Early morning at "Riverbend". I've just come back from "Melbourne" where I sat in the early-morning sun lost in thoughts but not lost because, perhaps for the first time in my life, I experienced the feeling of belonging somewhere.
These days I no longer venture far from "Riverbend". People ask me, "But what do you do all day?" Here's a quick and incomplete summary:
The kookaburras' mad cackling wakes me in the morning. I roll out of bed and go to the kitchen to switch on the kettle. I then sit in the sun and enjoy my first cup of tea of the day, after which I go back inside to get a banana or apple to feed to the possum in his possum penthouse.
By this time scores of wild ducks have assembled by the horseshed demanding their breakfast of several scoops of "Lucky Layer" pellets. The almost-tame kookaburra has been watching me constantly and it's now his turn to be fed. All that effort calls for a second cup of tea!
Second cup of tea in hand, I wander down to "Melbourne" where I can look far downriver and possibly spot some early-morning fishermen. The place is full of life. I surprise three dilatory rabbits breakfasting in the long grass. A wallaby watches me from a safe distance. A butterfly procession is in full swing. I sit down on my homebuilt green bench and, sipping my cup, ponder: 'Does a butterfly know that it used to be a caterpillar and does a caterpillar know when it goes to sleep that it will be a butterfly when it wakes up?' Life flows. Life ebbs. Knowledge has not solved its mystery. We have learned how to blow up the world and walk on the moon, but we still do not know why we are here.
If it is a weekday, I go back inside at around 10 o'clock to switch on the computer to watch the gyrations of the stock-market. As my old mate Noel Butler used to say when I questioned him once why he bought and sold some of those "penny-dreadful" shares, "What else is there?" Some days the market is good to me, on others it isn't, and on some it turns downright ugly but, as Noel put it so succinctly, what else IS there? In between watching stock quotations and listening to the news on the radio, I answer some emails and walk up to the gate to await the mail. And so, almost without realising it, lunchtime has come around.
"Happy Hour" is when I take my afternoon nap on the very old but oh-so-very-comfortable sofa on the veranda. Waking up refreshed, I pick up a book and read for a while, sitting in the sun. Again, almost without noticing it, dinner rolls around, after which it is only a couple of hours before I head off to bed to listen to Philip Adams' "Late Night Live" at 10 past 10 on ABC Radio. And that's about it! Multiply this by 365 and you have a fair summary of the year. May there be many more years like it!
