The Years of Merrimba

 Every year in Merrimba the conditions were just right for something to flourish and come to the forefront. Something would go right over the top and tip into triumphant superabundance. I could never tell what it would be, I suppose the influences were subtle and complex, but I would look for it. And then I would hook my memories to it. Oh yes, that was the year of the pumpkins. No matter what we planted, pumpkins grew. Or, that was the year of wild blackberries. The children would pick them, very willingly, they would run away down the back paddock with an ice-cream container, and then I would make a pie. When I cut into the crust the smell would invade the kitchen, a powerful fragrance, like black velvet. 

Then there was the year of the irises. The dark blue iris had never been so blue. The colour was exquisitely vivid, almost supernaturally blue. The curling lip of the white iris had never been so plush. And, if conditions had been right for the iris, then they had been very wrong for the pests that preyed upon them. Slugs and snails and aphids, tended by trudging trails of indefatigable ants for their honeydew, and thrips and nematodes and their ilk did not visibly impinge on their season of perfection. They seemed untouched, until the last moment of their flowering, as they withered back upon themselves, passing through the stages of faded to bruised to anhydrous.

Our first year in Merrimba we sat on the front verandah and watched a flock of light-bodied birds rolling through the sky, missing each other by a nanosecond as they swooped through the telephone wires, the cloud of them boiling like a school of fish in a feeding frenzy. We guessed they were scooping up insects on the wing, there was nothing else they would be so busy for, so intent. They would display for twenty minutes in late afternoon, and then, like a creature with one brain, the cloud of them would roll away. We asked our friend Jamie, who lived over in Bungundah, what they might be. He was one short step away from being a twitcher and he would know. He did know.

“Siberian swifts,” he said. “They migrate here from Siberia. And while they are here they never land, they never touch ground. If you ever see their legs they are very tiny and under-developed.”

He wasn’t quite right. I’ve just checked the Field Guide to the Birds of Australia. 

They are fork-tailed or Pacific or white-rumped swifts. And they do sometimes perch on cliffs or trees, clinging to a vertical. But they do migrate from Siberia, among other places.

We had our year of the swifts but they never came back. We waited for them for twenty-four years but never sighted them again. I see in the book that there are occasional mass movements associated with late summer low-pressure systems. So that is what must have happened. And those circumstances weren’t replicated during the rest of our time in Merrimba. But it could happen again. At any time. I don’t know how long the cycle is. Once every twenty-five years, thirty years, fifty years? You’d have to live a very long time to find out.

Now I am laughing as I think of the year of the foxgloves. I have a passion for flowers you can slip onto your fingers, like foxgloves and snapdragons. My snapdragons never did well, but one year I had a small space in the garden by the back door, so I bought some miniature hybrid foxgloves. Well, it was their year and they took total advantage of it. My favourite joke was to say to visitors—“Come and look at my miniature foxgloves.” What a hoot it was to see their eyes travelling up and up and up to the tips of the towering foxgloves. Taller than the tallest visitor, overtopping the roof. One visitor surveyed them slowly and drawled—“Lucky they’re miniatures.”

The year of the cicadas was not very pleasant. Not that there was ever a year without cicadas. They were the sound of summer. I liked their fanciful names—Yellow Monday, Black Prince, Green Grocer. I had one pink tulip and for several years I would come upon a nymph, just crawled out of the earth, clinging to the bowl of the tulip, drying off. But the year they were numerous was a horror, an abomination of incandescent noise. And they would all, the thousands of them, get themselves into a rhythm and thrum at a pitch that made you understand exactly what ear-splitting meant. And then their concert would fall apart, they would get out of step, and there were layers and variety to their song. It was just as horrible but at least it wasn’t rhythmic. And then back it would come, their triumphant, brazen concord. I was walking my mare down the road and we came into an area between two groves of trees, a concentration of cicadas, and dear heavens above, the noise, assaulting us from both sides, was so painful we both crouched in alarm, as our eardrums vibrated to bursting point. She glanced at me, and tugging the lead, set off quick smart down the road out of danger. It was a dangerous noise.

Now this was odd. The cicadas were so plentiful they were straying into our rabbit cage. And the rabbits were pouncing on them with their furry paws and eating them with quick snaps of their long front teeth. I had no idea rabbits weren’t committed vegetarians.

It would seem as if the thing that marked the year for me should be in autumn, at harvest, at the time of abundance. But it was not always so. One year it snowed in October, in the spring. I walked out into my garden and saw snow falling through apple blossom. It was indescribably lovely and very unsettling. So wrong, somehow. But you could live your whole life, you could live several lifetimes, and never see snow falling through apple blossom. The snow was sparse but it made an impression so that was the year of snow in October. Nothing else stood a chance.

When I think of Merrimba I see a kaleidoscope of years, of months and seasons turning over and over, forming different patterns, that can never be repeated exactly. And I see us, Martin and me and the children, being tossed about too, in the mix, part of all the patterns.

I see Alice squatting down to stuff worms into our pet magpie’s beak. I see Stephen reaching up an arm to pick a plum off the tree as he passes under it on his way down the road to catch the school bus. I see Martin in his deckchair under the young elderberry, absorbed in his book, as two fairy wrens loop and flutter around him, paying him no mind. And I see myself, seeing it all.