The late afternoon sun streams into our bedroom and the fine muslin curtains are washed through with bright white light and at the edges of the light, the softest pink glow from the old coloured glass that fill in the sides of the huge sash windows, like the two big open eyes of the front of the homestead, as they have been for close on two centuries, such things they would’ve seen.
I am showered and dressed for bed in the late afternoon, my skin still pinched pink from the hot water, stood in long to soothe my aching muscles, the best kind of ache from a day spent in the garden. Under the bluest sky I’ve seen in months I worked the day through making vegetable garden beds in the most restorative sunshine, the kind your skin drinks in, making your mind firer faster, suddenly no longer the sense of stagnation crept in and carried around with you over of the prolonged wintry months, rather electricity catches from the tips of your fingers to the tips of your toes and you’ve energy to burn.
It has felt like spring all day and it was life giving. A potent blend of soaking warmth, glittering light and the fluttering by of the small brightly marked birds that herald in the shifting of the season. It had us all, even the trades finishing off the final touches to mum’s house, handing over this weekend, singing along to the painter’s blaring radio, an amusing mix of rock classics and country drawls, no one cared what it was, it was a tune and the air hung with the happiness of people who have spent months working outdoors in the freezing wet. Wednesday wandered between each person she could find and was greeted by all with energetic pats and back rubs which she took gladly, sending plumes of dust in the air, lit golden around her, from wherever she last lay. Even she seemed to wear a smile whenever she wasn’t fast asleep in the sunshine between the beds I was building.
Red robins, the brightest red robins we’ve ever seen, popped off the landscape wherever they were, they could not be missed, male and female in and out of sight all day, as if they are checking on our progress. I felt my heart flutter each time I saw them, a sure sign if ever there was one that winter’s long embrace was relenting. By the end of the day they flitted between the young fruit trees in the orchard, their red feathered breasts against naked scarlet branches of the peaches and nectarines. Other birds too with bright bellies, not New Holland Honeyeater’s or Pardalote’s, too quick to fly by for me to properly see but for the burst of deep lemon yellow beneath them as they darted over my head and into the Hawthorne hedgerow that still seems fast asleep.
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