Fremantlebiz - Paul's Letter from Australia

It's a rainy day in spring

It's been raining for most of the night here, and still is. The forecast is for much of the same until the weekend.

In the half light of dawn outside I can see grey sky and drizzle, and the wind is blowing gently through our custard apple tree. It's never produced a custard apple yet, but we live in hope.

Another fruit tree which has taken it's time has been our West Indian lime. It's been moved a couple of times as we've done various landscaping projects and has suffered for the experience. However, this year it's come good. When my wife and I were cleaning up in our back garden a couple of days ago we noticed it was really looking healthy, and hanging amongst the foliage was a single lime. It's the nicest lime I've seen. Just the right size and a fabulous green. It's as close to perfection as one could hope. Now all we need is a warm day and the right sort of drink to try it with. The lime tree has quite a bit of blossom at the moment, so more fruit are expected next year.

Our gardens become winterised between autumn and spring, which means that all the weeds try their best to take over. Wild oats, paspalum, stinkwort and a few others all find their niche in the paving bricks and have to be removed by hand. We don't use herbicides. Wealthy people might have gardeners, but we have to do it ourselves by hand. Our kids are very good at helping us with this chore - not. They suddenly remember that they have homework or something more important to do, like watch TV.

Last night when it was raining I went out the front to check the garage door was locked. We have a small frog pond and have sighted three adult frogs so far this spring. Last night they were in their element - the rain was just what they wanted to go hippity hopping away from the pond. I almost trod on one accidentally. Two of our adult kids were out with their cars so we phoned them to be on the watch for froggies when they came home.

There was another animal incident yesterday. The soundtrack CD for Titanic had arrived in the mail. I had won it for $2.70 on eBay last week. When we opened the mail we saw that the original price tag for $29.95 was still on the case. We'd definitely won a bargain. I put it on our micro hi-fi player in the lounge room and gave it a whirl. About ten minutes later while I was out of the lounge there was an almighty crash and the Titanic music stopped as suddenly as if it had run into an iceberg.

Our large and slightly used tabby cat Mad Max must have decided the ship was sinking and had leapt with his almost five kilos for somewhere higher, like on to the top of the hi-fi unit. A five kilo scrambling cat was just enough to pull the entire thing crashing to the ground. The lid had flipped open and our newly acquired bargain CD had catapulted out and rolled to the other side of the room. Fortunately it wasn't damaged. Neither was clumsy Max. But we could tell he felt guilty. He'd gone to the naughty corner for a sulk.

I'll say this much for the Philips micro hi-fi unit. It must have been robustly constructed because there was absolutely no damage, and after it was put back from whence it came and the speaker wires reconnected, it played away happily as if nothing had happened.

A couple of months ago a bloke up the road came and asked us if he could pick some of our olives. Yesterday he brought us a jar full of his preserving efforts. They had been done in salt, then washed and stored in olive oil. I tried a couple. Very nice. We'll have them on the same day we try the lime.

While on the subject of preserves, someone else brought us a jar of home made kumquat marmalade on the weekend. That was very nice too. I just had some on toast. We've currently got a lot of ripe kumquats on our own tree. Maybe I should make some jam?

We have plenty of oranges and lemons on our trees too. I'm going to preserve some lemons in salt, Moroccan style. They can be very tasty additions to Arab and Turkish recipes.

© MMVII Paul R. Weaver.

About the writer

Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write a couple of million words.

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