Jackie Randall

Authors =/= Mature

queryquagmire:

So one of my authors has created a fake Amazon.com account and is posting both positive reviews of his own book and scathing reviews of his competition.

Because apparently we are all in seventh grade and this is a thing that we do.

FML.

Mudbrick and Silvereyes

She used real leaves, held flat and traced around onto paper. Oak and maple leaves. He was summoned to help too. Dad. Together they cut the fabric leaves, and branches, and gumnuts. Green, gold, brown and orange. Earthy colours she told me when I thanked her for the quilt. She knew I liked earthy colours. ‘Leaves of love’ she called them.

They had retired to a mudbrick cottage in the country – when I say the words out loud they sound so romantic. Roses, a ‘pond’, gum trees, kangaroos in the back block, silvereyes and kookaburras.

But there were winters when the creek flooded right up to the sheds or when it was so cold Dad could bounce a coin off the ice on the pond, which was really a dam. And there were spring days when blowflies found their ways into the sealed house, looking for the kitchen. And summer when there was a choice of sitting on a railway sleeper next to the creek and dangling feet in the water, or turning on the little air conditioner (a recent addition) and staying shut in. And she hated being shut in. Every day of the year, their front bedroom window was open, even if they were away. ‘They’ll know we’re not home if we shut it,’ she would say.

And autumn, the colours of the quilt − the earthy colours. She liked autumn because it heralded the cool change and it was ‘kinder on my English blood’.

We’re the only ten-pound poms I’ve met who came by plane. Everyone else I knew who came out in the sixties, came by ship. Being four years old at the time I don’t remember a lot except when Dad pointed out Egypt as we flew over it – the place of Sunday School stories.

I remember our crate arriving that held, amongst other things, her Singer sewing machine, and Dad using the crate’s wood to make us a table and two bench stools so we had somewhere to eat in our small farmhouse just up the hill from a ‘native’ camp − and comfortably shading the resting spot of a dugite. Dad borrowed the farmer’s gun for that one. I was the big-girl but I had two younger brothers who should not be bitten by a snake.

They were merino farms – the farms we worked at − and even now I get fond memories when a sheep truck rumbles by with a morose bridal train of black round pearls. That smell takes me straight back to being four, and five, and six. And I like it.

The sewing machine, it stayed around long enough to make my wedding dress. It was old without even zig-zag and probably just one step up from the treadle version. But reliable. And the dress was a winner. We lived in a big town then, when I got married, and the material came from a fabric shop in town called Wilfs – gone now. There were enough scraps from the dress for her to make a small bassinet quilt for our first baby two years later. But eventually the old Singer that had made curtains and clothes and bedding in the simplest, remotest and homeliest of homes around the south, was beaten by progress. A new one came along with zig-zag and buttonholing and a host of things she didn’t use.

Strangely I nearly always saw her sewing by hand not machine, except I never saw her sewing the leaves and gumnuts. She put them away when I came to visit and I didn’t see the quilt until she gave it to me for Christmas.

That year we had our first family Christmas together for countless years, and we had it on the nineteenth of December. All three of my brothers were there with us – the last one was born a couple of years after we landed here, so long ago. So a party of six. It was that date so we could all be there – not so easy now that we live so far apart, but important that Christmas.

We took turns around her bed, but it was just Dad through the nights. And it was Dad who held her four days later when her eyes opened for five minutes. He told her he loved her then prayed with her as she went to sleep for the last time. He didn’t ring the buzzer. He just went to the desk and quietly asked them to come – that it was over.

I was glad he was there. The nurses had said that sometimes a person can sit by the bed for hours then simply go to the bathroom and when they come back the moment has gone.

The quilt, finely stitched by hand, of gold and green and brown, earthy colours, came home on the plane with me a week later – a journey of three thousand kilometres. Friends had helped her finish it in between the October of diagnosis and radiation, and the Melbourne Cup lunch where she won the sweepstakes of around thirty dollars. I know they helped because someone wrote a note, to me from her, with a permanent fabric marker on a plain fabric maple leaf, and sewed it on the back. I took a photo of the words anyway, just in case they fade.

It’s a memory of who she was, that she had friends, skilled like her, and that she really did know me even though life had put a section of the planet between us.

The person of course lives on – in us. In ‘elbows off the table’, envelope corners on the bed, and memories of the Sunday night’s when Disneyland was on TV and we would have a ‘special tea’ of tiny sandwiches and cakes and cordial in the nice glasses. And not eat at the dining room table but in the sitting room. Now I think about it that’s where I learned to eat politely, with a little tea plate on my lap and ‘only one thing at a time!’

I asked her once what she would do if the Queen came for morning tea. She said she’d do it the same as for anyone else, although I have a feeling there would be a little more starch in her embroidered tablecloth. It’s funny because that tiny answer changed how I look at people. I’ve been around the world a couple of times, been in the same room as two different Australian Prime Ministers, an American President, met major TV personalities and prepared regular dinners for a Board of Directors, and I have respectfully not used it to my advantage. I’m sure they actually just want to be treated like normal people and that’s all I’ve done.

As kids we ate off Royal Doulton crockery. It was white with silver leaves around the edges. I didn’t know what Royal Doulton was till I was long married and gone. It was a wedding gift to them and came in the crate with the Singer and its first table here was the crate. When Dad was cleaning out the house he gave some of the crockery to my next brother down who was setting up his home in the big town.

It’s sold now, the mudbrick cottage, just last month. Ten days after their golden wedding anniversary and two years after she gave me the quilt for Christmas. There should have been two sitting together at dinner that night. But a brother put flowers on the ocean that day, where her ashes went. It was nice to know that.

I hope the silvereyes still visit and the new people water the roses. I hope the kangaroos still hop through the back block and the creek always runs cold to take the heat from someone’s feet when the golden summer sun bakes the Australian earth. Their cottage had history before them. People say that Albert Facey once slept there. I don’t think it added value to it but it’s nice to say.

I never make my bed without thinking of her, and admiring and valuing each stitch, each leaf and gumnut and branch.

It’s a quilt of jewels, of treasure – in the rich earthy colours I love.
(It’s Mother’s Day in Australia this weekend.)

Jackie Randall