Author: Elisabeth

This is my last morning at home, my last full morning before a full day before I travel off overseas.

Trips to the airport always fill me with a peculiar sense of excitement and nostalgia. The air is electric with the buzz of hellos and goodbyes. At the exit gate even more so because here there are only good-byes. Every time one of my children, or in some instances these days my husband, pass through those silver teeth-like snapping doors I am left with the same sad sense of loss. We who are left behind move off back to our cars, back to our homes, back to our ordinary lives while those who have passed through to the other side stand in queues, hand over their passports for examination and finally board planes for far away destinations.

My childhood was marked by visits to airports, at least once a year when some beloved relatives would come, from many places in Europe, from Papua New Guinea and Indonesia and then eventually go after a short visit. Every time they left, we hugged and my mother cried. I sensed her sadness at another goodbye. My childhood was marked by the sadness of my mother’s longing for her childhood home, such that in my mind I turned her home into a wonderland while our home here felt like dross.

I will be going away as of tomorrow for two weeks and as ever I am fearful of the plane dropping from the sky, of the authorities holding me in quarantine for seven days because I or someone else on my plane is seen to be suffering the effects of the dreaded swine flu. I am fearful of getting sick. Last year when we went to Byron Bay I became sick. I was sick before we even left. I’d lost my voice and my voicelessness became a virus and I felt miserable and fearful for a couple of days.

I am not a good patient when it comes to physical illness. My immune system stands me in good stead, but when it lets me down as it inevitably does from time to time, I imagine the worst. I must be dying. I have cancer of the lip I imagine because there is some dry skin that occasionally gets red. Skin cancer I imagine.

I do not think of myself as a hypochondriac but there are times when it seems a distinct possibility. Talk to anyone who is sick, particularly anyone over the age of sixty and their health becomes an absorbing and abiding concern. My mother in hospital these last two weeks after knee surgery is nearly ninety. Every time I arrived to visit, she offered an account of her bowels, whether too loose or constipated, an account of her knee, how much more she could lift it, her walking and on top of this she liked to outline the ailments of the two women whose beds were near to hers, divided only by jutting walls and thin curtains.

It is also difficult leaving Australia because I am concerned for the well being of my children left behind, especially the youngest, Ella, who will be at the beck and call of her two older sisters, both of whom threaten to be particularly militant. I hope they are kind to each other, look out for each other and do not allow their natural rivalries to turn them into brutes towards one another.

My mother hopes for the same with her children. Even now she hopes that all her children will attend her ninetieth birthday party in October. This seems unlikely. It looks like one will not attend. This brother whom my mother has now labeled as ‘so like his father’ did not come to her 85th either.

The boys cop it every time. They can be like their father, whereas we girls, well we are not all considered to be like our mother, though I know my mother considers that I am like her. She does not suggest that any of her girls could be like their father. Oh no. That’s not possible in her eyes. Either we are like her or we are ourselves like ourselves, unlike any other. Whereas the boys, they are like their father or they are strangers. If they are good to her, then they can be forgiven their resemblance to their father but if they are cruel and at times, they all have been, then they are ‘like their father’. But we girls have sometimes been cruel to our mother too. She tends to overlook that.

I am off to a foreign land. Italy beckons. Italy the land of Lombardy poplars, my favorite trees, but we will not go near Lombardy, I imagine. We will have adventures and the odd mishap. We will see things anew and our world will be broadened but how much I have resisted going. Now I have no choice. I hope I survive.

We need to build a gate in the back yard. This is a difficulty. Bill started building a side gate when Ella was a baby. For complicated reasons he never finished it and given that Ella, like her sisters before her, was not a wanderer, it never became a problem not to have one.

The plan is to use the nearly completed gate, that stands against one wall in Bill’s workshop. But to install the gate, which needs additional pickets down either side, we need to dig ditches for the foundations of the gateposts and to paint the whole thing once completed.

Bill never does things by halves. He has so little time. Most weekends he’s so tired he only wants to potter, so I worry that this gate might not happen, though something has to happen. Without a gate the dog cannot live in the back yard. Without a gate for the backyard, the dog has to live indoors.

We lock him up at night or when no one’s home in the small bathroom upstairs but he cannot live forever in an upstairs bathroom. The rest of the day when someone is there to supervise him, he runs around the house chewing up computer cords, socks and shoes and whatever else he can get his jaws around. We need to get him outdoors.

Millie and Nick began to build Ralph a kennel but that too seems to have stalled. My suspicion is that Ralph will live indoors for too long and that in time it will become almost too difficult to get him to live outside.

How we have changed. The first cat this family ever owned, a cat for Tessa when she was seven, a cat we named Tillie, became what we then called an outside cat. None of your pets indoors, in those days. Now they all live indoors. They sleep on beds, in hallways and over heat vents, on freshly folded washing. I’m sick of picking their fur off black clothes. But isn’t that the way of it, with aging we mellow. Our old standards subside. Besides I cannot see so well these days, without glasses. So the mess becomes a blur and our priorities shift.

Yesterday Millie took Ralph unexpectedly to the vet. He had lept off the bed when he first caught sight of her in the evening and fell heavily on one side. He started to yelp and limped around. By the time Millie reached the vet , Ralph was fine. No broken bones, just a fright and maybe some bruising. The vet then took the opportunity to go through the list of pets they have included in their registry. Some six rabbits – Fern, CCS, Huggle Pots to name a few, as well as Tillie. All are now long gone. Millie said she felt like a murderer or a negligent pet owner as she declared that each in turn was dead.

I once wrote a story about our pets, focusing on the two frogs, Doris and Picasso.

Here’s an early draft:

The frog’s name is Picasso. He’s a boy. We used to have a girl named Doris but she died. Tragically. One day she produced a long line of eggs, little jelly eyes, that somehow stuck to her rear end instead of dropping onto the surface of the water below for hatching. At first I’d thought the eggs were frog poo, all mixed up with bits of gravel from the base of the tank. I was wrong.

Over the next few weeks Doris lost her shiny green complexion. She no longer leapt high to catch the crickets we tipped live into the tank each evening. She lost weight.
We took her to a vet who specialises in reptiles.
“It’s not frog shit,” he said. “It’s her reproductive organs. She’s a sick frog.” He was pulling at the sticky stuff at Doris’ rear end. “There’s nothing I can do. She’s too far gone. We’ll have to euthenase her.” I watched as the vet drew up a needle longer than Doris’s tiny body and injected a thin stream of liquid. Her body caved in on itself and instantly she shrunk. I took the lifeless frog home for burial.

“It’s the kindest way,” the vet had said. He’s a reptilian specialist. He can operate on lizards no longer than a finger. “But I’ve never yet managed to anaesthetize a frog.”

A year later I bring Picasso to the vet. We adopted him to replace Doris. No more girl frogs. We figured with two boys there’d be no possibility of reproductive backfire.

But now Picasso’s sick. He’s been getting thinner. The fine bone at the end of his spine is jutting out in a way it never did before and there are dark raised spots along his skin. He’s lost his bright green sparkle and turned into a darker green. Frogs change colour to reflect their temperature, the darker the green, the colder they are. Picasso’s cold all the time now even on the few 40 degree days we’ve been having lately.

Picasso is a green tree frog from the rain tree forests in Queensland. Here in Melbourne we need a special home, a glass fish tank lined with gravel, a heat mat attached below to keep the temperature tropical and a UV light to emulate the sun’s rays. Finally we need a frog licence from Fisheries and Wildlife that costs $35.00 a year, a fee that increases regularly because green tree frogs are protected.
The vet diagnoses a severe case of gravel ingestion. It seems whenever Picasso swallows a cricket, he takes in a piece of gravel with it, and for some reason he hasn’t managed to shit the stones out. Now he has a belly full. At least a third of his body weight in stones, like the wolf in one version of Red Riding Hood. The Hunter cuts him open, frees Grandma and Red Riding Hood then replaces her with large round stones from the riverbed. Then he restitches Mr Wolf who wakes up to the most awful bellyache.

The vet prescribes a dose of laxative, caramel flavoured. He’s convinced that frogs love the taste. At least Picasso takes it in. He has no choice really. The vet has his mouth prised open with a metal stick and is shovelling in the stuff, brown and gluey, much like melted caramel.
“As long as he doesn’t vomit it back up, the laxative might help to shift the gravel.” It’s our only hope,” the vet says. “Put him in a separate container tonight otherwise you won’t know whether or not he’s passed any stones.” He hands back the frog and his assistant hands me the bill.

I don’t mean to harp on money but tree frogs in captivity are expensive, at least the ones you buy here in Melbourne. They fetch at least $150.00 from specialist pet shops plus the annual licence fee and all the bits and pieces. It has been suggested to me more than once that I should announce on the status sheet that we send to the Department of Fisheries and Wild life each year that both frogs have died. I don’t suppose they expect you to keep up your licence fee for dead frogs. Still I’m too honest for that.

All in all you have to be responsible to keep frogs. And the vet will tell you as he tells me in no uncertain terms how bad I am at handling frogs. I put Doris in a shoe box. Frogs don’t travel well in cardboard boxes. “Cardboard burns their skin,” the vet says, in a way that suggests I should have known all along. An ice-cream tub would be better. “Always wet your hands first and leave them wet when handling your frog’” the vet tells me wetting his own hands under the tap. “Otherwise frogs are surprisingly strong.” “We’ve had one of ours for four years,” I tell the vet. I don’t want him thinking I’m a complete incompetent. After all we’ve managed to keep them this long. But all the while I’m trying to think back. How long is it since I last cleaned out the tank. And the sight of the burden of keeping the animals clean I’m afraid I can’t distinguish one from the other. At least I couldn’t before Picasso got sick. Now it’s easy. He’s the skinny one.

All of this happened some five or more years ago. Life rolls on, for some of us at least.

Long live Ralph, the dog.