From the long windows in the living room of the homestead, warmed by the fire, I watch the painters turn the cream boards of mum’s house bright white in the brisk air and dropping sun of late winters afternoon. The light turns the tops of the River Red Gums behind it amber, they radiate like stage lights and with it’s new coat, the house suddenly comes alive on the landscape. Just like that, after almost two years of imagining this moment, it is finally here. The floors arrive tomorrow and it is suddenly made a home and normal life can resume here at long last.
A lone Eastern Grey springs into view, and pulls my attention to him as he leaps the low fence near the creek with no hesitation or effort at all. They are mesmerising and when you see them it stops you immediately and without even thinking too but in seconds the buck has disappeared into the gums that line the brimming bank. I wonder often how they get across it? In a single jump? It seems far too wide, even for them. Or do they find the shallow sections where the sand collected during the floods of this time last year along the edges, altering the beaches we discovered when we first came here in the summer before, tapering the waters so it can be crossed?
Tomorrow he will return, the larger mob too, arriving silently in the night, before watching the homestead wake on the rise above them. Like ghosts in the fog of morning, we will see them and then suddenly, they will have gone again, as if only figments of our imagination. I notice the painters too have spotted our visitor, bounding by them as he did. They’re excited by the sight. A smile rises to my face. How lucky we are that this is what we see every day?
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