the opposite of anxiety is mango

quick trip home

“When I go back to the places of the past, nothing is there anymore, as if I have made the whole thing up. It is as if life were just a dream placed in the window to cool, like a pie, then stolen.” —Lorrie Moore, If This Is Not My Home

Usually a condition is with you forever, a giant penguin that trails you around. My main condition is just homesickness, which can, at worst, feel catastrophic. Certainly pathological. Incredibly, though, it just disappears when I get home to Oz, like the scene in Heidi where Clara jumps out of her wheelchair up in the Alps and starts running around.

In February, Noodles and the kids and I fly from Albany to Australia for winter break. We’ve seen my brother and sister and parents celebrating Christmas in their paper crowns through our distant portal at the top of the planet and have hastily booked a trip, requesting they all reconvene so that we can do it again WITH US THIS TIME. It’s a 30-hour trip door to door, and the second we turn the corner in the hire car and see my dad in the driveway watering his frangipani bush, all the vertigo, the distance and abstraction and worry, evaporate. My dad is solid. The house isn’t the one I grew up in, but it’s stood up with the same National Geographic magazines and Balinese carvings that have always held the roof up.

Inside, my mum is sweaty from her morning walk along the beach, and there is a bowl loaded with dozens of limes. Look at the limes! Says my mum all breezy. There are a lot of chillis too. Look at the chilli bush! She says, and it’s an absolute mountain of a bush with hundreds of little red peppers all over it. What a joke! People who live in paradise will do this: Ugh, time to get out the broom and sweep the perfectly ripe avocadoes off the deck.

The best bit is the pineapple plant: it’s in a small pot by the shed, pushing a fist-sized flower out of its fan. Banana, the youngest grandkid, loves the pineapple plant. “Lello papappe,” he says, toddling around to check on it. “Bye papappe.” 

The trees are all blooming and there is a bush with white flowers that look like fried eggs flung there off a spatula. We walk down to the park where Noodles and I got married and find a koala wedged into the lowermost fork of a tree, snoozing. We swim on the other side of the peninsula in sparkling salt water.

In the past few months, I’ve been sending Noodles perimenopause memes and asking him dire questions like, “What if I’ll never be properly fit again, what if my bones are already dissolving?” The really wild thing is that after one night of sleep in Australian summer I am BACK, BABY. Noodles and I are running the track past the oyster farm, we’re swimming the bay, we’re walking everywhere and bowling a cricket ball to J for hours on end. I feel fantastic. My dad turns the limes into daiquiris. Hangovers don’t exist. What if it isn’t perimenopause but just American winter? Do I have the cure for you.

Banana likes to carry around a piece of fruit in his hand as though he’s gripping the world itself—a mango is ideal, but a lemon will do. J follows him around trying to give him big-kid hugs. S swells with pride when she hears him say her name: Sout.

The other cousins arrive, A (8yo) and F (6yo), their births timed to perfectly complement S and J, good job us. I see a “GIRLS RULE, NO BOYS ALLOWED” poster stuck to the wall by A and S’s cots. Later, I hear them having a perfect conversation:

A: Guess what, I saw my mum’s boobs

S: I saw my mum’s boobs!

A: hahaha

S: hahaha

A: hahahaaaa 

S: I caught my dad while he was changing and guess what I saw

A: his boobs!

S: no his PENIS!

A: hahahaha

S: hahahaha 

My sister and I book into a Pilates class, and when the instructor is asking her if we have injuries, my sister says, “Just, you know, babies,” circling her torso. I nod in my finger socks. When the instructor asks how long ago it was that we had the babies, my sister sheepishly says, “well, almost two years ago.” “Seven and eight!” I say, mortified.

Ah, but they are all good babes. We are all working full-time to cut up enough mangoes to feed them all. A and F have arrived in my brother and sister-in-law’s Tesla, which the kids named “Teslie.” 10/10.

The big news is that my dad, fulfilling a life goal, has also acquired* a Tesla (“Niki”), his reward for gutting it out through two decades with a falling-apart Ford (after I had a bingle with a box truck in 2016, the bonnet remained patched with gaffer tape for months). We have a Tesla cake and toast minor progress on keeping the world from burning. (*Mum, it’s your Tesla, too.)

After dinner, we sit around sharing our anxious Manley dreams while Noodles watches on in shock—he claims to see only a blank white screen while he sleeps. I disagree with the dream decoders; what if having psychotic dreams of death and endless falling keep your daytime life happy and easy? We have wild dreams, but look at us here eating Violet Crumbles together. Look at us splashing around on a blow-up surfboard the next day. Look at us!

the putative pie on a sill

Please take note I am insisting you watch Muster Dogs on Netflix

It’s a “competition” amongst five graziers to train their kelpie pup to muster livestock, but really just a chronicle of the bond between farmer and dog (as such, it really knee-caps the kind of subscription-only secret playbook being peddled by Big Parenting, as captured in this sharp piece by KJM. MAYBE WE ARE OVERTHINKING PARENTING DO YOU THINK?). The graziers have different levels of experience with dogs, but all understand basic conditioning and connection, and make it work for their personalities. They have to love the dogs, or the dogs can’t work. I crode. IT’S ON NETFLIX, OKAY?

Goodies

Past Lives: This is a lovely film about a Korean émigré, Nora/Na (Greta Lee) who reconnects with her childhood sweetheart, Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) in her 20s, when she’s a writer in Manhattan and he’s still in Seoul. There’s a stretch of the film where Nora is living on Seoul time, putting her psychic energy into existing and connecting to Hae Sung’s world, and it’s so accurate! The work of maintaining relationships in another place can be exhausting since you’re living two worlds in a single day. Being in one place is so easy, if there is anyone out there that applies to. Great film.

I’m afraid I’ve been wasting time on #KateGate. More useful, this Hilary Mantel piece from 2013, “Royal Bodies”:

Sue Townsend said of Diana that she was ‘a fatal non-reader’. She didn’t know the end of her own story. She enjoyed only the romances of Barbara Cartland. I’m far too snobbish to have read one, but I assume they are stories in which a wedding takes place and they all live happily ever after. Diana didn’t see the possible twists in the narrative. What does Kate read? It’s a question.

I love these

Catherine Lacey

dispatches:

I ran into an acquaintance; I didn’t recognize them at first, then I did, then I realized why there had been a delay. So even writers are doing it now?

Old but relevant: “A world without pain” by Ariel Levy