A Normal Woman's Diary.

 INTRODUCTION

To forgive is to accept that you will never know some truths in this life,and leave the past to be healed in the sunlight of the present. To enjoy what good there is in all that have crossed your pathways of your life.  Take the strengths you have gathered from them to make the most of your future. Do this by weaving a better life for those that may follow you down your chosen path that you make for yourself.   2010

 A NORMAL WOMAN"S DIARY

It is the year 2008 and I am sitting under the Morton Bay Fig Tree at the local State School. Children’s voices are surrounding me, I start remembering my own childhood and the many schools that I attended. My childhood was so different to the one that my son now enjoys. My life was different as well. This school has been his childhood, he has travelled though all the grades with his friends and peers. His roots like the tree have reached down to the every sub soil of this playground. His memories will be rich with the shadow of this tree. This tree that I sit under has seen many young lives, children and languages from all over the world have passed under its large shade giving branches.

Mine was one of change as my Father moved around from one job to the next, from one town to the next. Travel was part of the way we lived. Each year brought the challenge of uprooting and transplanting in different living environments. Even today the sound of metal wheels on metal tracks always brings back memories of our years of constant change. Friends were hard to keep and find. I remember that I had trees as my friends. They were always solid silent and grounded. Trees knew who they were and where they were going. I needed the roots like the tree with the freedom to sway in the wind and whisper and rustle my inner thoughts and stories. I wanted the time to hear these stories return changed, being interwoven into other lives, but it didn’t happen until our last move as a family, one that took us from Bundaberg to Brisbane in 1966, the year of decimal currency. That move allowed me to have friends and for my mother to have a home.

 My children have cultural roots. They are made from marble and easily understood for they are Greek/ Australian, the Olive and the Paperbark. This is our life that we built for our children, one in which they could grow strong in the knowledge of knowing who they were. Love was the main ingredient and ignorance of blind love. In the beginning things were more difficult than a normal marriage, because of language differences, and cultural. This made us more flexible with each other; we put our differences and arguments down to this and left it there, not blaming each other for the fight. All married couples have differences; it becomes a problem when the blame is laid more on one person than the other.

We lived in a little flat that overlooked the University and the Brisbane River. The views were something and you wouldn’t have known we were living in the inner city of Brisbane as we were surrounded by trees of our neighbours’ yards. In was a perfect place for us young lovers. The block of flats was the meeting ground where we both met and fell in love. It was my first real home as an independent woman. For a year prior to my future husband moving in to the same block of flats I was sharing another flat within the same block with my oldest childhood friend, Paula.

She was a timid girl, shy, and I loved her like a sister. It was her house that I escaped to on weekends while growing up in an outer Brisbane suburb. After all the moving in my younger years, this became our home. Paula’s place gave me the Moon landing, endless Elvis Presley Movies, and Countdown our favourite escape into teenage dreams.

This suburb was surrounded by industry, with its rows of repeated commission houses have stayed as it was. When I returned to visit my elderly Mother I felt like I had steeped back into a time warp were my adolescent years reflect on the bitumen of the street, as a mirage of summer heat.  The backyards with the outdoor toilet blocks still stand as a living memoir to the days prior to Clem Jones and flush toilets. The whole suburb is like a museum of the how life was like in the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s, in a lower economic sector of society.  My eyes would wander up the road to Paula’s place, and my feelings of that friendship would re-blossom within my heart. There a longing of re-establishing that friendship grows ever stronger, not silenced by time but only stilled by the mind it says to my heart what will be will be.