A Day in the Country: Maggie Mackellar weighs up the challenges and thrills of major milestones.
FOR THE FIRST TIME IN ALMOST TWO DECADES, MAGGIE MACKELLAR WILL NOT BE SENDING A CHILD OFF TO SCHOOL.
A LONG TIME AGO, when I was a graduate student living on campus at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, we were asked to a barbecue. My friend had emphatically said, “You have to come! This weekend is the last weekend of summer. It will start raining next week and it will not stop for nine months.” I went, but I didn’t believe her. The sky was blue, the temperature balmy and the air still.
Sure enough, the following week the rain started, then continued in various forms – sleet, snow, fog, mist and mizzle – for the next nine months. I remember this because it was the beginning of my disorientation brought on by living in a place where the seasons were unrecognisable. I struggled to accept both the snow in December and the blossoms in April. I’m sure if we had lived there longer, I would have learned a new rhythm, but what has stayed with me is how difficult it was to imagine the year ahead.
I’m thinking about this because this is the first “end of summer” in 18 years where I will not be sending a child to school. And just like our year in Canada, the normal signifiers of time passing are suddenly not there.
In Tasmania, summer’s end is just about perfect. The days are starting to become noticeably shorter, but the sea has finally warmed up and the air temperature is kind. And this year, with water in the creeks and the dams full, the stock shiny and fat, the mulberry tree heavy with fruit, the lawns green and the apples ripening, we have the buffer of a good season. It’s taken the dust from the air and lessened the urge to scan the weather map for signs of an “autumn break”. We’ve put the rams on the creek flats “to put some pep in their peppers” before being put out with the ewes in autumn.
I list the familiar because the shape of this year feels different. The disorientation is back. There’s an expanse of time where there used to be a little trail of events that gave a shape to the year. But this year there’s no final favourite meal at home, no rush to buy textbooks, no realisation that shirts no longer fit or school shoes are not going to make it just one more year. There’s no nagging to pack for school, no pile at the bottom of the stairs (pillows, bedding, cricket bag, saxophone, school bag, blazer) to signal the end of summer.
I knew this was coming. I’m ready for it, looking forward to it, even. But just like the snow in December, I could not imagine how it would feel until I was in it. The house is quiet. Both the kids have crossed Bass Strait on their respective adventures. This is after all, what I was parenting toward, their independence from me. It’s a relief, but it’s also a challenge. I feel like I have been walking into a strong wind and it’s just stopped, as if the last 20+ years of my life have been shaped around the form of my children and I have forgotten where they end and I begin.
In the quiet I’ll seek solace in the rolling of the seasons. I’ll pick the mulberries and make jam, I’ll deadhead the roses and hope for another flush of flowers, and I’ll continue my obsessive search for the right horse to fill the silence. I’m comforted, too, when I remember the disorientation of our year in Canada, because having the familiar stripped away heightened my awareness of the beauty and possibility around me. I’m hopeful this new year, without its familiar signifiers of school terms and holidays, or even the simple joy of having a child arrive home on Friday night, will allow me to recall something of myself that has been pushed aside in the glorious juggle of school-aged children, work and farm life.