The year I was born, on the other side of the world in the land of my parents, the Netherlands, there was a storm. The North Sea swept in and broke the dykes built to protect the low-lying marsh lands from too much water. De Ramp inundated the land.
In 1953 the sun bore down on a weedy back yard in Greensborough, my baby self rested nestled in a cradle made of white wicker with an enamel-coloured crucifix attached by a satin ribbon. A baby, I did not know about the waters engulfing my parent’s homeland.
My mother wept. Her tears splashed down her face as she held me close, but not close enough for me. The world was unsafe. I knew there were problems in the land of my caregivers, my mother, this woman who held her flesh held in place with tight corsets riding up her thighs across her stomach. Her muscles weakened through too many pregnancies, her body was now closed off to me as she did not have enough milk for her sixth born child.
From the land of water, she had travelled to the land of sunshine and eucalypts. A world where we did not see snow unless we travelled hundreds of kilometres to the top of mountains whose winter season shone white for less than three months of each year.
My mother missed the snow and in this hot land, which was now her home and my birthplace, she could not find a firm enough footing to feel safely at home. We might as well have been in a small boat tossed on the waters of the North Sea, near the broken dykes that failed to protect the land from the sea.
Three years later I walked with my sister and two brothers to a local swimming hole. A build-up of water from the Darebin Creek which ran near our house, a tributary of the brown Yarra River that curled like a snake though the nearby fields yet to be converted into suburbs.
The locals had piled rocks in places. To create a deeper section for swimmers able to manage without a foothold too deep to stand, I jumped into one when my big sister was not looking.
She kept her wits and dragged me by my straggling hair to the edge of the pool and pulled me out. I wish she had not. If she had not I would not be here. But then others would not be here because like my mother before me I have reproduced. And I do not wish the others were not here.
The colour blue is multifaceted, the sky by day by night, the sea under clouds, under sun, in storm or sorrow.
Dying in an amazing experience.