone on the sundial. We followed the walks through the orchards. There was no one there but the animals and the fruit. We followed the old maps to the groves, calling out in the fading light. We reached the furthest of the groves, holding the black book. But we were too late.

The orchards went crazy after mum died and just burst into fruit. at $80/kilo the trees she nurtured were thousands of dollars of productive agriculture. We got stabbed by the thorns all the time. We missed her with every stab. The salt water made it hurt less. The pink caviar was our favourite.