Annabelle Hickson: A Day in the Country
ANNABELLE HICKSON IS GRATEFUL FOR EVENTS THAT BRING HER TOWN TOGETHER.
“THIS IS SO much more than lunch,” said my friend Michelle as we finished our desserts at a long table set in a clearing in a native plant nursery, surrounded by finches and wrens and honey-eaters darting in and out of the bottlebrush and gums. About 100 people of all ages had come to the Red Cross fundraiser at the pristine Mole River valley near Tenterfield. Children were welcomed and encouraged to run around. I did not see them for most of the day, but I could hear them screaming with joy in the distance, building castles with bales of hay as the rain gently sprinkled from the sky. The grown-ups had huddled together under a large white marquee, sipping local wine after being led into the lunch by two local farmers on the bagpipes. There had been yabbies cooked in a nam jim sauce and bunya nut rissoles, lovely beef for the main meal and then pecan pie and pavlovas. All of this was cooked by members of the Red Cross branch who were not professional caterers, but whose food tasted as if they were. David Caldwell, the owner of the historic Mole Station, where the lunch was held, spoke about the property, harking back to the 1860s when, with the help of shepherds, the then owners ran 40,000 sheep over 404,000 hectares. The property has seen a lot over its years. Long gone are the fenceless days of the shepherds. Tobacco, too, has come and gone. There had been a prosperous arsenic mine, now defunct. Today, as well as cattle and sheep, the farm is home to a very well respected native nursery established by David and his wife Sarah 27 years ago as a way to diversify. It was very moving to hear David talk about this farm and its history. Now in his 60s, he had grown up on the property and, listening to him talk, you could feel the richness that comes from a life spent respecting, nurturing and, at times, reinventing the one property. It was one of those days that leaves you feeling hopeful. Inspired. Lucky to live where you do. And I had arrived feeling a bit hopeless. I had been worrying about big things — like would it ever rain properly again — and smaller things that felt like big things, such as being inexplicably but very urgently in a flap that my kids were not learning some sort of musical instrument and that I was failing them. Like wishing I lived closer to town. And like trying to ignore the discomfort of itchy feet that semi-regularly make me want to live somewhere brand new. But after lunch, all that didn’t seem to matter as much. I had spent the day with interesting people. I felt part of a loving community. I saw my kids running around with other children, grinning madly, as free as wild animals. I was still a bit worried, a bit restless, but most of all I felt lucky. And life really is a paradox, isn’t it. You may want to sink your roots down in one spot and move around like a gypsy. It can feel hopeless and beautiful. It can be hard and comforting. Days are pointless and meaningful. And you may feel lucky and worried at the same time. But events like this make you feel like it all matters. Writer Anne Lamott has some advice for how to live with this paradox; how to manage the combination of hopelessness and meaning in her book, Almost Everything. “We march, make dinner, have rummage sales to raise relief funds. Whoever arranges such things keeps distracting us and shifting things around so we don’t get stuck in hopelessness: we can take one loud, sucking, disengaging step back into hope. We remember… that the littlest things will have great results. We do the smallest, realest, most human things. We water that which is dry.” I feel grateful there are people in this community who take the time to arrange things — like this Red Cross lunch, David’s speech, shelling bunya nuts — so that we don’t get completely stuck in hopelessness. Thank you for watering that which was, at least in my mental landscape, feeling a little dry. Annabelle Hickson lives on a pecan farm in the Dumaresq Valley, NSW. Follow @annabellehickson on Instagram.