Dodo Au Go-Go

There's been a gap of some twenty months since I last wrote anything here. Basically, as you can see by my previous 2-3 posts, I lost my puppy-boy, Bodie. I grieved, cried, wrote down every single blessed memory of him I had, and cried some more. In-between, life, love and light gathered. Our much-longed-for Little One arrived. Bodie is our sky-angel, and Indi, his sister, is our earth-angel. We're a family of four. In my mind, we'll always be a family of five. Then, in quick succession: I took a new job, we made a giant move interstate and we moved from the four-season climate of the Blue Mountains in New South Wales (emphasis on the freezing-cold bit of the four seasons) to the tropical north. Brisbane, Queensland, where heat, humidity, frangipanis, poincianas and very mild winters reign. For the past year-and-a-bit, we've been building new roots - as you do when you start making the unfamiliar everyday familiar - so you can live in it with some comfort. One...

In the late afternoon of our first truly warm Saturday of spring (27 degrees - woohoo!), my stumpy-tailed cattle dog woofer, Indi-Girl, and I went for a little stroll at Hassan's Wall. Hassan's Wall is a lookout with magnificent views of the Hartley Vale area which undulates gently between the Blue Mountains and the country town of Lithgow, in New South Wales. Indi hadn't been there before, and she was absolutely bursting to smell ALL the new smells AT THE SAME TIME. So to calm her down a bit, we walked a couple of hundred metres down the driving track, away from all the lookout points, just to get the scented lay of the land for a bit. For good measure, we wandered down an overgrown side track that didn't go anywhere. I'm guessing it's an off-the-main-track parking spot for the likes of the NSW Parks and Wildlife, or the NSW Rural Fire Service folk. Anyway, the little saunter worked, and Indi settled into a more relaxed mode of grooving around. So we bac...

It is autumn here in the Blue Mountains in Australia. The world has been getting steadily colder for weeks, the sun has retreated in the sky, and leaves are falling to the ground in great numbers. It is both beautiful and melancholy, and it instills a form of sun-worship deep inside me that I don't think I will ever lose - even though I grew up as a child of the tropics. I don't like knowing there are still three bleak months of winter to come, so I focus on the small, visual beauties of autumn in the here and now . Back in high school, I remember we were given an English Lit assignment of writing a poem about autumn. We never did enough of the creative writing, which was my favourite thing (although I used to anticipate it so much, the joy in the actual writing and end result never lived up to expectation). For the autumn poem, I can't remember what I wrote (thank goodness!) except that I tried to make it rhyme. I tried to use all the right imagery borrowed from the...

As I write this in April 2014, we are barreling through autumn here in the Blue Mountains in Australia. It actually feels as though autumn has been eagerly hanging around, trying to stake a claim on our corner of the world since mid-February. I find myself already pining for what feels like a very brief summer. And I harken back to one of the stand-out days of the summer: the day we did the Valley of the Waters bushwalk.