floral Friday

Hello friends,

How are you feeling? How’s your week been?

Guess what? I’m writing this from a hotel room. Yep, I’m sitting up on a massive white bed, up against a huge pile of pillows and I’m all alone.

Each year my parents celebrate their wedding anniversary by taking their daughters, us, away to a seaside town an hour away from our home for a few days. No partners, no kids, no pets allowed.

It’s such a beautiful indulgence. We eat, we go for long walks, we talk, we workshop each others issues, we tell funny stories about when we were little, we get our nails done, some of us work, one of us knits, we text each other from our separate rooms constantly, and we celebrate our parents’ love for each other and for our family. We all lead pretty busy lives so it’s incredibly precious to have this uninterrupted time for each other and for ourselves.

(photo of feverfew flowers)

Last Monday evening and Tuesday morning, before I left to come away, I ran around the garden taking photos because I knew that I’d be away on blogging day and would need some pictures for the post. I tried to ignore most of the big showy flowers this week and focus mostly on the smaller, more subtle ones.

(pea flowers)

Of course while I’m away luckily living life at a slower pace for a few days, time marches on back home. Pepper finished school for the year on Wednesday and Bren just sent me a picture of her lying on a blanket in the garden reading a book with Poppy the cat asleep next to her.

At 7am on Thursday Jarrah received the results from her final two years of school and is delighted to have received a score that means she can study any psychology course in the state.

Indi has finished uni for the year and is spending her time nannying babies and waitressing.

And Bren is keeping everyone fed, taking them where they need to go, solving their problems and looking after the farm.

I miss him.

(pea flowers)

I just love Billy Buttons, I think they’re possibly the cutest flower in the patch. A few years ago I was chatting with a friend of mine, the local florist at the time, about how we intended to add more flowers to our farm, and she suggested we grow them and then gave me a packet of seeds to start me off. I remember I went home that day and scattered some in some seed raising mix and they’ve been popping up ever since.

(billy buttons)

We thought we’d give our girls’ teachers big bunches of home grown flowers this year to say thank you for teaching, for caring, and for generally being incredible over the past few particularly difficult Covid years. But when it came to picking them, everything looked a bit worse for wear after some big storms, so we gave them hand made ceramic mugs and jars of beautiful locally made tea instead.

(proteas)

How sweet are these chamomile flowers. There’s something so gorgeous about flowers that close up to go to sleep at night. I especially love that their petals are folded up downwards rather than upwards covering their centres like other flowers often do.

(chamomile flowers)

I’m still knitting away at my Cloudberry Tee. I am a serial overpacker and with the amount of yarn I brought with me just in case I could have knitted another whole garment or two, but I’ve probably knitted less than 25grams. Oh well, at least this top when it’s finished will have lots of beautiful memories knitted into its stitches.

The book report!

I have a rough rule that I’ll read a book up to page 60 and by then I have to decide if I’m going to continue or not. Generally I don’t even think of the rule when I’m reading, but occasionally when I’m struggling it’s good to know that if I reach page 60 and I’m not getting anything out of it, then at least I’ve given it a good go.

Weirdly, Daisy Buchanan’s Insatiable was so quick and easy to get through that I read 106 pages before I realised that I wasn’t liking it at all. The hope that the back story was going to be explored and possibly resolved kept me going for a while, but in the early hours of Wednesday morning I put it down and never picked it up again.

(I just wrote a whole paragraph going through everything I didn’t like about the book, but then my dad told me he thinks that authors work hard in such a tough industry, so there’s just no place for the criticism. I’ll leave it at that.)

Instead I picked up Charlotte McConaghy’s The Last Migration which I bought at an op shop in Melbourne last weekend with Indi and Pepper. I haven’t read enough of it yet to really understand what’s going on but I can say that I sighed with relief after I read the first few pages. I can already tell this is my type of book.

In the days before I came away Bren and I started having a conversation about where we live and how we live and what we do here. Wondering if we live this farming lifestyle because we love it and couldn’t live any other way, or because this is how we’ve lived for the past 20 years and so we still do. It’s not the first time we’ve found ourselves having this conversation, but this time it feels more meaningful and intense, and this time it doesn’t feel like it’s going away. Maybe this is our mid-life crisis.

It’s always so hard to analyse and dissect your way of life from deep inside it. To try to separate the emotional from the practical, the comfortable from the overwhelmingly difficult, the heart from the head.

It’s really challenging me. I believe wholeheartedly in the way we live, but it’s also starting to feel like it’s too much for us. There aren’t enough hours in the day for the two of us to maintain our farm to the standard we’d like to, to be present and attentive with our kids and families, to be part of our community and to engage in our creative pursuits. But on the other hand - all the options on the other hand feel enormous and overwhelming.

While doing the dishes the morning I left to come here I was complaining about how difficult this conversation and the possible solutions were starting to feel for me, how huge, and tricky. Bren, ever the reasonable one, walked to the bookshelf and pulled my Vantastic book down and read a passage out to me.

In our family, plans brew over time. The seed of an idea can sit in the background of our lives for months, occasionally thought about, but mostly biding its time until the idea has grown so big there is no ignoring it.

At the moment I can’t work out if we’re in the background phase or the no-ignoring-it phase, but as he reminded me later in that conversation, the two of us do have a history of doing big things and I shouldn’t be afraid to ask the hard questions and to consider big changes. I’m definitely trying. I’m definitely trying to be open minded anyway.

(radish flower)

And that brings me to here. 25 minutes until I have to check out of this room, walk down the beach for one last drink together and then drive home.

I hope you have a lovely weekend ahead of you.

I hope you find the answers to some of your questions. Or at least try to enjoy the process of discovering what you unearth when you ask them.

See you next week.

Lots of love, Kate x