Trust

So easily upset.

My outstretched hand tentatively offers warmth, softness, kindness and gentleness.

Will he trust? Will I escape unhurt?

Will my hand be bitten by a harsh beak accompanied by a mean, angry face and piercing eyes that warn me not to come closer? Daring me to?

Perhaps.

The beak's owner seems to ask me to trust while offering a claw to rest on my arm. He's likely unaware that I could snap his neck in frustration. He tentatively comes for a scratch and a pet, no matter how his prior behavior toward me was. He trusts that I won't lash out, although that is an option for me in my selfish hurt, even if is is justifiable.

More often than not when I approach his wings are spread, body forward on his perch, beak wide open in challenge..."don't come near me, I will bite."

I don't trespass. I wait.

After a time, body language denotes seemingly sincere ease and affection. He's used to me now. Claws are gentle on my hand, beak gently grooming my fingers and calmly nipping my palm. Melodic chirps surround us when night closes in during our interlude with the hum of crickets and magpies' sleepy chortles as background music.

This makes me ponder.

If I try again and the next day...if I approach from a different stance...if I offer a treat...if I am more submissive...will he accept me? Will he need me?

Will he respond differently? Will he feel more secure? Will he be more loving?

Parrot language is hard to understand. Male language is just as difficult.

And I ponder yet again...are relationships more effective with a calm voice and a gentle hand, and a swing and a ring and a rope anchored with a pinecone stuffed with peanut butter?

Thoughts on a 1998 Washington morning

Nearly ten years ago...

"It's quiet while the kids are in school. I hear the faint click of the mantel clock, the hum of a fish tank, the low rumble and swish of the washer and dryer, and the loud chirp of a robin outside.

I take deep breaths. Autumn is making its arrival in daily steps across my piece of land here in the hills. Mornings are cold enough to bite toes and put yellow in cottonwood leaves. Fog clings to dewy green firs, and intermittent showers wash the powdery dust off roadside thimbleberry and blackberry bush leaves. I smell woodsmoke from home fires burning beside warm hearths.

The warm breath of a late afternoon breeze sends loosened, dried leaves spiraling through the air, clattering across dusty roads.

Today I have dreams. Hearts are scary things--dare we trust them? How do we know when a thing is gestated by God or our own dreams and desires? Scripture, obedience, prayer, close communion with my Savior will ensure my safety. Dreams are such gossamer things. Like filmy spiderwebs, beautifully structured but easily broken...but hope springs eternal, doesn't it?

My cat, Lawrence, reminds me of that. He feigns a nap...white paws tucked under his silver-gray chest, eyes closed as if in sleep...under the outdoor bird feeder."

The closing of a door

"We live a time secure; beloved and loving, sure it cannot last for long...then--the goodbyes come again--again--like a small death, the closing of a door. One learns to live with pain. One looks ahead, not back--never back, only before. And joy will come again--warm and secure, if only for the now, laughing, we endure." --Ruth Bell Graham, from Sitting by my Laughing Fire.

A spectacular start to a new day

Venus over crescent moon before sunrise. On his way to work, Steve called to tell me about the sight. This is taken from the road in front of our house.




Sunrise shots are over Ballarat and Sovereign Hill near where we used to live. The "hill" in the distance of the last three photos is Mount Warrenheip.









Gorgeous. I was on my way to deliver an item to Tegan that she left behind at our house, and I didn't mind the early morning chore with this as a view!

Nothing more really needs to be said. Fabulous start to a new day.

Saturday with friends

Men in coveralls working on a caravan named "The Ant." It's pretty small. Covered in grease and dirt, Steve gets under the old rig, and Conrad hands him tools. A bent axle needs a closer look.



Women in the kitchen, preparing evening tea. Denise putters back and forth in the small space, Heidi watches from the doorway. Keeping company. A cup of coffee for her, a good English cuppa tea for the cook.



With women's work done, the duo head to the lounge room and chat about life, love, children, husbands, and other mysteries. Denise has stories to tell, and often gets up to illustrate. She keeps me smiling, and pondering, and wanting to tell my own stories.

Men arrive, tired and hungry. Break out the wine, crackers and dip. Tea ready soon. More stories float around the room. Content to be together on a Saturday.

Table set, steaming boat of gravy, corned beef (aka silverside), British-style roasted potatoes, peas, and honeyed carrots. More wine, water, pineapple soft drink. More stories. Ice cream topped with stewed apples and rhubarb, not too sweet...enough to make glands pucker a bit.





We decide to play Trivial Pursuit...the original edition. Trouble is no one realizes its the Australian edition as well. Lots of trivia about worldwide stuff, but Heidi seems to get all the Australian and New Zealand questions. Needless to say, she gave up and just enjoyed answering everyone else's questions. Steve and Conrad pull all the war history and other blokey stuff, so they do well. But Denise, the transplanted Brit among us, commiserates with me, and she wins.



Dogs, Spike and Rusty, snooze until potato chips and crackers are brought out. After begging, they go back to nap and keep a wary eye on the adults who burst into laughter at silly guesses and wild answers that turn out right.



I look around at my friends, my husband, and I know that the people I love 10,000 miles away would enjoy this evening with us. Perhaps someday.

A late night home, crash into bed. Contented again.

A bowl of blackberries

A late February Saturday. (equivalent of a late August in the northern hemisphere)

Pleasantly warm afternoon. Friends visit and join us with a step-daughter already visiting. She is the youngest of Steve's brood, 15-year-old Stephanie...not easy to get past her barriers. Sometimes sulky, defiant, rude. Othertimes giggly, wanting to be accepted, trying hard to fit in. Normal with a bit of angst thrown in.

Con and Denise arrive with wine, a salad, and laughter. Con and Steve head to the "shed" where men hang out. Welding, sawing, downing a stubby bottle of beer each. Too early for dinner. I set out marinated lamb roast, get veggies, mushrooms and potatoes ready for later.

"Let's pick blackberries," this from pint-sized Denise who knows the mixed emotions Stephanie sometimes has toward me, the step-mom.

I hesitate. I don't like uncomfortable situations. Stephanie has been very difficult to be around lately. Sullen, ignoring me, won't eat what I make and complaining. My mind races for a way out. I can just stay at home to prepare the evening meal and let them wander. Steph likes Denise. She's not a threat and Denise has a way of coaxing her out. But a still, small voice inside me says, "go."

So I do. I distribute three plastic tubs to collect fresh blackberries. We wander down the road, empty tubs swinging from our lazy hands. Denise telling stories, Stephanie laughing, me chiming in now and then. We find a wild, tangled bush of the fruit we are after and dig in. My step-daughter and friend tackle the task with energy. I am a bit slower, looking for the ripest fruit as well as watching the ground for snakes and spiders. But I also look back.

I remember picking thumb-sized, plump-ripe blackberries off the side of a dusty road near the house where my children and I lived in Battle Ground, Washington. We ventured out, bowls in hand, chatting all the way about lots of things. Every now and then there would be a squeal at the abrupt presence of a large orb spider...mostly from me. Late August, late summer, warm days. The fruit of our labor were blackberry pies or tarts or just plain blackberries in bowls of milk and sugar.



I couldn't help but compare the tiny, drought starved blackberries to those at home. But I didn't say anything. They still tasted good. We were having a good time, and I didn't want to ruin it with comparisons. Steph warmed to me as the sun warms the cooling autumn earth. I responded. We had a good day.

Back at home, she taught me how to prepare her favorite zucchini snack with sour cream, tasty cheese, and paprika, and she was so proud that she told everyone within earshot. Denise, who knows the situation between Steve's youngest child and me, kept her distance when needed and chimed in with support and a diversion when I stumbled.

Dinner was a perfect roast, potatoes, stuffed mushrooms, green beans and salad. Dessert was blackberries over vanilla ice cream with coffee on the side.

After watching a movie, it was time for our guests to go home. I got a hug from Stephanie, and a "thank you."

I haven't seen her since then, her schedule is busy, and she lives with her mum about 20 minutes away.

But I think that blackberries are good memory posts to build on.

Green Drought

Australia is a land of contradictions and unpredictabilities.

A popular poem memorized by Australian school children contains the verse, "I love a sunburned country, a land of sweeping plains; of ragged mountain ranges, of droughts and flooding rains."

The land I come from is a little more predictable. When I left in January 2007, it was a frostbit country, a land of weeping plains, of snow-capped volcano ranges, of cold and drippy rains. About 23 hours later, I was embraced in Melbourne, Australia by the hottest, most humid summer in decades.

Since then I have watched seasons come and go for a little more than a year. This summer was fairly mild and seems to be ending soon. Temps have hovered in the 90s-100s for a few days, then drops to mid-70s or less with mornings in the low 40s for the rest of the week. One day the temperature dropped from 85 to 68 in two hours with the onset of a summer rainstorm.

Other things are contradictory to this northern hemisphere native. It snows in July. Tulips and daffodils are autumn flowers for Easter, and that holiday is the last great getaway weekend for camping in the fall. Christmas is a time for barbecues on any beach, and prime Christmas gifts are surfboards and beach towels. Australia Day on January 26 every year is the equivalent of a firecracker hot American Fourth of July. The water flows down drains backward, and night-time constellations are mostly unfamiliar.

One odd contradiction that sticks with me is the term I've heard here: "green drought." When winter started last June, Steve and I chatted with a sheep rancher's daughter about all the rain we'd had and how green everything was. She said not to let looks fool me. Even though most of their 600 acres was lush with greening pastures, the earth was bone dry about an inch underneath. I was baffled. News reporters regaled the best start to the ski season in decades, dams were filling, rivers were flooding, native plants that had adjusted to years of little water budded and bloomed. But a careful look at dust puffing out from underneath the tires of a truck moving across a green paddock proved the rancher's daughter right--the soil is very dry underneath all that green.



That made me ponder. People are so often like this green drought. We may look happy and peaceful and prosperous and fertile. But inside we are dry, empty, insecure and lonely. A closer look, or hard times, may prove a bone-dry soul. I know my life was like that, and still is in some areas. Before this big life-change I struggled to thrive in a life too busy and too empty.

I also know from experience as a Bible study leader and regular church attender that sanctuaries are full of souls experiencing their own green drought. We put on our happy, going-to-church faces so that no one looks under the surface and sees the parched soul inside. We have become like "clouds without rain, blown along by the wind; autumn trees, without fruit and uprooted--twice dead." Jude 12b




With any drought, it takes time for the land to recover with regular watering; to drink in enough water to sustain healthy plant life, not just giving the illusion of fertility. But as this process takes place, there are not so many puffs of dust as the soul takes root in Christ and a new life begins.

Changes aren't easy, especially in a land of contradictions and unpredictabilities. But we can thrive by drinking in scriptures, meditating on the Word, following in the safe footsteps of Jesus who has gone ahead to make a place for us to join Him.

It is with joy, and hints of green in our spirit, that we can proclaim with the prophet Jeremiah, "blessed is the (wo)man who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in Him. (S)he will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; it's leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit." Jeremiah 17:7-8




Living in a land of unpredictability but thriving in the water of the Word,

Heidi

Signs

The sign is gone.

Nothing marks the spot of a cattle station where my husband lived in his youth.

Steve got out of our black Land Rover and poked around in the sandy dirt with the toe of his boot, hoping the sign was just down and forgotten. The post it hung on is still there. His work-worn hand patted the top of the post as he scanned the ground. The fading white paint of the wooden sentinel was chipped and peeling to show the silver-gray wood of an aged gum tree.

In the 1960s, Shipley Downs, north of a town called Keith in South Australia a couple hours east of Adelaide, was a thriving cattle station of a few thousand acres and a few hundred cows. Today, standing at the crossroads where a school bus deposited him and his older sister and younger brother, the wind shifts sand through scrub. The air is filled with the bleating of hundreds of sheep.

"I used to hear nothing but cattle," Steve said, looking at the dirty, woolen creatures staring at us from a paddock of knee-high, browning grass.

Steve stood on the burnt-orange colored dirt road, squinting his eyes against the late afternoon sun. It's springtime in October. The light dodged in and out of towering, black, empty storm clouds. A little further up the road is the main entrance to Shipley Downs.

The cattle grate is the same, he said, as we drove through the entrance, and remembered riding a horse over it. But the winged side gates are dilapidated and aged, not the way it is in his mind.

Driving down the well-worn track, his mind rewinds to 40 years ago. Big cypress trees where he hid under sheltering branches and let his imagination run are still there. He sees an early morning cattle round-up, feels the horse beneath him and the growl in his stomach as he helps his dad, the station overseer, before 8-year-old Steve heads off to breakfast and then to meet the school bus for a 45-minute ride.

As the Land Rover slowly travels up the long driveway, the house he lived in comes into view. In the mid-1960s it was brand new. Lacy curtains hung in the window then, vegetable and flower gardens thrived. The grass was mowed regularly, and a stockyard was within walking distance of the back yard.

On this day, it appears that no one is home. Dirty, unkempt drapes shield the front windows. The landscape is dusty and dead. Paint peels from the eaves under the roof, but a shiny new dirt bike is propped up against a wall in the carport. The leaf-shaped plot of grass Steve remembers barely resembles the one his mother carefully tended. The old, corrugated metal rain tank is still perched on its stand above the roofline of the house. It looks hardly big enough to keep a family of five watered and washed.



Other memories crowd to the surface of Steve's mind: he's a little red-haired daredevil on a bike too big for him, careening around the sloped corner of the road in front of the house, then jumping off in the front yard and letting it fly and hit the rain tank stand; staying with a family down the road while his parents were away a week in Adelaide; long bus rides to and from school while tormenting a teenage boy who was assigned to sit next to him and keep him in line..."wild bush kid" is how Steve describes himself; going on picnics with his family to large sand and dirt hills and jumping off to roll in the dust; letting his big sister sleep past the bus stop on the way home from school while he and his younger brother got off. He grins as he recalls how the bus abruptly stopped near the top of a distant hill, and an angry little speck of a person emerged and started stomping in their direction. He and his brother ran the nearly full mile to the house, in the front door, drop the lunch bags, out the back door to get lost in the land and far away from an angry adolescent female. "Hi mom. Gone," he said. Even now there's a sparkle in his eye at the memory.

Steve also noticed powerlines strung on poles like marching sentinels across paddocks and hills. In the days he lived there, power didn't reach that far back into the land. The only power to be had was by generator, which was installed at the "big boss's" house a little further up the dirt track. At 9 p.m., it was literally "lights out" for the day. Sometimes Steve would forget on late night trips to the loo and would flick the light switch. The distant warning "chug chug" of the awakening engine urged him to flick the switch off quickly before he got into trouble.

We travel no further down the road than his old abode. He slowly turned the Land Rover around in the driveway and we backtrack, undetected. His eyes scan the property, noting aloud what's still there and what's been removed.

I look at him, this South Australian by birth, who is my husband. I study his face and note that underneath his manly, rugged profile a little worn by passing years, there is still a glimpse of the red-haired, freckle-faced little boy with a mischievous glint in his blue eyes.



He turns to me with a smile and a wink. Not everything changes.

The signs are still there.

Aussie Sayings

Australians have unique ways of expressing themselves...

Regarding someone with acne..."They've got a head like a ruptured rice bubble."

Anger..."I was so angry I could crack coconuts with me bum cheeks."

Morning look..."He's got a face that looks like a kicked-in jam tin."

"Struth!" (A saying that denotes shock and unbelief)

"That's as useless as a hip pocket on a singlet (t-shirt)."

"He's got a head like a racing tadpole."

"That tastes as bad as the bottom of a cockies' cage."

"That's rougher than Hessian undies." (burlap)

"I went down the frog and toad to the rubadubdub. On the way I saw a joe blake, it made me almost jump into the black tea where I could've been eaten by a Noah's ark. At the rubabdubdub, I bought a dog's eye with dead horse. " Rhyming slang translation: "I went down the road to the pub. On the way I saw a snake, it made me almost jump into the sea where I could've been eaten by a shark. At the pub, I bought a meat pie with tomato sauce (ketchup)."