The Woman on the Mountain by Sharyn Munro

Author:Sharyn Munro
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction/General
ISBN: 9781921497605
Publisher: Exisle Publishing Pty Ltd
Published: 2009-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

WHILE THE WOMAN’S AWAY...

In 2005 I went away again, but only for a month.

It was early September, when the wisteria and the ornamental grape on the western verandah were still brown sticks, their leaf buds small blind nubs, barely a hint of green showing. Here in the mountains the seasons seem to become evident about six weeks after they do in the valleys.

I am rarely away for more than a few days, but this time I didn’t return until mid October. Being so far from main roads anyway, every trip is a long one for me, and as petrol is so expensive, I try to combine them. Since I wanted to attend Watermark, a week-long nature writers’ conference on the north coast, I found a few interesting owner-built houses up that way as article subjects for the magazine and then I went a bit further to visit family. Hence the month.

A month is too long to be away from my wildlife refuge. Too long for me and too long for the wildlife.

For a start I get too used to the company of creatures who answer with words when I talk to them, and to being able to press a button, flick a switch or turn a knob to fulfil all my needs. I welcome these comforts for a while, and then all that hard-edged man-made environment starts to get me down, as does the awareness that its inhabitants, be they dogs, cats or people, are all man-made too in a sense. I begin to miss the softer, wilder, natural world, and to hanker after my solitary hermitage back in the bush.

As for the wildlife, well, being an opportunistic lot—I suppose I should say ‘adaptable’—they get too used to my territory being unmarked. They start to move in.

When I got home from my month away, before I even opened the yard gate I could see that spring had arrived with great flamboyancy The ornamental grapevine and the wisteria had exploded into such vigorous greenery that they had twined together to completely barricade the verandah, and I had to push my way through at the top of the steps. The Crépuscule climbing rose on the eastern side had also gone into overdrive, draping the verandah posts and rafters with swags and tails of raggedy apricot blossoms.

Naturally, confronted with all this profuse growth, before I unpacked the car I just had to walk around the garden to see what other delights spring had brought. The air was full of perfume—the honeyed white cloud of the May bush, the exotic intensity of the jasmine smothering a stump nearby, the innocence of the old-fashioned pink sweetpeas in front of the verandah, and the faint almond scent of the Banksia Rose that has turned my clothesline post into a fountain of foaming white. But the Banksia Rose didn’t look right. The lower parts of its drooping stems were all bare.

So, I realised, looking about in dismay, were those of all my newly leafed and very young European trees—and the rose bushes were totally denuded.

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