Author: Elisabeth

The sorrows of goodbye

I drove my youngest daughter to the airport on Tuesday
night.  She’ll be away for six
months.  
It’s not quite the empty nest
syndrome, but when I came home earlier in the afternoon after two days at the
beach with my husband and grandsons, a terrible pall descended and I recognised
the nagging sadness of farewell. 
My daughter will return and the six months of her time away
will pass soon enough, but things will never be the same again. 
A trip like this is bound to be life changing, especially for
my daughter, who is going to expand her mind, despite her ambivalence about
leaving.  
On the trip in the car on the way home after we had watched
her go through the opening into the departures zone, where people queue for
ages to get through customs and to their eventual flight, I told my daughter’s
boyfriend about the reasons for my desire to avoid travel except when
necessary. 
For him, my daughter’s leaving is saddest of all, as they’ve
not been long together.  She’s been planning
this university semester overseas for more than a year, well before they
recognised their connection. 
In any case, as we walked back to the car after our tearful
farewells, I told my daughter’s boyfriend how it was when I was a child when
relatives visited from Holland, or in the case of one of my uncles and his
immediate family, from Indonesia. 
The joy at the airport, the pleasure of my extended family in
Melbourne coming to greet relatives from overseas and my mother’s delight were
all palpable. 

But at the other end, when it came to say goodbye, my
mother’s grief swamped me as she waved to her father, on that last time she ever
saw him after he had walked through those doors.  
My grandfather was already in his late seventies and soon after his return to Holland
he developed blindness and later died at the age of eighty-six years.
 My mother was not able
to be with either of her parents when they died.  And both died not long
after respective trips to Australia.  The trips must have taken it out of
them, those long journeys by sea and later by air.
I can still feel my mother’s pleasure against her grief the
moment I go through those electronic doors at any airport.  
The crisp air-conditioned comfort inside, the
reams of people lugging suitcases across the walkways up and down escalators,
the people who mill around signboards to read the names of destinations, the
flight numbers and airline logos splattered in neat lines that keep rolling
over. 
There’s a sign to let you know that certain flights are
closed and if one was your flight you’re too late to take it now. 
And one to
tell you your loved one’s plane has landed and you rush down the
escalator to the arrivals section underground where all arrivals
disembark.  And wait and wait and wait
until your loved one has cleared customs. 
People hang over the iron bar with you and wait for the doors
to open to reveal their loved ones who are coming for the first time or
returning from a trip.
There’s a buzz in arrivals with the occasional whoop of joy
when some new longed for person goes through the double doors and looks to
right and to left along the corridor that leads out in either direction. 
They look to find someone they know, someone who’s expecting
them and when they lock eyes on that someone there’s the mutual grin of satisfaction,
the squeals of joy, the brisk movements that signify they’re together at last.
All this joy at arrivals, but on the next floor above we see
the sorrow of goodbyes where couples hug one another, families like ours give
one last squeeze to a departing daughter who will be back soon enough, but the
ghosts of past relatives who once went through the departure doors –
my aunts, uncles, cousins and my grandparents – hover on the sidelines. 
These relatives could not return.  Their lives were lived elsewhere, but for a
while during visits, their lives joined ours and we could be together in the
flesh.  But in that first hello, as Gillian Bouras writes, we heard
the echo of their goodbyes. 
We’ll skype and text and use Facebook I tell my daughter and
she tells me the same, but it’s not the same. 
The virtual world is a poor substitute for the real one,
where people like me who are not big on touching cannot reach out to touch, to
stroke a cheek, to hold a hand, to pat a back.  The deprivation seems
unbearable even as when we are together in person I might hold my distance. Now the
actual distance divides more acutely than any skype screen can allow.
My grandsons are young. 
They will wonder in a few days where their aunt is, but for now,
although we have told them she’s gone away for a few months, they cannot know
what her absence means. 
They will recognise it only in a slowly dawning sense of
loss. 

Weevils, pudding dolls and the vinegar mother.

Yesterday, I cleaned out the panty and half-filled a wheelie bin with foods past
their used by date, including the occasional packet of flour, sesame seeds or polenta infected
by weevils, and two pots of honey that had gone to sugar.  
It snuck up on me as jobs
like this do.  
My husband had not been able to find the pot of salted capers he bought several months ago and wanted them last night to
liven up his salad.  
He searched high and low and accused me or
unknown others of throwing out his stuff. 
Salted capers do not go off, he said. They do not exceed their use by date. It was just wanton throwing out of his most precious stuff.  
My husband’s mother gave away his photograph
album to some neighbour’s kid when he went away for a few months in his
teens.  He has never quite forgiven her
for this, among other things. 
And so I started on the pantry and found the capers third row down against the back wall. 
We designed our pantry to fit into a
corner of the kitchen with deep shelves that form a triangle at its innermost
walls.  
It was a mistake.  These places are hard to
reach.  Things build up there and
die.  They go past their use-buy dates,
they multiply. 
In the clean up, I found four varieties of
tomato and pizza sauces, and three different types of jars of vegemite.  We had four of honey, two of which I threw
out, and at least five already opened packs of flour, of brown sugar and bread
crumbs. 
The worst offender was salt.  
My husband collects salt: Cyprian salt, pink rock salt from the Himalayas, kosher salt, ordinary Saxa salt, fine granulated salt,
cooking salt for the salt pig on the bench, and black salt from Greece.
Alongside the salt, he collects peppercorns of every colour.  No need to throw out any of these.  They do not perish, but they take up space.  
The pasta packets, many opened, all varieties from tagliatelle
to spiralli and rigatoni are my responsibility.  Not to
speak of the rice varieties and the noodles, mostly instant, Maggi and the
tastier Japanese stuff.  
You name it we
have it. 

I was at a conference once where someone used the pantry as a metaphor, an excellent metaphor I thought at the
time. 
This woman talked of the way we allow everyday things to come to the front
and forget about the stuff that lies behind, until we do a cull and are surprised
by all the now useless stuff we have collected.  
These past accumulations need periodically to be examined and, if necessary, removed
in order to make room for the new. 
Which brings me to pudding dolls.
Last Sunday we celebrated Christmas
with my husband’s family at one of his sister’s place in Healesville.  It’s a traditional affair, with turkey and
ham, but the best of all is my other sister-in-law’s plum
pudding.
She makes it gluten free, on account of her coeliac disease, which does not matter one wit for those of us who can
tolerate gluten, because my sister-in-law is a great cook and the recipe is tried and true over
thirty years of practice. 
Years ago my sister in law came across some
pudding dolls in an opportunity shop.  
These days she sprinkles both pudding dolls and silver
coins throughout her pudding and every year we joke about who will be having
babies in the year to come. 
It’s pure luck as to whether any of us finds a tiny
piece of porcelain shaped something like a Kewpie doll but not half so
cute.  
In fact they’re ghoulish, especially one of the tiny ones, which my brother in law reckons was born
prematurely. 
We make a fuss when one of the
young eligible ones, male or female, finds a baby in their pudding.  It’s a sign of hope for the future.  Hope in the next generation when the rest of us can only encourage new life from the sidelines. 
And finally, I
thought I saw a ghost in the vinegar bottle last night but it turned out to be a ‘vinegar
mother’.  
My husband tells me the vinegar mother is akin to
a starter for yeast or sour dough bread, rather like
 the bacillus that gets yoghurt going in milk.  It creates each new batch of
vinegar afresh.
  
And so we reproduce, weevils and babies and vinegar.  And from time to time, we cull.