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The big old raggedy tea rose bush by the front fence bloomed soft pink flowers, a late hopeful flush against spotty brown leaves. The autumn light was fading down, wintering our hearts to the leaving. Time thinned and shrank even as it expanded out to those big wide unknowns. The exhausting suck and swell of breath was pulling life away as much as pushing us to live in its tides. The undertow deepened its moaning each day. So I full on fed to fill up the trenches. Eating, eating crusty bread loaded with butter and soft cheeses as solace. Sadly stuffing my face hole to fill the hole.
Somewhere between mouthfuls, I started drawing. Drawing with no idea of the drawing, I just began. A spindly avoidance, a double distraction, both of the hole and of the eating. Circles, lots of small circles inked across a big sheet of white paper. One after another after another. Over and over. My crabby old hand going round and around in a rhythm of empty circles. Then taking a tiny brush, water dissolving them to black and greyish white infill before drawing more and more circles. A soothing sway motion of tonal tide back and forth across the page. My little radio quietly hummed distraction in the background as I travelled around and around all those sister conversations we used to have, and all the conversations we now won’t have. Chit chat laughter the colour of wattle bird quark, magpie warble, hilarious high sky screech lorikeet. We loved those noisy birds. And low murmur skies hummed muffled secrets. And huff junk clouded rain storms were whispering shiny bits of everything. And never nothing because it was all the very something of our sharing. Our being, our sister being.
