After the car battery went dead and a tooth popped out of its placing what more could occur in one week?Then the rains came.
And with it whipping, driving rain, pelting pellets as sharp as buckshot against the windows. No sign of the sea and no sign of any living thing...grey, dank, muted, dull colours of northern climes enveloped us.
The wind only felt by us in the cyclonic areas in north Queensland years ago, buffetted the panes of glass and moved them in a rhythm, ghostly and determined.
Darkness fell....I mean, it really fell, along with the many trees brought down powerlines that fed our hungry house and our miserable lives.
Not even in candle light could our aging eyes read to satisfy the silence and sudden shock of ancient times. After 28 hours we ventured out to purchase some batteries for a dead ancient electrical servant that once belonged to my dead dad so it could be wound up to give us news of any other life forms.
It crackled into being and brought with it stories of floods and raging waters, boiling seas and eaten coastlines. People were fleeing as though in a Sci fi novel and here we were sitting like two stooped corpses bemoaning our lot.
No hot food, no tea, no coffee and no light to brighten the screaming roar of the wind.
We usually can spy the sea from our landing but it was blanked out by the wall of wet grey, masticating its way along our house.
So an exodus of sorts was occurring all around us, to the north and to the south...rivers rising and tides swamping small towns that we know so well.
The above picture is of our ( yes us both) 'home town'. We were born on the edges of this river HWMBO and I. His family skimmed up its reaches to settle in the highlands to cut down the cedar and try to make a go of it for four generations.
We knew it flooded. It had when I was merely 3 years of age...
There is a photo somewhere of me standing foot outstretched, ( black and white...well more of the grey and sepia nowadays) hands by the sides, waisted frock too small for me ( my sister was older but smaller so by the time she outgrew her clothes they were pretty much too small for me too)... and bowed before me like some respectful servant is my father tying my shoe laces. I remember I only ever had one pair of shoes, for 'good'. Church and shopping, not that we were ever allowed to go shopping really with our dear mum. So it was school and church and the rest of the time it was thongs ( flip flops to the yankees) and bare feet.
The river behind me has risen up the main street and is lapping at the footpath behind my heel. I used to love the way my father tied my shoes...he made my whole foot feel his warm big hands and the laces so neat and tight and in line, like he would have his old troups during the war. It always made me feel safe. It was he who taught me to tie my own shoe laces, patiently over and over, and taught me to shine the shoes for his approval.
And now he is gone and I am old and the rains have come.
I live barely 2 1/2 hours drive from that very spot and I can smell the town after a flood like a ripe wine in my minds nose. It is full and bodied and steeped in humus and rotting mud and vegetation and it makes me whizz back in pain to the time I would hang my head out of the old Holden car as we sped toward Fredrickton to pick up dad from the Milk Factory where he worked in the laboratory as field officer and technician testing milk brought in from the dairying properties that surrounded the old town.
I would take my father's hands and drink their smell in deeply and pretend to throw them away crying out ; "Poo Factory"...but in reality I loved the smell of his hands..I always did till the day he died.
The wet cowshit, the sprouting weeds, the soured milk and the clean clean after scent of sweet soap always made me feel that I was, again, safe.
So the rains came and after many hours and a few days the electricity returned.
At one point cowering together, in delight, under a quilt, I said; "So how long do you think it would take for anyone to find us here if we died like this together? Three months?"
"Oh no, much sooner than that, two weeks", was the reply.
For it is our youngest who contacts us regularly and is concerned for our welfare. She is our deliverer in more ways than fifty.
And so the rains came and went. The wind came and stayed and went. The seas rose and came and are subsiding, and our little little lives are seeping back to a time of supposed 'normality'.
I love nature and her fury, her threatening to overtake all with persistence...she is my redeemer, my reminder that all is well with the world and that man shall indeed NEVER overcome.
