living inside an emerald

the strangeness of the middle of the night and other stories

I’m sitting at the kitchen table, writing and looking out at the endless rain.

I’ve written many essays on missing the rain as I adjust very slowly to Australia’s often dry climate, but here on the far South Coast, water has been falling from the sky at an incredible rate.

Water bounces staccato like from the bitumen. The deck is transformed into black ice, lethally slippery and increasing covered in moss. I’m cocooned in the valley, so hidden even the pale sun cannot find me, and all around increasingly startling shades of green wave at me through foggy windows.

I am inside an emerald.

for the love of rain

Two years ago we ran out of water. I’d never experience this before. I kept turning the tap on as a reflex to nothing. No water. Nothing to drink. Nothing to clean with. No showers. No flushing toilets. No tea. No water to cook with. It’s a very strange thing living in a house with no water.

We bought big containers of water from the supermarket and showered at the studio. Eventually a tanker of water trundled down the steep driveway. The joy of turning the tap and seeing water of life gush forth was immense. Normally the water we are drinking is rain water. Straight from the sky. ‘Sky water’ my friend calls it. The best kind.

I grew up drinking ‘town water’. Water with things added to it, usually chlorine and fluoride. I drunk this water for 39 years and I’m fine, better than fine. I feel very healthy and hardly ever get sick. I tend to believe that the thoughts we have about ourselves and others are more toxic or beneficial to our system than the chemicals in the water and I think its very important to not obsess over these things, the obsessing is what is most harmful.

And still, sky water tastes like purity.

After we ran out of water I got even more vigilant about usage. I set 4 minute timers on everyone’s showers. I put up signs next to every tap ‘please turn off all the way - no drips’. Towards the end of last year we purchased two more water tanks and installed them next to the shed.

There is an abundance of water now. Every tank is full which is a wonderful feeling. However, as the Buddhist parable of the two rings reminds us, , everything will change

For now, I’m here. In the kitchen, drinking rooibos with milk and a tiny bit of honey. Writing and watching the rain.

I’m rattling around in this big house.

My husband Rod has been in Indonesia for 23 and a half days now. When he first arrived in Bali I would call him every 30 minutes or so, which is only a slight exaggeration.

Now he’s on a boat with his friends somewhere in the middle of the Indian Ocean. They are living on this boat for 2 weeks. Chasing waves. Thankfully there’s no internet in the Indian Ocean so my constant phone calls fall into the ether, unanswered.

I start leaving him voice messages which he might not listen to, not because he doesn’t care about my ramblings but because he doesn’t really know what a voice message is. He’s definitely never sent one. One of the billions of things I love about him is his complete lack of technological reliance. He doesn’t have social media. He doesn’t have a website, even though he has two thriving businesses. He doesn’t ever need to promote his work. In fact his ‘problem’ is he has too many customers. He’s been a sign writer in Batemans Bay for over 30 years. If you ever walk along the promenade of Batemans Bay and look up, you’ll see a hand painted Aussie Pancakes sign with a date stamp of 1991, painted by Rod.

I often think about how different our worlds are, in business and in life. I joke with him that he should start a newsletter or an instagram. It’s funny because he’s the least demonstrative person you’ll ever meet.

When we first fell in love and I started writing about him and posting pictures of him on social media, strangers started coming up to him in the street and talking to him like they knew him.

‘How was Paris?’

‘Congratulations on the engagement!’

‘How’s Clare?’

‘How did it go meeting the parents?’

That’s what you get if you fall in love with a celebrity I say. My ongoing joke about a tiny amount of people in a small coastal town recognising my voice from our the yoga studios old school radio ads.

Batemans Bay doesn’t have celebrities, he said.

We keep it real.

Outside the rain continues to pour in sheets, creating rivers around the house. It’s so quiet here. I can hear the rain and my fingers flying along the keys. I can hear the hum of silence.

Have you ever noticed silence isn’t really silence?

At night I turn over and over in the expanse of bed. I pull the blankets this way and that. With no one to pull them back I end up cocooned like a caterpillar preparing for its great dissolving. I sleep fitfully and when I wake in the middle of the night, there’s an eerie feeling like I accidentally stepped into someone else’s life.

Even though I’ve lived on the other side of the world for over a decade, even though I know with every breath, this is home, this is where I’m supposed to be, I think there’s still a little part of me in sleepy Herefordshire waiting for me to pick her up. I’m coming, I whisper into the dawn.

~