Today I realised I haven’t been enjoying my own company much lately. Which is awkward when you’re the only one you’re hanging out with. Sometimes, though, it’s just what happens.
I’ve been driving myself really hard to meet a writing deadline. Not with the kind encouragement and skill of a coach, but the discipline and deprivation of a cruel school matron. Feeding myself thin soups and dry crackers, not letting myself go to the toilet until I finish writing the sentence I’m on. That kind of thing. I didn’t mean for this to happen, but in that last week, it did. I tried to get myself to eat well, do yoga and go for walks, but even that felt like a stern directive I didn’t want to follow.
I realised this today as I was gallivanting around town, visiting a whole bunch of places I’d wanted to go for ages: the Co-op to get some buckwheat flour; the native plant rescue nursery, which was closed; Colless, which is the closest thing to a Patagonian/Fijian/Indian supermarket I’ve found around here (it’s in a massive warehouse with very high ceilings and ZERO fucks given to lighting, decor or mood music. It sells a totally random assortment of things, some surprisingly cheap, others inexcusably expensive, some in bulk, some in inexplicably tiny quantities. It is awesome). Then I drove out west for the first time in months, out to Lithgow. And as the vast expanse of the rest of Australia sprawled out ahead of me, the promises of this truly wide, truly brown land unfurled: the brilliant fringe of canola country; unfathomable, infinite skies; the endless, soul-enriching sweeps of gibber; towns where young girls learn to fly planes at age 16 just so they can get to school; plains where rivers cut paths through ageless sand; the basin where the Eromanga Sea rolled and raged a hundred million years ago . . . it felt fricken awesome. And I realised it had been a while. Since I went anywhere, really. Anywhere kind of new, and open and unfamiliar. It is SO good out there. So good to feel free, even for a moment, with the space and the trees and all the endless possibilities.
Of course, I just went to Coles and Aldi and filled up the car with some petrol. Still: VERY good times.
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There’s a tree behind the letterbox at my place. It’s been on my mind for a long time in the peripheral, niggling way so many things are. It’s kind of like the letter box.
The letterbox is a metal rectangle with a little A-frame lid you can lift to retrieve your mail. A very long time ago someone painted it red. Now it’s part-red / mostly-peeled, like a poor sunburnt backpacker (yes, British). Flakes of paint pepper the scrubby, unmaintained garden below, creating an overall impression of unkempt squalor as you arrive chez moi. Add to that the scrawl of graffiti on the shed and the disorderly spread of crap along the deck (I’m mid-maintenance ok?!) and my place looks pretty much like a bogan dive.
Anyway, a few weeks ago I decided I want to make a new letterbox, but I’ve only got as far as placing a provisional post, basically an upright log, where I think it might go. One day, when I came out to get my mail, the postie had stuck three envelopes to the the log with an elastic band. I reckon this is a vast improvement on the actual letterbox, which is still standing about one foot behind.
Anyway, back to the tree. The year I moved here it fruited half-heartedly, with a few spots of colour dotted along otherwise stark branches. I managed to nibble a bit of something that looked like a mini peach before the birds, who seemed to have a prior relationship with the tree, swooped in.
Over the past three years I’ve gotten used to the tree’s dark, skeletal frame looming spookily over the main entrance to the garden. I’ve tolerated its sullen refusal to sprout leaves or fruit or anything really. I think I felt a bit sorry for it, all spindly arms and brooding presence and long fingers gesturing blindly into the abyss. Then, after a while, I stopped noticing it.
A few days ago I got it into my head that maybe it’s time to remove the tree. So I decided to spend a bit more time in that part of the garden and see how it felt. I pruned the adjacent bush, sawing off endless leggy branches. I told myself it would grow back, and this time I’ll train it to grow up, not three metres out across the garden (to where the sun is, poor thing). Then I trimmed the pittosporum with zeal – I’m convinced that if it was left to nature, my garden would consist entirely of waist-deep bull grass, towering pittosporum and this one other native that’s constantly self-seeding and will probably survive the apocalypse.
Next I contemplated the tree. The diameter was less than 15 centimetres at its thickest, and it stood about 3 metres tall. I could take to it with the saw, I reasoned. Most of it was skinny limbs. Yep, saw would work. But then, how could I be absolutely sure it wasn’t going to spring back to life sometime and start yielding epic peach crops? Hmmm . . . how will I know?
Then I had a moment – the second such moment in my life* – that I WISH someone had been there to record. It was a rare moment of glory in a day spent mostly shopping for tea, corn chips and wine.
Maybe I’ll just give it a little nudge, I thought. If it’s really well-rooted I’ll give it another season. Seemed fair. So I reached over and gave it a little push. The entire tree lurched, then started to fall under its own weight, pulling the roots right out of the ground behind it. I held it up to guide its slow descent through pittosporum branches and onto the grass below. That’s right. I PUSHED a WHOLE tree over. All on my ownsome. Lights? Camera?
I know, it was obviously already dead. The roots were totally rotten. It was probably going to blow over at the next hint of a westerly breeze. Yes yes yes. But why rain on my parade? Toot toot!