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Talk to the Goose

06 Saturday Jun 2020

Posted by Karen Lloyd AM in Uncategorized

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

communication, Coronavirus, COVID-19, family, Isolation

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March 18, 2020

Do Not Travel overseas, says the Australian Government.

Late afternoon, we arrive home from a road trip. In the week we’ve been away, the Coronavirus situation has changed rapidly. Now we just want to stay home.

I text three-year-old Jack’s Mum and Nanny Gaye: I won’t be coming to his birthday party this weekend after all. Mum understands. Nanny Gaye says, “Fark!” People are over-reacting, she says; her GP told her to go out, she’ll go mental if she stays home. I feel bad. I worry about her, she’s in the high risk group.

March 23

It seems plenty of people agree with Gaye. Over the weekend they flocked to the beaches. So beaches closed.

Government says stay home, shuts down pubs, restaurants, sports, events. Queensland schools remain open. I worry about teacher friends.

Coronavirus cases climb, 1,347 now. It’s very fast and getting faster. Scary.

Breda is in Brisbane. We’ve agreed to chat on Skype but when I try to log in, it doesn’t work. I haven’t used it for years. Eventually John fixes it. Breda tells me her mother’s aged care home is locked down now, family can’t visit; but they relented, let her visit in the garden since she’d come from Sydney especially.

March 25

The hospital calls John, pre-admission paperwork for his angiogram tomorrow.

Government announces further closures, restrictions, cancels elective surgery. We decide not to worry, his procedure will likely go ahead, it’s semi-urgent.

Australia closed its borders on Friday night. It feels surreal. I picture our vast island, its rocky cliffs now sentinels, its jetties, beaches, airport gates barricaded with ropes and “No Trespassing” signs. We ponder what to do about our overseas trip booked for May and June, decide to put off thinking about it until after tomorrow.

We’ve invited Stepdaughter 1 and Boyfriend, who house sat while we were away, to stay on so they can be together. Stepdaughter 1 is studying online; Boyfriend is waiting for a new job to start. In our renovated Queenslander, we give them upstairs; we live downstairs except for meals. They stay up late, leave lights on, are messy, unobservant. They eat a lot. Boyfriend has expensive taste in coffee. But they help out with cleaning, cooking, washing up; they buy some food and coffee. And they make the most divine chocolate pudding we’ve ever eaten.

Harmony hovers. I try harder to bite my sharp tongue, be patient, calm. Stepdaughter 1 can be prickly, John grumpy, Boyfriend a somewhat unknown quantity. I expect they feel the same burden, trying to keep the oldies, the wife, happy.

My sister texts, confirms our eighty-eight year old Mum is fretting, can’t imagine what she’ll do at home all day. Hopefully their Far North Queensland rural location will protect this four generations slice of my family.

These days I pray a lot more.

Upstairs, computer games and fantasy movies reign. Downstairs, it’s the TV, with relentless COVID-19 coverage. Information access improves for me: Auslan interpreters begin appearing on TV press conferences; I’m thrilled, grateful. Government announces a committee to redeploy unemployed people, repurpose factories, keep supply lines going. We need to manufacture things like masks and ventilators for hospitals. Bundaberg Rum Distillery is using its ethanol to make hand sanitiser. It’s like wartime government requisitioning of private industry to work for the war effort.

It’s strangely exciting, dramatic, scary. Food shopping is bizarre. We sanitise our hands, don’t touch anything unnecessarily, walk wide of people. Others do the same, glance at us warily.

Watching TV gets depressing. John disappears into the study. I go outside, deadhead the roses, eat fresh-picked raspberries. I’m thrilled with my unexpectedly successful raspberry patch!

March 26

We check into the hospital at 6.00am. Hand sanitisers are everywhere, waiting room chairs 1.5 metres apart. I wonder if they measured each one. People come and go, constantly sanitising their hands. When John is called, they tell me I can’t stay and wait, so I leave him there, go home to worry. They say they’ll call me when it’s done but we know they won’t, my deaf need for texts instead of phone calls flummoxes procedures everywhere. Only my dentist does it well.

So John texts me, provides better information than the hospital would. At 6.55 he’s changed into a gown….putting his phone away. He leaves me in silence. At 9.30 he texts. He’s in recovery, all good…he’s had some food…at least an hour yet…he’s dressed… And so I track him as he perks up, feels better, asks me to pick him up at 1.30.

March 28

It’s Queensland local councils election day. Contradictory government messages abound. Stay home, don’t go out unless it’s essential, it’s not safe. It’s safe to go out and vote. Friends say they won’t vote or pay the fine. We voted pre-poll when it was quiet, took our own pencils and hand sanitiser, used their sanitiser too. I’ve become obsessive about hand washing; John always was.

Numbers keep rising: 3,500+ now and 14 deaths. Government flip-flopping incites nervousness. They reinstate elective surgery in private hospitals for another week, scrap an absurd 30 minute, 1.5 metre rule for hairdressers. Some are choosing to close. We don’t care. We have clippers, love our grey hair. But we worry about our wonderful hairdresser. “Perhaps we should gift him the cost of our cuts,” John says.

Family and friends have phoned, texted, checked we’re ok; we’ve checked on some. I worry about Lesley, already in home isolation for six weeks with a different virus and flu when we all went into isolation. At eighty-six, she’s still such a social person. We text weekly; she’s fine, talks with family and friends on the phone, reads, goes walking, practices line dancing in her kitchen.

Gaye doesn’t want to chat on Skype, she’s depressed. I worry.

After dinner Stepdaughter 1 and Boyfriend say they’re going to Macca’s for ice cream. Please don’t risk it, we say. They make chocolate pudding instead.

March 30

We have a big day out. We all go to the chemist at Brookside for a flu jab, do a week’s grocery shop, stock up on wine. But we forget things. Leek for the shepherds pie; some things Stepdaughter 1 wanted: running late, stressed, she forgot her shopping list. So John goes back for the missing things. Going out, doing the shopping, is stressful now. Scary. Threatening.

Boyfriend’s new employer calls. He still has a job but everyone is working from home, can’t train him until they return to the office. He’s been considering moving back home to his parents’ when work starts. We worry. If he moves back there, sooner or later Stepdaughter 1 will want to be with him. They need to pick one place: here, his parents’ or her mother’s, and stay there. Going back and forth between houses isn’t wise or fair to any of us.

John talks with them. Now that the job situation is clear, they decide to stay here. They go back to her mother’s and his parents’ to collect more clothes, his coffee machine. He’s very attached to his coffee.

We hope they will stop finding reasons to go out now, except for walks. I get nervous when people go out.

April 3

Life seems slow but the days still slip away. At two o’clock I decide I’m spending too much time knitting in front of the TV and go give the garden some love.

Today’s news is encouraging. Virus spread is slowing, isolation is helping. But government keeps saying things will get worse, go on for at least six months, possibly 12 to 18 months. It’s hard to imagine living this way for so long.

John stresses about our holiday cancellations. It’s a constant conversation. We’ve requested a full refund but they aren’t responding. No one is offering refunds, only credit notes. We worry about travel companies collapsing. Who knows when we might travel again? We understand why they want to give credit notes but it’s a lot of money for us to lose.

I tell him, as I have every day for a week: give them time, stop thinking about it constantly.

He goes to the doctor, the supermarkets for bits and pieces, flour for Stepdaughter 1, she wants to make pizza. We couldn’t get any when we did our big shop. There is still no flour.

I settle on the back patio with a cup of tea and Tim Costello’s book, A lot with a little, purchased at Adelaide Writers Week in early March, a lifetime ago. A third in, it’s disappointingly dull. I put it aside, take up Night train to Lisbon. I’m half way through. It’s beautifully written but hard work. I think about tossing them both, my life’s not this long, I have a stack of other books unread.

I weed the garden for an hour. It’s hot, humid, reminds me how unfit I am.

Stepdaughter 1 and Boyfriend cook dinner, a dish new to us: turkey mince pasta. It’s delicious but I can taste the cider vinegar. I do not like vinegar in food. Vinegar, to me, is a household cleaning product. John suggests they use wine instead next time.

After dinner, Boyfriend tells some stories. We’re establishing a ritual: after dinner storytelling. It’s been mostly John and me with stories from our lives, the children’s childhood, many stories Stepdaughter 1 hasn’t heard before, we haven’t spent a lot of time with her as an adult. Now Boyfriend is starting to tell some. I feel hopeful.

April 5

A friend tells me she’s loving having her four kids at home, no after school or weekend sports, more family time together. On Facebook, games mushroom. A friend starts a group sharing yoga videos for Auslan users. Another describes how isolation is making her feel disconnected from people, muddled in her thinking. We all need time to make sense of this new way of living, create new daily routines.

John and I plant seeds in punnets. A jasmine vine sprawling over the fence from a neighbour’s garden, for years a perfumed joy, has mysteriously died. Near a corner, behind a lavender bush, we struggle to cut it down.

Television is now too infected with Coronavirus. We sign up to Netflix and watch movies.

Good Friday

Food. Life seems to be a lot about food. We can’t plan anything much but we can plan meals, so a lot of energy goes into planning a week’s meals, writing shopping lists, shopping while trying to social-distance, finding space in the fridge and freezer, cooking, cleaning up. Shopping was something we often did on the fly, several times a week. Now we try to do only one large weekly shop. Food, and rituals around it, gives our days some structure. It’s also making me fatter.

We go walking. At the house at the end of our street, I pause to talk to the goose. She waddles to the fence, fixes me with a beady eye, listens attentively. “Hello Goosey. How are you today? Are people being kind to you?…” I love this goose. Other locals do too.

We’re getting better at this, walking most days. More committed, Stepdaughter 1 and Boyfriend walk daily for longer.

April 11

Breda and I catch up on Skype. We’re more settled in this isolation lifestyle now. We share concerns about mutual friends who are struggling. Somewhat guiltily, we confess we’re actually quite enjoying isolation. We both love our homes, have many mutual loves: reading, gardening, watching movies; Cameron has an extensive DVD collection.

Cam and Rowan join us briefly. Rowan, home from uni, studying online, tells me he’s had to reclaim his room from the storage room it had morphed into. “Are you retraining your parents?” I ask. We laugh.

Behind them, vintage glass doors, shelves of books, a sun washed room. It’s so beautiful it sings, a lilting visual melody.

Easter Sunday

We cook roast lamb, the four of us enjoy after lunch stories around the table, we laugh.

I bake a devil’s food cake. John makes the icing, he says I don’t make it thick enough. At three o’clock we cut the cake, lush and perfect with tea, and chat over Zoom with John’s brothers and sister. Zoom doesn’t work particularly well, people talk over each other, are difficult to understand, I can’t lipread anyone, but it’s worth it just to see them.

My mother phones on the TTY. She’s the only person I still use the TTY to talk with. I’m missing her, she’s normally here with us for Easter.

Late afternoon we chat on Skype with Stepdaughter 2. John talks with her often on the phone but I haven’t for a while. She looks happy.

April 13

John is grumpy. Flight Centre is still not talking to us. I get grumpy too.

I go into the garden, spread fertiliser, give everything a thorough watering. It’s deeply satisfying to be in the fresh air, nurture living things.

Lying in bed, we discuss what’s testing us. Our travel refund is driving him spare; his obsession with it is driving me spare. We’re concerned about how Stepdaughter 1 and Boyfriend spend their time. It’s their journey, they need to figure things out for themselves. But we feel responsible to try and nudge them along. I feel I have to tiptoe around other people’s messiness, indolence, grumpiness. I expect it’s a good thing to practice patience and calm, but a part of me resents it. Why can’t I be grumpy and have everyone else tiptoe around me? They probably feel they do!

We laugh, roll over to sleep, love wins.

April 14

We decide to do something constructive together and clean out kitchen drawers, insert new non-slip liners.

On the end of a long orange pole, John sticks a little metal bucket I found for $3 months ago at Vinnies and we use it to pick paw paws. The tree is too tall now, the bucket safer than a ladder.

Coronavirus case numbers are steadily declining. We are buoyed.

April 17

It’s our 16th wedding anniversary and we can’t go out to celebrate. But we often don’t anyway. A nice meal, some wine, we are content.

We’re falling into a kind of routine now, our days have a rhythm we hadn’t managed to achieve in the four years we’ve both been retired.

The seeds we planted in punnets are unhappy. Only one has germinated.

April 19

John makes pancakes for brunch. They’re delicious. Boyfriend and I eat ours with maple syrup. I wish I hadn’t finished all the bananas.

Our neighbour’s son is fourteen today so after lunch we walk up their driveway, stand far apart, chat for a while. They’re good neighbours, we’re fond of them. Son seems delighted with our gift, fresh ravioli and a tub of home-made pasta sauce. He’s enjoyed it before at our house. We’ve included dessert, a few small Picnic bars, the last of our stash.

Sue’s cryptic quote on Facebook worries me a little. “Are you stressed?” I ask. She replies privately. She’s worried about her daughter and six months old grandson, expats in Argentina. They need to come home. She’s managed to get them onto a flight organised by DFAT on Anzac Day, flying into Melbourne. They’ll have to quarantine there for fourteen days before flying home to Brisbane. Daughter is happy they’re coming home but upset she has to leave her beloved cat behind.

April 20

Finally Gaye replies to my latest text asking if she’s ok. She says she’s not bad, still a bit down but perking up. My relief is palpable. It’s so difficult when someone I love goes into a funk and won’t talk. To me, it’s the worst way to deal with feeling down, and makes everyone else worry, feel helpless.

There are no new cases in Queensland for the first time. We’re winning!

After dinner, minor bickering between John and me morphs into a discussion about relationships. I’ve never talked much about this with Stepdaughter 1. We laugh a lot.

John is still obsessing over our travel refund. He’s in a couple of Facebook groups, thousands of angry people all trying to get their money back from Flight Centre. I tell him I’m thinking about running away.

April 23

It’s John’s birthday. How to celebrate in isolation? I give him a card from our stash, with a $50 note inside. It’s silly but it feels wrong to let his birthday go by without giving him anything at all. One day when isolation is over, we’ll go shopping, buy something he likes, probably for a lot more than $50.

I make another devil’s food cake, with ridiculously thick icing.

Stepdaughter 2 comes for dinner. It isn’t absolutely clear but we think it’s allowed under the two-people-can-visit rule. She brings him flowers: a sunflower, white gerberas, everlastings. John is delighted, says, “How very unsexist of you!” Stepdaughter 1 and Boyfriend give him a Bunnings voucher, his favourite. We cook roast lamb again, have cake with a candle, which John “blows out” with a brisk wave of the knife.

He’s had a splendid day.

I read about a report released by the Commission for the Human Future: researchers and citizens led by John Hewson. It identifies ten risks to life on the planet, says this pandemic offers an opportunity for rethinking society and policy reform to build societies focused on natural and ecological security rather than economic growth as the key success indicator. I feel hopeful.

The PM talks about “harvesting” ideas for economic and tax reform after isolation ends. It sounds depressingly like everything he’s ever said before. Only “harvesting” is new. I feel despair.

Anzac Day

We bake Anzac biscuits, leave half in the kitchen for Stepdaughter 1 and Boyfriend, take half downstairs.

Stepdaughter 2 sends us the lyrics and recording of a new song she’s written for guitar. The lyrics are lovely. John says the music is excellent too.

A neighbour sends photos of her family standing in their driveway for the “light the dawn” street memorial. “We missed you,” she says. I feel rebuked.

I reply, explain: We don’t do dawn services. They aren’t inclusive, don’t usually have Auslan interpreters. Instead, we watch them on TV with captions, much more meaningful for me.

I know she probably didn’t mean it as a rebuke, had just hoped to see us. I’d mulled over this, suspected some people would look askance at neighbours not participating. I’d have liked to participate in this unusual Anzac salute, this community spirit, but knew that as a deaf person it would be difficult, even just communicating with neighbours in the dawn’s faint light. Community spirit, such a fine thing, can be unwittingly judgemental. I feel hurt; and I feel silly for feeling hurt.

John and I go walking and I talk to the goose, feel better.

April 27

Overnight Stepdaughter 2 posts a video on Instagram, a song she composed about isolation, for fun. She sends us the lyrics and we laugh. It infects my head all day.

Flight Centre calls, offers us a full refund of land tours and flights, partial insurance refund; we will have to pay $600 cancellation fee. This is much better than vouchers on the never never, we know there’s no way they will refund everything, they want to survive. John accepts the offer, forgets to ask when the refund will be processed.

There is a sudden rainstorm. I take my half-drunk tea out to the patio, sit and watch it drench the washing, bend the roses with its weight. It brings vitality to the garden, a world washed clean, hope.

Good Grief

30 Monday Oct 2017

Posted by Karen Lloyd AM in Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

death, dying, family, friends, gratitude, grief

Sunset 1

In the past year, just over a year, three people I loved dearly have departed this life. My father in July 2016. My friend of 25 years, Ann Darwin, in January 2017. And my friend of 41 years, Tricia Giles, in July 2017.

All of them left us too soon. Although my father was 88, he was fit and healthy until a skin cancer claimed him. Ann was 69 and Tricia was just 60. Cancer took them all.

So thinking about dying and living well has been much in my thoughts for a while. I didn’t realise quite how much until John said to me one night, quite crossly, “You always do this when someone dies!”

“Do what?” I asked, surprised.

“You go on about how we need to be doing more with our lives, as if we’re not doing anything when actually we are!” he said.

He had a point. Since we retired, our lives are slower, we have time to enjoy things we like, to plant and smell the roses and have coffee with friends, but neither of us sits around doing nothing, we are always occupied and going places.

But still, I think a lot about how to live better, how to make the most of my time, what’s really important. These things have different meanings for all of us, but lately I’ve been reflecting on what I learned from Dad, Ann and Tricia and how I might put their wisdom to best use in my own life.

Of course I learned many things from all three of them but there are particular things I think about now.

My father taught me the importance of a simple, honest life.

It’s how he lived his life. He was a farmer. He liked growing things. Even after he retired from sugar cane farming when he was 80, he tended his fruit trees and his garden and he loved mowing his vast lawns on his ride-on mower. He lived simply, worked hard, ate sparingly, looked after his family and contributed to his community.

When we were small, he was the chair of the school P&C and always turned up to help at school working bees, fetes and other occasions. He coached and refereed community basketball. He organised the indoor bowls club he and Mum played with for years. He and Mum organised local dances and for 25 years they taught high school students to dance. He was always on some community committee including the local Leukaemia Foundation branch and the Seniors club.

He didn’t hanker after more possessions or experiences or wider horizons. He was happy tilling his little patch of earth and keeping it and its inhabitants healthy and happy.

In his garden, which one of his grandsons now tends for Mum, are many different plants. One, a simple low-growing plant with bright yellow daisy-like flowers we call “Grandad’s daisies” because he was particularly fond of them.

During the six months before his passing, when he was unwell and we knew his time was near, John commented to me one day that it was sad that Dad had such a short time, only eight years, to relax and enjoy life after he retired.

I thought about that and said, “No. He lived his life the way he wanted. He liked farming and was his own boss for 60 years, he did what he wanted and he was happy, he always enjoyed life. He just enjoyed it differently after he retired.”

Ann taught me the importance of forgiveness and a good laugh.

Ann was involved in many deaf community organisations and gave a lot to her community for decades. We worked together within Deaf Australia, advocating for deaf people’s rights.

She was devoted to her family and often talked about them. A hard task master, family was the only acceptable reason for non-attendance at an event or failure to complete a task on time.

Advocacy can be adversarial, friends can behave like enemies and enemies can sometimes be our friend. Many people made our work difficult and sometimes people hurt us. Ann often said, to me and others, “Put it behind you, move on, think positive.”

Often after a hard day’s work, we’d sit on my back deck or at her kitchen table, with a glass of red wine, talk things over and put things into perspective. And we’d laugh, Ann had a wonderfully dry sense of humour.

Ann and her husband Barry retired a few months apart when they turned 65. They did some travelling, spent a lot of time with family, especially their two young grandsons, and continued to be involved in the deaf community.

Her passing was unexpected and shocked a great many people. She lived in Melbourne and after I retired from Deaf Australia we talked on Skype from time to time but I hadn’t talked with her for a while. This bothered me a lot. She knew I loved her, I had no regrets there, but it had been too long since I’d last talked with her. I thought a lot about that and how important it is to keep in contact with people we love. But I also knew that Ann would have said, “Life is busy. I know you think of me.” Forgiveness matters.

Tricia taught me the importance of being practical and using our time well.

For her this meant doing what we want rather than what others might want, and spending time with those most important to us. Of them all, Tricia was the one most prepared for her passing. When her cancer was diagnosed almost four years ago, she knew her chances of surviving were not good.

She retired from work. She figured she had enough money to live on for three to five years and she didn’t love her job so much that she wanted to spend possibly her last years doing it.

One day I asked her, “What will you do if you’re still here in five years?”

“I’ll have to get another job!” she said, laughing.

Tricia loved the freedom of being retired. She spent a lot of time in her garden. A few years before, she’d had the pool filled in and created a beautiful native garden. She did her research and was very knowledgeable about natives, especially grevilleas.

She did some sporadic travelling, to Bali and within Australia.

She had about two years of remission. When her cancer returned and she knew it was terminal, she set about putting her affairs in order. She did some things she wanted to do for people she loved. She spent as much time as she could with the people most important to her, especially her two children and her siblings. They were wonderful and made it possible for her to die at home as she wanted.

She spent some time alone too, reflecting. She didn’t live very differently to how she’d always lived, but she lived her last years exceptionally well, focussing on what meant most to her.

Living well means different things to us all. This is what I think about a lot. What does living well mean for me? What am I here to do; what have I not yet done that I must? If I knew I had only a short time left, how would I live my life? What would I do differently?

The answer I keep coming back to is simple. I wouldn’t change anything much. I’d do a bit more travel. I’d do a lot more writing. Spend more time with people I love. Tend my garden. Knit. Eat less. Be kind to people.

I like my life. I feel I’ve lived it well. Not everything has happened as I would have liked it to, not everything I wanted from life has been mine, there has been a lot of anguish and a lot of struggle. But it has been a good life, rich in people and experiences. I feel very fortunate.

Death and grief are things we don’t talk about much in our society. We should talk about them more. For over a year now I’ve been talking about them often with people around me, people who loved Dad and Ann and Tricia too.

We talk about how much we miss them. We reminisce about things we did with them. We talk about things happening in our lives and we ask and tell each other: “What would Dad do?” “Ann would say to smile and let it go.” “What would Tricia say?” We wonder where they might be now. We talk about what we believe about the afterlife or lack of it. We tell funny stories about things that happened with them and we laugh sometimes until we cry.

A very special thing that has come from Tricia’s passing is that I have gained a new friend. Jude and I have known each other a long time, but not well. For me, she was always Tricia’s friend. Likewise for her, I was always Tricia’s friend. Now, helping each other with our grief at losing her, we are becoming good friends and it’s like a wonderful gift from Tricia. Just last week, talking about our mutual much loved friend, Jude and I agreed that what we feel is a lot like feeling homesick.

All of us are grieving something or someone. Some don’t talk about it; instead their grief comes out in strange ways, behaviour that is perplexing for others around them.

But for those of us who do talk about it, for me anyway, there is something enriching about grief. It makes us think about what’s important, what we like about our lives and ourselves and what we want to change.

For me most of all it is about being grateful. Grateful for everything I have, and grateful that I had everything I’ve lost.

Nutmeg & Purls

27 Sunday Aug 2017

Posted by Karen Lloyd AM in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

crafts, crochet, Etsy, knitting, Miallo, sewing, sheds, sugar farms

IMG_0408

I’m loving life as a retired person. Now I have time to enjoy, among many other loves, making things. Knitting. Crochet. Sewing.

In the past three years I have made many things. Some as special gifts for special people. Some for me. And some just because I love making them. Some I have sold at craft fairs. And now I have set up a shop on Etsy, called Nutmeg & Purls.

Nutmeg & Purls has had quite a long and loving gestation.

My mother taught me to knit and sew from a very young age. I don’t remember when I actually started. Knitting and sewing are just things I have always done.

I also learned to sew at school. Miallo State School in Far North Queensland in the 1960s was a little two teacher school wedged between a rainforest-fringed creek and a sugar cane field.

When you’re little, the world is big, and we had a ‘down the hill’, a ‘woods’ and, over the fence and through the bush, the ‘Clay Bank’: a fresh water swimming hole with an enormous bank of clay to slide down, a swift current around it and calmer shallow water at the edges. It was a perfect world. It is all still there, my grand-nieces and -nephews go to school there, but it’s different now.

The school is much larger and to my adult eyes the hill is tiny, the woods just a small stand of tall trees and the Clay Bank sadly is over-run by crocodiles and unswimmable. But it’s still a magical school wedged between a rainforest-fringed creek and a sugar cane field.

My first teacher, Mrs Newman, taught me to sew by hand and then on a Singer treadle machine. At high school I learned sewing every year to grade 12 when I made my own white debutante gown.

I sewed a lot at home too under my mother’s watchful eye. Sometimes she rescued projects I abandoned. One particularly complex dress I threw into a corner of the sewing bench in frustration when I was about 18. Later I found her at the sewing machine finishing it for me.

Shane, an Aboriginal boy who lived next door and called my mother Mumma Lloyd his entire life, was playing on the floor beside her. He was then about three years old.

“I don’t know why you threw this in a corner, it’s a lovely dress,” Mum said.

“I couldn’t figure it out. I got frustrated,” I explained.

“Ah yes! Your daddy is like that,” she said sagely.

She asked me to put the dress on so she could adjust the fit.

“I don’t know why you have such big hips!” she complained.

“I can’t help it, my mummy is like that!” I said sweetly.

Shane looked up and laughed, making us laugh too.

Sometimes, with particularly thorny projects, we sought advice from Aunty Clare. She was a dressmaker and made the most beautiful things, including countless bespoke bridal gowns.

Aunty Clare had four children and her house was small so she worked at her kitchen table. Her house was always amazingly neat. I can’t imagine how she kept all her sewing paraphernalia under control.

One day as I watched her hand stitching, she began unpicking her work.

“Made a mistake,” she commented.

“No one will notice it,” I said.

“Maybe not. But I will know it’s there,” she said and went on unpicking.

Aunty Clare taught me to crochet when I was about fourteen. I absorbed her attitude to mistakes and to this day I can’t leave a mistake, I have to fix it because even if no one else notices it, I will know it’s there.

My mother didn’t learn to crochet until after I’d left home. Mum and I still share knitting and crochet patterns, and I have many vintage patterns she has given me. You can’t buy them anymore, except sometimes in antique shops, I have found some there. Mum still helps me out sometimes with particularly difficult knitting patterns and I help her out with crochet. She also does smocking but I have never learned this beautiful old craft. Sadly, not many people smock anymore. Lately I’ve been thinking of asking her to teach me.

I also have a love of sheds.

When I was growing up on our sugar farm, Dad had a huge open sided shed with a hard earth floor. It housed tractors and ploughs and all sorts of other farm machinery, tools and workbenches and all sorts of bits and pieces.

We loved the shed. We’d find hammers and nails and bits of wood to hammer them into. We’d find empty hessian bags and use them to build cubby houses. We’d sit in the tractor seats and become imaginary cane farmers and headland explorers. We found all sorts of things to play with in the shed. We’d sit on piled up bags of fertilizer and eat luscious oranges and mandarins picked from trees growing in the chook pen.

Thirty years ago Mum and Dad built a new house on a hill at the back of the farm but Dad still used the big shed until he sold the farm when he was 80. It slowly fell into disuse, becoming increasingly dilapidated until part of it fell down in a storm and it had to be demolished a few years ago. The space where it once stood is now empty and forlorn.

On the hill Dad’s much smaller shed is still there, a year after his passing. On the tool board in his distinctive writing is scrawled a command: “If you borrow it, return it!” People still borrow things from Dad’s shed and mostly they still return them.

I’ve always envied men their sheds. Then soon after I retired, a friend gave me a fabulous book about women’s sheds. It was a revelation! Lots of women have sheds! For writing. For gardening. For painting. For crafts. For whatever they want. I couldn’t believe it! Browsing through this beautiful book, my soul began to sing.

I had to have my own shed. Or a version of a shed. Our house block is awkward for sheds but our house is large enough for us not to need them. The shed John does have is only large enough for storing garden tools. Instead of a work shed, he has work areas in the house and the garage.

I have a sewing nook in our large study. And I have converted a part of the sleepout of our 1930s tin and timber Queenslander into my knitting and crochet ‘craft shed’. I have drawers full of yarns and patterns, jars filled with knitting needles and crochet hooks, and clear plastic boxes storing finished work. Inspiration is everywhere in my ‘craft shed’.

So a couple of years ago when I’d started accumulating finished work and needed to find an outlet for it, I decided to set up a shop on Etsy and, needing to come up with a name for my shop, I started thinking about something to do with craft sheds. I played with variations of that idea for months but everything seemed lame. Then I played with other ideas to do with stitches and witches. That didn’t work either. Finally I sat down and wrote a very long list of things I love and words associated with them. John liked the idea of a two-part name, Something & Something, and he added Nutmeg to the list. And one day it just all fell into place and I had a name: Nutmeg & Purls.

So Nutmeg & Purls is about beautiful things I love and that I hope you will love too.

I love purl, a knitting stitch both contrary and restful. And I love our cat, Nutmeg, a British shorthair. She keeps me company while I stitch. There’s a lovely photo of her in the shop.

We set up the Etsy shop in 2015, but only now have I put some stock in it. We need to take photos of everything, which is a process in itself, and when you’re retired, you’re so busy!

So far the shop has a collection of finished baby blankets. Soon I will add some baby clothes and beautiful vintage lacy women’s tops in soft cotton, in time for summer.

Everything in the Nutmeg & Purls store has been hand made with love and care. I hope you will enjoy browsing and returning from time to time to check for new stock. These things take time to make so stock numbers will always be quite small. If you decide to buy something, for yourself or as a unique gift for a special someone, I’m sure it will give many years of pleasure.

And it would be wonderful if browsing Nutmeg & Purls   inspires you in your own unique crafts journey.

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