The Seventh Summer
If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal—that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself.
Henry David Thoreau
I woke today to the sound of a chainsaw. A neighbour is felling the row of gum trees on his fence line. There may be ten or twenty eucalypts in the row. I can hear the chainsaw grinding and slicing and through the kitchen window see the bucketed arm of a yellow bulldozer pushing over a tree, and then another. It snaps and crashes to the ground and the sound is reverberating across the paddock. I guess he wants the wood but the act seems wanton to me and I mourn for the trees. I turn up the volume on the radio and switch on the woodheater fan to drown out the noise.
Sitting at a desk all day when life is going on outside isn’t easy. The seasons are turning, the jobs are too, and I wonder if those things are having an effect on me, like Marilyn and Monroe who sense the day is ending, or the swallows when they leave. Life moves in its own way without a plan. It’s Audrey’s eightieth summer this year. Leigh is getting married. Annie now shares her farm with Jen. Garagistes, Luke’s new restaurant, opened to rave reviews in the national press, while Rodney’s Agrarian Kitchen is more successful than he and his wife Severine had ever imagined. At eighty, Les packed up his potter’s studio and moved to New South Wales but I can always find his jewels on Lulworth Beach and see his cupped hands holding them. The raspberry plants Libby gave me when they were just sticks are now laden with berries ripe for picking. Richard sold his vineyard and is holidaying this year in Peru. Rose’s latest doorstep gift was a bucket of garden macadamia nuts. Lizzie is finally coming to visit from London. Viv still uses her hil-barn hessian bag for carrying her laptop in sunny Gran Canaria where she found her home. Glen has had a baby girl. And Marcelle and I have just found each other on Facebook: ‘Hil darling, are you EVER coming to London? If not, why not?’
I want to see her—to tell her that, yes, I have loved again— but it’s not a love that is easy to leave. I am connected to the day turning, to the cycle of living, of growing and reaping and, in that union, feel no need to escape. Although I live in the shadow of a church and share its landscape, I have never felt the urge to enter it. My sense of direction is here and (hopefully this makes sense to you) from here it is infinite. In staying in one place I have opened up my world to a flood of probabilities. Life no longer feels starved but abundant. The lemon smile, the fence line, a bend in the road, the arched eyebrow of my mountain and wide veranda view that frames my existence in this stretched valley beneath an ever-changing sky where life ripens and decays . . . this is my eternal, my necessaries in life, and the story of seven summers.
There’s an email from Margaret, a loyal hilbarner: ‘The girls were overjoyed to recognise the red van driving up the driveway: Mum! I think it’s hilbarn! We didn’t realise how much we’ve missed you, till then. We’ve had an abundant summer veggie garden this year, which now is pretty well dormant, so bring on hilbarn!’
I love how hilbarn is us—Hil and Barn—yet also exists outside of us and that our small business is still growing without being pushed. We do what we do because of where we live and how we want to be together. It’s as simple a life recipe as that.
Barn is in his paddock across the road. He looks like the Man from Snowy River except he’s riding a mower instead of a horse. He’s seen his lady writer in the Nuns’ House window, stands up in his seat and tips his hat towards me. We make each other feel warm like sunshine and we are happy living however many summers we may have.
Not that Barn and I do days, birthdays, anniversaries, or even New Year’s Day. In how we are, every day seems to have a similar weight. It’s how I imagine Jack and Kerouac’s days to be, as they amble their slow-motion way up the paddock along the same well-trodden alpaca track to eat the finely sliced apple from my fingertips. There’s a sense that there are no Sundays in their world, yet that every day might be a Sunday. Summer and winter, day and night, sun up and moon down.
I’d heard Peter Cundall talking on the radio about the Lalla apple and how he wasn’t sure if you could still get them or even if they were still around. They used to be exported to Europe in great quantities before the Common Market came in but you don’t see them on sale in any of the orchards or grocers in town, and few of the old Lalla orchards remain. I phoned Alvaro, who thought their friend Chris Olsen might know; he owned quite a bit of land in Lalla. Chris thought if they were anywhere it would be on a couple of old apple trees on top of the hill in an old orchard just opposite the Pear Walk.
‘You’re welcome to have a look,’ he said. ‘Feel free to pick some pears while you’re there. The trees are at the top of the hill, next to two big old oak trees.’
I stopped the car where Chris had directed, and climbed over the gate into a paddock fenced by an avenue of old pear trees bearing golden teardrops of ripe pears. I started to fill a basket but the sun was dipping behind the softly draped hills and I decided to press on up the slope. The cow paddock opened up into a north-facing field with views of Lalla and beyond. A creek ran through the middle and old huts were calling me in to fossick, but I’d spotted the oak trees ahead on the brow of the hill. As I caught my breath at the top I noticed the trees were gnarled and ancient with views in every direction over a piece of land turning back to nature. There were no apples, the season was over, and the possums had probably done all the picking to be had. I would have to be patient and wait for next year to taste the Lalla apple in Lalla.
Lalla apple fruit crate label. (Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office)