Living la vida local

(Photo- My daughter gave me the wooden lorikeets in that photo.

She played with her band, The Burnt Sausages, on Spicks and Specks, at the end of the show! You can catch it on ABC iView, new season, episode 1!!)

So I go early to the bank and queue for 15 minutes before it opens, masked and with my Kobo, reading a short story by Pip Adams that is hilariously appropriate, as it is also about waiting for solutions.
Before buying a few vegetables on the way out of the shopping centre, I am beguiled by golden chrysanthemums with toffee coloured centres, and when paying for them I also manage to pick up a green bunny for a friend’s toy box. I tell the lovely florists that the baby is a busy child who works hard at her playing and learning. One of them knows sweet children like this who almost never cry, who laugh all day, busy at 15 months with their scrabble of possessions trailing gently from one room to another.
The vegetables are for soup that probably shouldn’t happen – my husband and my brother are running a family – wide campaign against Soup As A Meal – but I do get hold of some Australian grown garlic, which makes me happy.

I realise later on that while waiting for the bank to open I managed to shut out the music playing in the centre, while I was reading, and this is unusual for me.

As I leave I see a gaggle of aged pensioners who have clearly just come off a bus to the small but accessible shopping centre, two supporting each other as one has a walker and looks nervous in her frailty.
The bus is from Rymans and I stifle an urge to run back and interview some of them. I want to ask if they are as happy there as the colourful, often groovy advertising suggests. They don’t look as fashionable or healthy as the people in the ads, which is hardly surprising. I go home dreaming of one room, a cleaner, no cooking and no gardening.

At home I pick my own native greenery – correas, grevillea and westringia – to put with the chrysanthemums in a large wide vase and think, I must plant these green bits at my next house.

I have forgotten about living in one room already.