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I wonder what it says about the balance of one’s life when there is more hotchpotch than coherent substance?

Still life waiting to happen

I have a lineup of bottles on my kitchen windowsill. The plan was to spend 5 minutes photographing them in different configurations and light, but my arrangements always look stilted, and since they are glass I can’t throw them towards a random arrangement, and hope.

A joke

Look closely at the base of the trig at the high point in my village. Maybe you’ll be quicker than I was to spot the joke.

Fallen woman

I continue to practise floral and foliage kleptomania on my early morning strolls, although the leaves on gravel are fair game since they lie on a public road.

Fallen blossom

High on the crown of the eucalypts – the dark pink one opposite my place, the paler one on the corner a few doors down – are blossoms. I know I will never reach them, either with my arm or with my eye extension which is my camera. But then, as time passes, they carpet the ground and all I have to do is crouch down for an intimate view. Colour difference is the result of two different cameras and two different species.

Piling up

The beach is usually pristine and the creek pool just before the rocks pellucid, tempting small children to flop and paddle and play. Over this holiday period the beach has been piled high with rotting seaweed and the creek an infective black, where no child plays. Just occasionally a coil or a spray of seaweed separates itself from the suppurating mass.

Elemental

Early morning perchers, swallows preening and fluffing on the wires, graceful creatures of the air. A taped off area on Brou Beach to protect nesting Little Terns in their earth-bound phase from unwary clodhoppers. A pair of emus grazing along the sand-cliffs, leaving their startled footprints when we move too close, forever birds of the earth. An unperturbed egret, fishing in the dark waters of Potato Creek, at home in air and water. Fire, you may ask? That too, close to home. Bodalla school crest features a phoenix rising from the flames.

Left behind

The beach is full of things left behind: the sea must be far more forgetful than me. It recedes and leaves shells, weed, sand grains, ripple marks. When it returns, it carelessly eradicates them all under its waves and its foam. Occasionally things people leave behind escape its attention, and very occasionally it returns what it has taken. We once found a jumper of J’s matted and salt-laden a year after he left it on the beach.

Prospect

On an empty block, a lowslung chair has taken up residence in front of a potential barbecue frame. It lounges there taking in the view over the grasses and up the beach towards Tuross.

A weekend of death …

On Brou Beach and in Brou Lake things out of place and dying, if not already dead. A cicada on a vast stretch of sand, and a jellyfish imprisoned in the lake. Overhead at the river a cicada shriek overhead – doomed in the beak of a bird. At home the front yard hakea crashing harmlessly over the drive where there could’ve been people, cars, dogs.

… and maybe resurrection

The tree in the Brou camping area is spouting new growth. I photograph it with J’s camera. Mine is awaiting either resurrection or a death sentence, after collecting a pile of sand and seawater when I inexplicably fell over on the edge of the sea.