The Garden at Moorfield Journal: 31
Sunshine On My Shoulders....... 26.08.2023
A new rhythm runs through life, a stronger pulse and everything wakes to it, we are less than a week from spring but she has snuck into many of winter’s last days and a waning winter puts up no fight. I feel electrified, we all do, how different our last spring began, so wet, so so wet and our first glimpse into the future for our new home and garden then, and mum’s home on it. A deferred future, a deferred dream, on hold until building could begin. It drew out, long and langushing, it stretched us uncomfortably thin and the garden I would’ve normally turned to, to find some peace of mind and reenergise, was as overwhelming as everything else. Doubt prodded at my side.
I had been so sure this was the right move, the right home, my instincts, well honed from a tumultuous early life, tested and to be trusted, had sparked at this new vision for our life, and I felt shockwaves of knowing beat through me for this home when I first saw her and the land on which she had been the first home built in a town newly raised, on the country of the Dja Dja Wurrung. I had been so sure, she was the one to take us in, she had been waiting, I had felt it, an unbreakable pull to a life here I could see clear as day, a place lying between two towns whose cemetery’s kept the bones of my ancestors from a side of the family I had never known but from stories had felt so intrinsically connected to. There had been so much magic to the moment she became known to us, so much serendipity, had I invented it all? The hope so potent it had clouded my judgment? Surely I could not have been wrong, not when it felt so fated and this wrong that it kept me awake so many nights?
We live in Gold Country, fabled land in the folklore of the cultures that came here, atop the largest seam of buried fortune known to the world and an intricate network of dug and drained river systems now dry man-sized canyons ripping their way through the earth, through the surrounding scrub, for a century or more. The very buried treasure that laid to waste all who had called this place home before us and had brought my family, and so many more like them, the maternal and paternal branches of my late father’s lineage, across the sea, leaving behind their long and far reaching ancestral roots in Scotland, Wales and England, in search of it, and the opportunity, born wherever it was found, to carve out a new living searching for that trace of colour, or the money to be made from the souls who did.
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