Ms Philida Laterly likes to keep busy

She's looking for a Penny Red
To match her head, to match her head.
Instead she finds an Aussie Roo.
Sigh, what to do, what to do?

Things that go click in the night.

Our kitten was very busy overnight. She brought my knitting and wrapped it around the bed legs, then we found the cleaning cloths from the bathroom all around the living room. She is a busy girl. Now if only I could teach her to dust and clean the windows!

Knit one, Purr one, knit one, Purrrr one.

This afternoon, after finding the umpteenth dead insect on the living room floor, we have imposed a Cicada Tax. For each chirping creature she abandons, she has to iron a shirt or unload the dishwasher.

Redheads and heat

.......just don't mix. She looks how I feel today.
Doesn't help that I have tonsillitis and would like to remove my head as it hurts top, bottom and sides.
Wiltingly yours,

Channukah lights

Tonight is the first night of Channukah, but this year, I am dwelling on other lights; the kind that sit on a helmet and light the way in a mine.

Tomorrow 29 lights will sit on 29 tables to commemorate those lost at Pike River Mine. The nation will stop at 2pm and remember.

A strange kind of coming of age

Next month I will achieve that perfect number, 7x7 and become a 49er. However, this evening I have yet again faced the reality that I am a universe short of perfection. What an easy trap it is to fall into, the sense of self that tells you, “You can do it. Put in lots of hard work and everything will be great. It’s all about you and what you are capable of.” What codswallop, poppycock and hogwash that is! Except, how easy it is to believe.
Lest you think I’m first cousin to a sloth, I’m not. I’m not agin hard work - heavens, I was born of hardworking working class workers…..if you catch my drift. I had hard work drummed into me and modelled before me. I pulled up my bootstraps long before I had feet big enough to wear them. But the working gene in my DNA mutated to striving. It became a belief that debilitated, crippled and sapped life.
This evening, the Maker of the Universe (the one I fall so short of), taught me yet again that the world is all about Him; every last wondrous atom of it. Every bird song and moth, syllable and rhyme, every plan, path and purpose, every miraculous whiff of the ordinary and plain, gargantuan and minutae is Him.

What season is it and where am I?

I find living at the bottom of the planet, and being a native of the top of the globe, I am nostalgic for pine cones in December - I found these in a pile of trimmings of a spruce at the cemetry. The Norfolk Pine always looks like a Christmas tree waiting to happen, and the Hottentot fig flowering by the side of the beach reminds me of a South African winter.

I suppose that means I'm hopelessly confused.

Pike River Mine disaster

There is a tragic inevitability about living next to a mine, any kind of mine. There’s the old man in the corner of the room at Christmas who sips his drink tentatively, afraid to gulp too much beer and not enough air. He’s actually not that old, not old enough to retire, but his face clings to the inevitability of death and the unpredictability of breathing. He comments wryly that there’s more air in the beer than will ever enter his lungs. His lungs are shot.
Then there’s the mine closure – not economic they said, too much cheap coal from China to make it worth their while keeping open the doors; risking lives for the thin pickings clinging on the seams. The day they close it down, the kids don’t go to school, all except me, because my daddy didn’t work the mine, he worked in the ship yard close by.
Then there’s the shaft collapse, the wait at the gaping hole for the ground to give up its dead, a parody of a resurrection – giving the dead back to the living.
Then there is a day like today. Those who have clung to hope, in one brief moment have their hands opened so to fall through the crevasse of grief. No one can accompany them to that depth. It is their raw descent, alone.
We who stand and watch paralysed on the margin can only pray for hope to return.