Blessings

I walk my familiar route, remember it’s the first time since _ and a wash of sadness flows over me.

But, I tell myself, this is the time when your legs are striding out with the energy of beaches, and the sun on your bare arms is a joy despite the heat.

The networks of needle-leaves of the big old, rough-barked corkwoods are dark green and firm despite weeks of searing sunshine, will shelter finches and pigeons this and many other nights.

Witchetty bushes fan out from stoney ground like it’s nothing to keep doing this for months without rain.

The mulga trees, my favourites, stand in graceful crescents, spreading their fine branches and leaves, saying this is just another summer in a hundred or more.

The young ironwoods have bunches of leaves around their bases, are still on the slow path to recovery from that fire six years ago.

The buffel grass clumps are grey and look dead, but that’s a blessing with this weed.

The pale brown soil, sprinkled with dry lichens and tiny, brittle grass stems, keeps its hundreds of thousands of seeds, waiting carefully for the right rain.

I walk to the stone circle, my touchstone. There is another car track across it, faint but a couple of fist-sized stones have been displaced.

The circle is slowly disappearing. Maybe someone will come and fix it up, but I suspect not.

As I walk back, I watch the clouds, always a novelty here. There are lines of fluffy ones, some of them grey enough to look semi-serious.

They’re joining up to make a wall in the west. The sun only looks through it occasionally.

So this is the time when the sun is not in my face but lines of sunlight stream down in front of the clouds, not doing anything dramatic, but there nonetheless.