Doonan diddly-squat

A good hospital story, for a change

2012-02-03T11:05:00.000+10:00

Two weeks ago I had to call an ambulance to take Allen to hospital. He was taken to our local hospital, suffering from pneumonia. That was the end of a difficult week in which three generations of my family came down with a nasty viral gastro bug that our grand-daughter picked up on her very first day at a childcare centre. Poor little Charlotte seemed to take the 24 hours of vomiting and diarrhoea quite in her stride. But her parents and grandparents weren't so lucky.

Allen and I had gone down to Brisbane to help make Charlotte's first week at childcare a bit easier by picking her up each day after lunch, instead of her having long days in her first week of care. But things didn't turn out as planned. She, both her parents and I successively succumbed to the dreaded lurgy. I hoped Allen would be spared (after all, he wasn't changing nappies). So I rushed him home on Day 4, when I was well enough to sit upright in the car for the hour's driving. But on Day 5 it was his turn. Still, the gastro seemed to pass without too much trauma. But he did have great difficulty dealing with vomiting. And we think perhaps he ingested something nasty into his lungs at this stage. Whatever the reason, by Day 6 he had a high fever and obvious difficulty breathing.

The less said about being in hospital with aphasia, the better - that's been my attitude in the past. But here at our local Noosa Hospital, I can happily say the hospital experience, though not exactly pleasant, was made much easier for us both by their very enlightened approach to caring for persons with any form of dementia. Allen's progressive aphasia is progressing to the extent that he is now often mildly confused at the best of times. But when he's very tired, his confusion increases. And when he's as ill as he was the first week in hospital, he really hasn't much idea at all what's going on.

As we have private insurance, he was first placed in a very spacious and pleasant private room. But by the second day there, doctors and nurses recognised that Allen couldn't manage when left alone. He could not remember how to ring for a nurse – or even, in the first days of treatment, where he was or why. So he was transferred to a 4-bed ward in the public section of the hospital. Here conditions were definitely less convivial for visitors (e.g. no spacious lounge for making cups of tea or watching the Australian Open on large-screen TV!) But that hardly mattered. The outstanding feature of this ward (and of several others like it) was that this 4-bed ward had a full-time nurse IN THE ROOM 24 hours a day. In fact, the attending nurse was not allowed to leave the room, even to walk down the hall for linen, without a substitute nurse standing in.

The level of personal care in this ward was almost the same as in an Intensive Care Unit, even though these patients' medical needs may not have required high-level clinical nursing. They did require a high level of care, however, since almost all the patients I saw come through this ward in our 10 days there were persons with some degree of dementia or delirium. Having a nurse in constant attendance meant these patients were able to be safely treated for their medical problem AND safely cared for. No one fell out of bed or wandered down the hall. Anyone needing to go to the bathroom had only to call or show some sign. Everyone got assistance with meals to whatever extent this was needed. Most importantly, in Allen's case, someone was always there to remind him what was happening, where he was, when his wife would be back and generally reassure him. If we had had this facility when Allen left Intensive Care two and a half years ago, I would not have had to spend weeks sleeping in a recliner next to his hospital bed. I don't know the extent to which all hospitals offer this service to patients with cognitive impairments but it's a question worth asking before admitting anyone with dementia for treatment, if you have a choice of hospitals.

Allen is now in a standard 2-bed room at a small rehab hospital that he knows and remembers. He's been both an in-patient and a day-patient there in recent years, and so I hope this will help him to settle in well for the week or two of rehab that he's about to receive. If he doesn't settle, then I'll bring him home and just take him in for regular physiotherapy. But the fact we've managed to come this far is due to good nursing geared to the needs of a very special group of patients.

We need to talk about...Walle

2011-12-20T10:27:00.188+10:00

We need to talk about... not Kevin, but Walle (pronounced Wall-ee). No, no: my newly adopted three-year-old labradoodle is not wreaking any kind of havoc reminiscent of that other nasty fellow. Quite the opposite, in fact. The only thing other than his toys that Walle has ever tried to destroy by chewing is the old sheepskin I put down for him alongside my bed. And that being something very like rawhide, it's probably not too surprising.

It's not as if Walle hasn't got a perfectly good bed of his own. But that's in the living-room, where he could easily choose to sleep, and does when we are all in there. But there's no room for that big bed in my bedroom. And Walle always sleeps wherever I sleep – or nearby. He's not allowed on beds or chairs, and knows that. But wherever I sit, work or sleep – that's where you'll find Walle. At the mistress's feet, so to speak. Right now, as you can see, he's lying right here behind me, his morning walk over, a couple of chicken necks quickly gobbled and nothing better to do than snooze.

Walle has become more self-confident as the weeks go by. He doesn't (always) lie outside the bathroom while I shower. And if I tell him to 'Go' when I'm working in the kitchen, he will reluctantly trot off to his bed in the living-room. Otherwise, he lies at the very edge of the carpet that marks the division between dining area and kitchen, where he (usually) knows he's not allowed to enter. Two front paws might stray over the carpet's edge onto the kitchen tiles, but that's all. And he watches. I never feed him anything while I'm working in the kitchen, so he can't be expecting scraps. He's just...watching...ME.

At least now, when we've gone to bed, Walle no longer gets up just because I make a quick toilet visit or a trip to the kitchen for water. He does always come along when I check on Allen, though. He'll stick his snout up near Allen's pillow for a quick pet, or a surreptitious lick. But other than that, he's quite content once he's settled down alongside my bed for the night. And I've learned not to step on him as I get up for any reason.

Outdoors in our one-acre paddock that's fenced on three sides only – the fourth boundary being the big old farm dam – Walle generally runs free. Exuberance did once cause him to spring off down the valley, following the creek below the dam's overflow.That creek bed marks the property line between neighbours' acreage on both sides. It was a harmless enough adventure, with me in pursuit through long grasses on both sides of the creek bed. But some deep instinct had taken hold of him, and I couldn't help but laugh as his rear legs flew high, water splashing as he landed in the nearly dry creek's puddles. He slept very well that night, feet still twitching in those strange dreams dogs have, accompanied by little half-barks of delight.

And on one other occasion, while friends were helping unload compost onto plants that border a camping area at the bottom of our paddock, I looked up just in time to see Walle take off, ears horizontal, in pursuit of a big monitor lizard he'd found sunning itself in the grass by the dam's edge. The lizard executed a neat dive into the dam, and in plopped Walle right behind. He'd no chance of catching the lizard, of course. But still Walle plodded around among the water lilies, churning up mud and coming out a new shade of brown. I'm not a great believer in washing dogs too often, but no way could Walle come into the living-room without a hosing down on that day. At least he'd recently been shorn, making the clean-up a bit easier.

The only thing Walle asks from us – other than food and water – is to let him be with us. Preferably 24 hours a day, but if we need to be away for a few hours or half a day, he will tolerate that. Nothing gets chewed and there are no wrinkles to suggest he's taken advantage of our absence to sprawl across a bed or sofa. He is, of course, deliriously happy when we get home. But that kind of effusive love is little enough price to pay for such total devotion. And at the least suggestion that he might be allowed to come with us on some outing, wild horses couldn't keep him from hopping into the car.

When Walle first came home with me seven weeks ago, I thought his extreme devotion would be temporary. It worried me then, so the breeder gave me an article about 'separation anxiety' and I followed its recommendations. But now, even though Walle has settled happily into his new home, I know his 'attachment' to me is permanent. He's a one-woman dog. And though it took some getting used to – a bit like having a toddler follow you around – I'm not only resigned to it, I love it. I even think Walle knew I needed this unconditional love and affection, knew that his main job with us would be to care for the carer.

Welcome back, me!

2011-10-26T19:21:00.000+10:00

After such a long drought, I hardly know where to begin. Blame Facebook, some addictive computer games, Donna Leon's Commisario Brunetti novels and my wonderful vegie garden for taking up so much of my free time, leading to this absence of postings for the past two months.

Charlotte Maudie and her Mum

My gorgeous grand-daughter has to accept a small share of the blame, too. Whenever I've been around her in these first six months of her life, I've had no interest in any other pastime. Just look at this photo and you'll see why!

But now I'm determined to mend my ways and get back here more often.

Speaking of my vegetables, this looks like becoming a bumper year. During the winter I was able to have the lower vegie bed extended, the middle beds raised a little and properly drained and a new upper bed constructed where there was formerly just a sloping bank of clay. I tipped a total of 80 bags of mushroom compost onto all these beds, as well as some soil and sand. And after weeks of letting all that settle, I began planting. Not surprisingly, everything is flourishing. We're already harvesting a number of greens, plus stringbeans and radishes. I've even planted sweet corn this year, which I've only grown in Tasmania before, never Queensland.

Allen is also doing well – ploughing on with his word puzzles and working out every day on his exercise bike. Blue Care is sending in a physiotherapist once a week to help Allen improve his balance and strength, which deteriorated somewhat during the winter. We visit the library just about every week, too. He's moved on to large-print books now. It's not that he needs this for his vision. It is just easier for him to face up to a smaller amount of text on each page. Certainly, 'processing' anything (whether that's ideas, spoken utterances or tasks) is becoming more problematic for him. But he doesn't give up. Even if he can't finish half the books he starts, we are gradually getting better at selecting topics that will hold his interest and be right for his ability level. He's reading more biography and history now, and also enjoying some of the wonderful illustrated books that are available about historical periods – e.g. A Photographic History of World War II.

Shorter, more frequent postings: that's my resolve! So I'll close now and finish making the fish chowder based on the leavings of a large cod my son-in-law left in my freezer a few weeks ago. I cut fillets off the fish for last night's tea (photo); the rest of the fish made the broth base for tonight's dinner.

A visit from the girls

2011-08-22T13:46:00.000+10:00

It's about time I share a few photos of the newest girl in our family: little Charlotte Maudie H. She was born on 19 April, and was just over two months old when the following family shot was taken. The occasion was my sister N's visit, and that's N below, holding Charlotte, with proud Mum, my daughter Zoe, looking on. (The 4th girl on the left, of course, is big sister Lucy, who doesn't yet pay much attention to the newest member of her family, though I understand she did recently have a little lick of Charlotte's face when Mum wasn't looking.)

Not surprisingly, my granddaughter is just about the most amazing child who ever drew breath. Not that I take credit for that, of course – it's just a fact of life which any grandmother would understand. I guess I could lay claim to some credit for the fact that Zoe is doing an outstanding job of mothering. But that might be difficult to justify, given that I made a bit of a mess of some of my own early experience in that role.

Maybe that's why I am so revelling in the role of grandma. Of course, I have had good practice as one of several grandmothers to Sam and, in a smaller way, to Allen's other two grandchildren. But I'm still amazed at the joy I feel in being part of this little one's life. And I am already thinking ahead to all the things I hope to share with her and teach her.

My delight is probably greater because Z&B's decision to have a baby came as such a surprise to me. In recent years Zoe had begun to talk about the possibility. But years went by and so I really stopped thinking much about it. And now that it's actually happened, little Charlotte has worked that miracle that only babies can. She has brought hope and optimism for the future back into my life, where previously those things had been, if not exactly lacking, certainly a bit thin on the ground, given all that has gone on with us in the past few years.

Aphasia Music Video

2011-08-18T18:32:00.002+10:00

Check out this aphasia music video by Marc Black, with animation by Buzzco.

My time at Time: How proofreading was done

2011-08-12T20:13:00.004+10:00

This is the fourth and final article in a series about my first job in publishing – in the editorial offices of Time Magazine at Rockefeller Center, New York City. It was 1965 and I had just moved to New York. Previous articles in this series were My time at Time: Getting a job as proofreader; My time at Time: A short, hectic working week; and My time at Time: Learning the ropes.

Each two-person proofreading team at Time Magazine worked according to a well-established and tightly controlled routine. There could be eight or more teams totalling 16+ people working on the two busiest days of the week. Each team had a small alcove in which to work, which only partly isolated the team from the sounds of adjoining teams.

In each team, one person read aloud from the edited draft while the other team member followed along on the galley-proof, carefully reading the typeset copy there and using appropriate proofreading symbols to indicate anything that the typesetter had not reproduced exact1y as per the draft. The long galley sheets contained white space on the left and right of the typeset lines, and in this white space the proofreader could note any corrections within the line. If a typeset line required more than one correction, then successive corrections would be separated by an oblique line. Corrections pertaining to the left half of each typeset line were written in the left margin; corrections to the right half of each line, in the right margin.

Straightforward corrections were written in one colour (red); queries in a second colour (I think this was blue); and later in the week, when final layouts were being assembled, proofreaders would note in a third colour (green) any optional additions or deletions which the story's author or editor had suggested. These options could be used or not, depending on the story 'fit', or number of lines available for that story in the page's layout. As no one except authors and editors were allowed to make such deletions or additions, having readymade options available helped to minimise the need to send 'copy' back up to the author during later stages in page make-up. In fact, the name given to these optional types of annotations came from the ink used: they were known as 'greens'.

The partner in each team who read from the original text read everything: punctuation ('bang' for exclamation point, I remember; 'pos' for apostrophe, 'query' for question mark), capital letters (cap-A etc.), spellings of most proper nouns, new paragraphs, indentations, quotation marks etc. So the first line of text in this article would be read as follows:

para cap e each two hyphen person proofreading one word team at open itals cap t time cap m magazine close itals worked according to a well hyphen established and tightly controlled routine stop

At the end of this first reading the person who had 'read' aloud from the original text (the ‘copyholder’) then took the printed galley from his or her partner and silently reread the galley, checking the partner's corrections and looking for anything the partner may have missed. The two then discussed any queries either of them wished to make about the story or passage (e.g. the spelling of the name of an obscure Indian village perhaps, or the accuracy of the description of some medieval re1igious practice about which the proofreader happened to have read a book recently). They might also consult with a proofreader working in a nearby alcove who was known to be an expert, say, on the sexual habits of one-humped dromedaries. Then the pair would return the galley and its accompanying story to the box holding completed jobs and take the next story from the top of the pile of stories waiting to be read.

The corrected galleys went back to the typesetters for corrections. Later a revised galley, along with the marked-up first galley showing what corrections were needed, came back to the proofreaders for a reading of the corrections. Typesetters were as strictly regimented as proofreaders, so when proofreaders checked corrected galleys they only had to read closely those paragraphs that contained a correction, not the whole story. The typesetter would have worked from a paper-tape 'memory' to reproduce the revised galley. He (and typesetters were all male) would not have rekeyed anything except the lines that contained a correction. And if for any reason the typesetter had rekeyed lines that didn't contain a correction, he was expected to indicate this in some way on the revised galley. This would alert the proofreaders that these lines, too, contained ‘new copy’ (i.e. newly keyed copy). So these lines also needed to be read again. Otherwise, revised galleys did not have to be completely reread. But to be sure no lines had accidentally been deleted, the proofreader partner doing the reading would take the original galley in hand and, reading aloud to his or her partner who was checking the revised galley, go through all the lines again, but reading only the first and last words of each line, just to make sure that all lines in the original galley were the still t here in the revised galley.

Team members were supposed to take turns as readers and markers. I would be the 'copyreader', reading aloud from the original story on one job; on the next job, I would be the ‘copyholder’, marking up the galley while my partner read aloud from the original. Except for an incorrect word-break at the end of a line, the only contribution a proofreader could make to the content of a galley was to query some point. And queries were not made lightly. Honour was involved.

Writers and editors had it in for proofreaders – or so it seemed in those high-pressured closing hours of each editorial week. Most writers and editors at that time seemed to project (or tried to project) the image of a successful Ivy League academic (writers were all men, in those days). Except for some well established old-school journalists, writers and editors wore tailored suits during the week, and on Saturday (‘closing’ day of the editorial week) they might wear casual slacks and cashmere sweaters with Harris Tweed jackets. In those days, they never wore jeans or sneakers.

Proofreaders, on the other hand, were a ratbag lot. They tended to favour orthopaedical1y correct handmade shoes from Greenwich Village shoemakers, fringed shawls, funny hats which they wore indoors and thick homespun Aran sweaters. Some were unashamedly homosexual and/or vegetarian – this at a time when other corporate employees were discrete about such preferences. Proofreaders had PhDs in Eastern religions and East European literature. And they quite often knew more than writers and editors (except about getting ahead in American corporations). So when proofreaders queried something, they were almost always proved right.

Very occasionally, a galley would come back with a ‘thank you’ from the writer who had been saved from embarrassment by an astute query. But the proofreader whose query was found to be groundless was punished royally. Trailing miles of galley behind him, and maybe carrying a book from the exhaustive Time Library to show that his was the correct version of the fact in question, the writer would sail triumphantly down the long 24th-floor corridor into the proofreaders’ windowless rabbit warren (only the writers had windows) and in a loud voice that everyone this side of the central elevator shaft could hear announce: ‘Thank you for your efforts but my version was the correct translation of that line from the Gallic Wars. You were probably confusing the dative and the ablative, but thank you anyway.' No wonder proofreading partners consulted carefully before querying.

I remained a proofreader at Time for about 18 months, I think. Occasionally I also worked upstairs at Time-Life Books, where the pressure was less and perhaps as a result, the proofreaders generally were less bizarre individuals. There, it was considered imperative that proofreaders not be distracted by too great an interest in a book’s story line, so all galleys were split into sections that deliberately did not correspond to beginnings and ends of chapters. Again, proofreaders were supposed to take from the top of the basket, but teams occasionally (and surreptitiously) exchanged jobs if a particular team wanted to continue reading from a book the pair was enjoying.

Tired of midnight closing hours, I left Time for a while to take a 9-to-5 job – setting up a proofreading system for a public relations firm. But news releases and advertising supplements were a great bore after Time-style excitement. So after a year I went back to Time as 'girl friday' to the production editor. That was when I began a really serious involvement with publishing and production, but that’s a story for another day.

Nowadays proofreading has all but disappeared as a publishing profession. Very few people know the difference between editing and proofreading, and many honestly (and to their peril) believe that computers can proofread as well as people. Knowing such things as the correct use of hyphens, en-rules and em-rules is no longer a marketable skill. And thanks also to computers, in my later years in the publishing industry graphic designers had become the ‘oddballs’ in the production team – though they usually enjoyed a lot more prestige than proofreaders ever did. But in my time at Time, proofreaders were the strange ones. And how lucky I was to have spent the formative years of my working life amongst these weird creatures.

This was the final article in a series about my first job in the publishing industry. In more than 40 years' involvement in publishing since then, I have never known a proofreading process of equivalent comprehensiveness. For that matter, I've never worked in any organisation that had such well-developed processes for the preparation and production of printed material.

A needling post

2011-08-05T18:15:00.001+10:00

Teacher-trainees in the Lao project I was managing wear
beanies knitted by my mother just as her eyesight was failing

I come from a line of needle-workers. Many of the women in our family sewed, knitted and/or crocheted. I wouldn't be surprised if some of our French foremothers were lacemakers, too. When she has time (which is rarely), my daughter is continuing the tradition. So is my Tassie niece, who has just bought her first sewing machine and who is also a crack crocheter.

My sister's bowl of crocheted fruit

Unlike my sister and her daughter (said niece), however, I mainly use patterns designed by others – except for homewares (pillow covers, bedspreads, curtains and pelmets etc.), where I happily go off in all sorts of directions. But during my long working life, I used my sewing to take my mind off work problems. I had a stressful job for a long time as the head of a busy government publishing unit. It wasn't always easy to stop the day's challenges and the next day's deadlines from mulling around in my head after I got home at night. So right after dinner on most week nights, I would go straight to my work table and sewing machine.

In that period of my life, I seemed best able to unwind by dumbly following a pattern, usually working on items for my work wardrobe, at a time when my teenage daughter was more interested in store-bought clothes. I did spend several months fabricating a fabulous black and pink silk ball gown for her high school formal – complete with boning, lining, organza underskirt and more than a dozen bound buttonholes and silk-covered buttons making up a false front... well, it's difficult to describe. I'll scan an old photo instead.

Eventually I came to use nothing but Vogue patterns. What appealed about them, I think, was the attention to tailoring detail and the challenges they presented – unusual ways of setting in sleeves, shaping yokes, and those sorts of things. Now my wardrobe needs are greatly reduced, I'm getting to an age when clothes don't wear out and what I mostly wear are garden togs that are the remnants of an earlier, classier casual life. But I'm still addicted to sewing and knitting.

I could afford the luxury of daytime sewing these days, but I still prefer to do my needling in the evening. My sewing machine is almost permanently set up at the 6ft long huon pine dining table. These days we take most of our meals in armchairs by the TV, or at a small cedar table nearer the kitchen. What was formerly our main dining table is now only used for meals with visitors. So for most of the time it makes a wonderful sewing centre, with all my trimmings stored away in one section of the Philippine sideboard nearby.

What is it about my and my sister's fingers that they need to keep busy! Arthritis may take its toll with me eventually, as it did with my mother. But until then my hands will keep dancing to well-known rhythms that by now must have become imprinted somewhere in my tailor's brain. I mainly choose simpler projects nowadays, and just as often sew for others (my son-in-law would like another pair of my board shorts, and my new grand-daughter opens up a whole world of opportunities).

One last square to knit, then blocking, joining the squares
and knitting a red edging and this Peruvian wool afghan
will be ready for my grand-daughter's pram or cot.

(Click here to read an earlier post about my sewing life.)

Keepsakes or junk? Is there a difference?

2011-06-07T20:08:00.002+10:00

Take a look at my studio and tell me if you can believe that I'm on a mission to de-clutter my living spaces!

And that's only one side of the room. Here's the other side.

Am I a hoarder? I never used to think I was. And I do live in a relatively small house, so most rooms probably contain more than would be necessary if we had four bedrooms and heaps of closets. But let's see what kinds of things I hold on to in this room only – things that aren't strictly necessary for the editing of books (my former trade) or the kind of writing I now do on this blog and for other purposes.

In the top row picture, at left:

Two Laotian sticky-rice baskets (only two of a dozen I have in different sizes).
About 20 years of tax records under the desk! (You never know.)
On a shelf above (just out of view), about 35 travel books featuring places I've visited, places I intended to visit but didn't, and places I just like reading about.
Behind one rice basket, a glass paperweight given to me as a Christmas present by........I can't remember who, but it was important at the time.
Four CD cases containing 10 years of backup files.

In the top row picture, at right:

Yet another sticky-rice basket - this one home to a small electric jug so visitors (and I) can make a cup of tea in the afternoon. And a fridge-top tray of smoked cane from the Philippines.
Never mind what's in the bar fridge. (You can never have too much home-grown citrus or homemade jam.)
On the wall, handwoven silk shawl from Laos. On the bed, handwoven cotton bedspread from the Philippines.
Pillowcases featuring embroidered Lao cloth (black), printed canvas made from a former Philippine shower curtain (white) and heavy African cloth (red).
A set of prints on the wall, the early work of a dear printmaking friend with whom I've lost touch.
In another friend's old black sea chest that doubles as a bedside table, all the Christmas decorations, my first marriage wedding veil, the outfit I made to take home my newborn (now 39-year-old) daughter from hospital plus the bloodstained nightie I wore to deliver her, several of her most important first dolls, and an old chenille bedspread from Tasmanian days.

In the second row picture, at left:

Bottom two shelves contain copies of many of the publications produced by Qld Dept of Education while I was in charge of the publishing unit there (1987-98). I need to donate these to an education library somewhere.
Third shelf from bottom has two silk-covered boxes containing a seal with my name in Chinese characters and a small porcelain container of sealing wax. A gift while in the Philippines.
Fourth shelf up has name card holders bought in Vietnam and a clock which was a gift, and which has Thai numbers on its face. (Why do I have two of these clocks!)
Fifth shelf up has mementos of my mother: little cloth-covered birdcage she made years ago as an ornament, and a metal box with some of her old Singer sewing machine bits and pieces. I also have the old brush she used to sweep thread dust off the machine's working bits. It's great on my keyboard.
Top two shelves have my collection of classic feminist books plus other writings and journals by women – waiting to find a good home (any takers?)
Third shelf down has publishing and editing references I no longer use.
Fourth shelf down has education and development books I'd also like to give away.

In the second row picture, at right:

The old Tasmanian table (pine top, blackwood legs) came from a neighbour's greenhouse 30+ years ago, after I told him we were looking for a patio table. (He tossed it over the fence to us, as I recall, and then we refinished it! His wife was not happy once she saw it done up.)
Hanging above the table: a Hmong baby carrier I bought from a woman who made it on an old Singer treadle machine. It's thickly embroidered in heavy cotton on a modern fluorescent fabric that Hmong mothers prefer instead of their traditional navy blue handwoven cotton fabric. (I have an embroidered Hmong skirt in that fabric.)
See the horseshoe on the notice board? It's on a piece of wood carved with '1991' – the year our predecessors at this place built the cedar-walled garage that I transformed into this studio. It used to hang above the door.
Also on the notice board, a little framed photograph of tiny Hotel Esmeralda, Paris – given to me by a dear friend who stayed there on my recommendation during her first of many trips to Paris.
White wire baskets hold my collection of Lao shawls and other Lao handwoven cloth.
Little Huon pine pots on the table date back to Tassie days.
And standing at the back of the table, a piece of calligraphy by my late Great Uncle, a Canadian priest who was also organist at the cathedral in Montreal. When I visited there long after he died, the archivist presented me with a box of my uncle's possessions, such as family photos, examples of my uncle's artwork and musical compositions and his old paintbox.
In back of the printer/fax and only the top edge visible here: one of the little slates distributed to Lao schoolchildren along with chalk, on which they learned to write in the absence of paper and pencils (this in the 1990s).
Standing at the end of the table and not quite visible, my old croquet mallet in its cover. I may use it again quite soon.
A wooden sign saying 'Massachusetts' which I bought while visiting my folks there many years ago.
And above the window, a pair of carved temple-guarding creatures from Laos.

I wasn't even going to mention any of the things inside desk drawers or filing cabinet draweres, but then I came across this little box of paperclips from the Philippines, handmade from pieces of bamboo and string. These are definitely too precious not to be featured here – and not to be kept!

So you tell me. Am I a hoarder? And if so, how can I break the habit?

My time at Time: Learning the ropes

2011-06-06T19:23:00.002+10:00

This is the third in a series of articles about my first job in publishing – in the editorial offices of Time Magazine at Rockefeller Center, New York City. It was 1965 and I had just moved to New York. The first article in this series was My time at Time: Getting a job as proofreader and the second article, My time at Time: A short, hectic working week.

To my horror in my first week, on-the-job training as a proofreader at Time meant starting work immediately as one-half of a two-person team. I found out later that only a few proofreaders were entrusted with the job of working with us rookies. Many of the 20-odd characters (I could say ‘20 odd characters’) working in that section in shifts had too many idiosyncrasies to be any use in the initiation of a newcomer.

All proofreading was done by teams, each of which included two proofreaders. Many of these partners had worked at Time for ten or more years. A proofreader friend from those days who has just retired after 39 years at Time eventually moved ‘up’ to copyediting. But in the 1960s such a progression was unthinkable. The various job categories were very much stratified. (1)

I have never known a more interesting collection of unusual people in one small group of fellow workers than those Time proofreaders. Almost all of them shared this attitude to the job: it was interesting, pleasant and well-paid work that allowed them to pursue more serious interests out of work. Most proofreaders worked a three-day week, so there was plenty of time for other interests. Long working days of 12 or more hours left little time for anything but work on Thursday to Saturday. But for the other four days of the week, proofreaders were freer than people with standard five-day jobs.

Some proofreaders even commuted from country locations beyond the famous satellite towns in the adjacent states of Connecticut and New Jersey that were home to conventional commuters. These longer-range commuters would spend two nights in hotels where they perhaps got special deals, or paid board somewhere for a two-night weekly stay. Most of them had professional or personal involvement in areas such as scholarship, writing, farming, philosophy or art. Their proofreading jobs fit in comfortably with those other pastimes. Some were kindly, some quirky, but almost all were fascinating to me, a young New England girl with little experience of such ‘characters’.

Each proofreader usually also had an area of expertise on which he or she (the group was split about 50–50, male and female) would be consulted by the others, and occasionally by writers and editors. However, there existed a kind of unspoken warfare (more or less serious, depending on the individuals involved) between the 25th-floor writers and editors and the 24th-floor production staff, especially proofreaders.

As each proofreading job was finished, the team was supposed to take the very next story on the top of the pile. The man who had administered my proofreading test, and who was responsible for progressing copy through the typesetting and proofreading process, would arrange the articles according to the priority which best suited the ‘make-up’ of the magazine’s layout pages.

The proofreading task consisted of correcting long galleys of each magazine article which had been keyed by typesetters operating noisy machines in a large adjacent area. (Experiments introducing computers into the publishing process were just then beginning, but the technology was not yet used for galley production.) The typesetters' job was to precisely reproduce the contents of the final typewritten copy which had resulted after writing and editing were finished.

As well as the conventional galley printout, typesetters simultaneously produced a perforated paper-tape version of the story – an early form of ‘memory databank’. It was this paper tape which, after corrections, would be used to ‘wire’ a final version of the story to the Chicago printing plant over dedicated phone lines. Older, experienced typesetters could even 'read' the perforated tape with their fingers and hastily patch in last-minute corrections by hand, instead of producing a whole new roll for each article. After typesetting, corrected galley proofs were used to make up precise layouts that would be airfreighted to the Chicago printing plant to show how typeset text and photos were to be laid out on each page.

The proofreading team received one copy of the uncorrected galley and the final typed draft which the typesetter had used as his original text. Remember: this was before word-processing and visual display units. The final edited draft of a story would have been typed up as an original with several carbon copies produced on sheets of various colours (pink, green, blue etc.) One of those carbon copies (the green, I think it was) would have gone to the relevant section's researcher (always a woman) whose final job it was to check and tick every fact, every unusual spelling, and every proper noun and name in the article, showing that she had checked each of these and affirmed each was correct. These 'check copies', signed off by the researcher, were kept upstairs in a central section of the editorial office and could be consulted by anyone who suspected an error of any sort after that article's researcher and writer had gone home. No one was supposed to alter anything so checked, without first consulting the researcher personally.

The final draft was sacrosanct. Not a 1etter or other character could be changed without the approval of the relevant editor, writer, copyreader (or subeditor) and/or researcher. Indeed, everyone who worked on a story at some point added his or her initials to the final draft and/or galley in the appropriate place. There was no anonymity at any stage of the production process – though it was not until the introduction of the Time essay in later years that individual writers received any by-lines in the actual pages of the magazine.

Incidentally, every time an error was discovered in the printed magazine, all of the initialled drafts and galleys were reviewed the following week so that blame could be properly apportioned. I think this was done as a point system and I remember everyone dreading the accumulation of errors for this reason. I acquired some distinction (albeit unwanted) for a notoriously amusing error I once made while working in a later position at Time. Then, one of my last jobs each week was to wire to the Chicago printing plant a list of ‘picture credits’ (photographers’ names) for the photos used in the final layouts. These names would then appear in small-size type alongside the appropriate photo. By some quirk I managed to credit a picture of an astronaut taking one of the first spacewalks to a certain New York photographer who often worked for Time, instead of correctly crediting NASA. (The photographer sent me a dozen roses to thank me for broadening his portfolio!)

(1) For example, all writers and editors were men, most of whom had ‘outside’ offices containing a window. All researchers were women and they worked in windowless ‘inside’ offices

In the next article in this series, I'll describe the tightly regimented process that proofreading teams were expected to follow for each article they read. In more than 40 years' involvement in publishing, I have never known a proofreading process of equivalent comprehensiveness.

My time at Time: A short, hectic working week

2011-06-03T15:32:00.001+10:00

This is the second in a series of articles about my first job in publishing – in the editorial offices of Time Magazine at Rockefeller Center, New York City. It was 1965 and I had just moved to New York. The first article in this series was My time at Time: Getting a job as proofreader.

The editorial week at Time began, officially, on Tuesday and ended on Saturday. However, many of the employees on the 24th and 25th floors – the editorial floors – worked a four-day week (Wednesday to Saturday). Even so, we all managed to accumulate a lot of overtime. Even staff such as layout artists, who worked only three days (Thursday to Saturday), often worked many hours of overtime, and this was very generously paid. In fact, Time's generosity to its employees at that time was legendary.

Catering events on both of the 'late' nights (Friday and Saturday) were an institution. Friday nights featured a 'cocktail hour', with a bar set up in the large 25th-floor 'lounge' equipped for just such events. And on Saturday night, when most of the editorial staff were expected to work as long as it took to 'close' the magazine, the company laid on a three-course meal, complete with silver service and white-coated chefs. Staff lined up with meal trays, selected from two or three main courses, and then took the dome-covered meal down to their desk to be consumed as work permitted. Later they would return for second helpings, and then a range of desserts plus assorted cheeses. I think there were little bottles of wine too, but maybe I'm wrong. Leftover pieces of cutlery and china were among the detritus to be cleared away at the beginning of the following week, as anyone scheduled to work extra late would have stashed away plates of cheese and biscuits and other titbits to see them through the night. At that time, there were very few fast-food outlets near Rockefeller Center that were considered safe destinations after midnight. Apart from this company-supplied food, the only other options were a few nearby restaurants that would deliver orders of Chinese and Italian meals. I suppose some of us also brought in food from home, but I don't recall that many people did.

The company also provided taxi-fares to everyone who worked after a certain hour (I think it was 8 or 9pm). This could be claimed the next week as petty cash. And except for Saturday night, when dinner was provided, late-working staff were also entitled to claim set amounts for one or more meals, according to the amount of hours they had worked on any day. No receipts were required for any of these claims, just the record of hours worked. So each week's petty cash entitlements were usually sufficient to pay for the following week's commuting fees. Working even later – after midnight, I think – entitled you to a door-to-door limousine service to your home, even when 'home' was somewhere an hour or more distant. I remember often opting for the taxi money instead of the limousine, and then taking my usual subway home. You could do very well out of petty cash that way.

The final largesse was a very generous profit-sharing system – more or less equivalent to a superannuation scheme, except that employees contributed nothing and were entitled to withdraw the proceeds on resignation, no matter how old (or young) they were. A certain copyboy, a member of the fledgling magazine's original staff, was said to have retired on what, in today's terms, was the equivalent of millions of dollars. (Unfortunately, he died not long after retirement.) At our resignation, my husband's and my profit-sharing proceeds were sufficient to pay our fares to Australia and set us up a flat in Sydney – not a bad return for a couple in their late 20s.

Time's concentrated work week resulted from the desire to publish news that was as current as possible at the time of going to press. Theoretically the magazine 'closed' early on Saturday evening. Exactly what this mythical Saturday deadline was varied from time to time as the managing editor attempted to implement budgetary cutbacks. Each edition's cover-story, special colour features and some 'back of the book' sections (Art, Books, Film etc.) had earlier closing times, as these sections did not usually depend on late-breaking news. This meant that pre-press activities and even some printing could begin before later news sections of the magazine had closed. (Remember: I'm describing production activities of more than 40 years ago, before typesetting and other publishing tasks were computerised.)

No matter what the official closing time was supposed to be, it was rarely achieved. The final 'closing' for the week meant the last corrections to the last story were sent from the New York office to the printing plant in Chicago. Time rented direct telephone lines for the transmission of typeset stories as data. This was achieved by inserting rolls of perforated paper tape, whose perforations contained code for all text, punctuation and line-breaks, into machines in New York. This data was then transmitted electronically over those phone lines to the Chicago plant. Exactly how the lines of text were to be placed on each page was shown on full-size layout sheets on which graphic artists pasted up galley-proofs of text and 'bromides', or reproductions, of photos in actual final sizes to exactly fill each column of each page. These layouts, along with 150 or so possible photos that might be used that week, were dispatched to the Chicago printing plant in a series of packages sent via commercial flights on successive days of the editorial week.

In a later position at Time it was my job to arrange those packages and flights, no mean feat when Chicago had some of the worst winter weather and highest snowfalls of all the major US airports. For winter days when O’Hare Airport closed down completely due to bad weather, I had access to a group of daredevil messengers whom we would employ to hand-deliver Time’s well-identified large red cardboard envelopes to the Chicago printing plant. The messengers would choose from various alternative routes, including charter flights to smaller airports in towns near Chicago where shorter runways could be ploughed clear of snow just prior to landing a small plane. Or I would send fearless teams of messengers by overnight train, with instructions to go as far as possible by rail and then hire a truck or car for the rest of the journey. Sometimes, messengers set out in their own all-weather vehicles, choosing to make the 700-mile trip by road, and usually getting there. Even in good weather, unaccompanied packages sent via the regular weekly flights would sometimes go astray, turning up days, even weeks, later. Once a phone call from a Pacific island alerted me to the fact one of my red Time packages had been sitting at the airport there for weeks!

Original photos were always copied before being dispatched – sometimes from negatives, if we had them, but in the case of photos that had come in from wire services such as AAP, our lab would make a copy from the original photo before dispatching the original in one of the packages to Chicago. These back-up copies made from photos and not negatives were of reduced quality, and no one liked having to use them. But when packages containing original photos were lost or couldn't get through, and the photo was considered important, we might have no choice. If it was late in the week and there wasn't time to dispatch a replacement package, we might even have to resort to wiring this copy to Chicago via what was then a crude form of faxing. In such cases, difficult questions would be asked at the next week's post-mortem meetings. But I'll describe that process in a later article.

I remember one time when the mythical Saturday closing deadline actually was achieved. There was quite a celebration but in fact the success was probably the result of a boring news week. In any case, too early a closing would have wreaked havoc with the weekly poker game – another Time tradition – which moved from office to office, according to who was rostered as ‘late editor’ that week. Generally, however, no-one below the status of senior editor seemed to take the deadline very seriously. Last-minute news stories and additional facts and photos to go into existing stories were being added all the time. But eventually the week’s 'late man' – one of the production staff – would paste down the last line of type on the last page of layout and call the edition ‘closed’. This meant the last proofreading team, the last blue-pencil wielding writer and editor and the last copyboy could finally go home. Rarely did this happen before midnight. More often it was 2, 3, 5 or even 10am Sunday morning.

I remember occasionally working right through Saturday and Sunday and on to Monday morning – for example, on the weekend Robert Kennedy was assassinated, and again when Martin Luther King was shot. Events such as these resulted in all-new cover stories replacing whatever had been scheduled, no matter how late. On such occasions, the company would take a group of rooms in a nearby hotel and staff would go there in shifts to get some sleep (always on full pay, of course). Nor was it unusual to see a layout artist laid out on his work bench, sound asleep, his head on a stack of layouts. I remember at such times a certain prematurely bald, dapper little man who usually wore a crisp white shirt was the messenger who would sweep out of the elevator from the managing editor's office upstairs and sail down the hall into the complex of rooms on Floor 24 where production staff worked, calling out: 'Hold everything. New cover.' There would be groans and expletives all around, especially from persons who'd been foolish enough to make a date for midnight on what had seemed a quiet news week. I suspect the couches in editors' offices at Time saw more use – by sleepers, at least – than furniture in a lot of New York office suites.

I think an early proof of the magazine was delivered from Chicago to the managing editor's Connecticut home on Sunday. In any case, the first magazines were on New York newsstands on Monday morning and a copy on everyone’s desk in the Time offices on Tuesday. If that week's edition contained errors or faults of any kind, the storm would have had time to brew before production staff arrived at work on Wednesday, the beginning of our work week. Then the mood of gloom would be palpable even before you arrived at your desk. But if everything had gone well, those of us who began work on Wednesday would begin the job of cleaning up last week's mess. Long, lazy lunches were also a feature of these quiet Wednesdays – often paid for by the petty cash one collected from the downstairs business office on presentation of the previous week's timesheet.

In the next two articles in this series, I'll describe how proofreading was done at Time Magazine. I doubt any magazine today could afford to have as comprehensive (and expensive) a proofreading system as did the publications produced by Time-Life in those days.

Another round of therapy ends

2011-06-02T17:40:00.002+10:00

Tuesday dawned bright and sunny up here on the Sunshine Coast, and we could happily have sat out in the late autumn sunshine for the rest of the day.

But just minutes after taking this photo, we were off to Brisbane for the last of 12 sessions in a semester-long Aphasia Clinic at the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, University of Queensland. This is the third time that we've participated in this clinic – we did our first UQ clinic in 2009, not long after Allen's release from hospital, and we went again for one semester in 2010.

Each clinic group contains six or seven participants who have some form of aphasia – most of whom acquired the condition as a result of stroke. Almost all the participants come along with a family member (usually a spouse, but sometimes a son or daughter). Each week's session includes one hour of group therapy activities, and one hour of individual therapy. Here small groups of participants have to rearrange a series of pages, each of which contains text and a photo, into a logical sequence to make a story. This demonstrates clearly that aphasia therapy is about much more than just speech. The full spectrum of mental processes can be affected by the deterioration in areas of the brain that affects a person's ability to use language. Sequencing difficulties are just one of many other problems that people with aphasia may experience.

The UQ clinic program is conducted by Undergraduate Speech Pathology students working under the supervision of a Speech Pathologist from the teaching faculty. The moderate cost of $200 per clinic, or just over $8 per hour, is exceptional value for speech pathology sessions. And the group environment is particularly good for building confidence.

As well as developing and delivering Allen's individual therapy sessions, Dana and Caitlin, the two students assigned to us, administered standard speech pathology tests to Allen over the 12 weeks: the Boston Naming Test and two subtests of the Psycholinguistic Assessments of Language Processing in Aphasia (PALPA): subtests 47 (Spoken Word-Picture matching) and 48 (Written Word-Picture Matching).

Testing is worked into therapy sessions in a relaxed and friendly manner, so Allen's performance was not adversely affected by any anxiety about the process. Then at the final session, Dana and Caitlin presented us with a comprehensive 6-page report summarising Allen's test results, and comparing these to results from previous years. The report also documents his progress on therapy goals we had set for these sessions, and gives recommendations for future therapy.

Allen's poor score on naming simple objects (19/60) confirmed that he has severe word-finding difficulties. This result is down from 29/60 in 2009 and 39/60 in 2006, when he was first diagnosed (55 is considered an average score). However, when he doesn't have to name an object himself, but simply has to match a given word to a picture, or vice versa, he scores almost perfectly (37/40 and 39/40). This confirms that his comprehension of words is relatively intact – as we know from the fact that he is still an avid reader. (Currently he's re-reading Dickens and recently finished a couple of Bill Bryson's travel books.)

In past years, when we have presented a copy of the UQ report about Allen's progress to the gerontologist who treats him for aphasia, and who administers his own tests once a year, he has been very impressed with the quality of the UQ reports, and the depth of coverage. We, too, have been well pleased with all three of the UQ Aphasia Clinics we attended over three years. And I would certainly encourage anyone with aphasia to participate (the Speech Pathology Clinic webpage gives contact details – but remember to specify that you're interested in the Aphasia Clinic, which is not specifically listed on the website).

In spite of this, I think we may not be participating in further clinics. I tried to explain my reasons for this in an email to our student therapists, part of which read as follows:

I’m not sure how much Allen can profit from continued therapy that ‘challenges’ him. Whereas this used to have a good effect on him, when he was able to feel he could make progress, I’m afraid now he mainly gets frustrated by what he can’t do. His intelligence is not affected – so he knows how badly he’s performing on some therapy tasks. And sometimes this depresses him. I’m not saying this has happened too much this semester. But I have noticed a difference in his reaction to therapy.

I am inclined to think that it’s better for us to organise more social occasions – visits with friends, going out to see plays and such – than to take part in too much therapy. The truth is that Allen isn’t going to improve; he is only going to deteriorate – that’s the unfortunate nature of Primary Progressive Aphasia. But luckily, Allen is highly motivated and undertakes quite a lot of mental activity at home – he routinely works on his daily word-finding puzzle (seeing how many words he can make from a given set of 9 letters) and inevitably scoring very well) and on various other pen-and-pencil activities, plus he does lots of reading every day. So I think it’s best for him to continue that kind of activity – plus our two-times-monthly sessions with members of our own Sunshine Coast Aphasia Group – and perhaps undertake more physical activity, maybe even another round of physiotherapy.

I think a more relaxed lifestyle may be better for Allen than having to work on set tasks, or homework, that he tends to worry about finishing. And that’s why I’ve decided it’s best for us not to continue with clinics – especially since the distance we have to travel is quite a strain on both of us. It’s been a very good experience for both of us, but I think the time has come for us to be a bit more relaxed in how we deal with Allen’s aphasia.

God knows I’ve pushed Allen very hard for the past few years, and in many ways that has benefited him. But I think the time has come when we should go along at a more relaxed pace, and enjoy life without pressuring Allen too much to try and perform at a level that is difficult for him. Does that make sense to you? We’ve lived with this situation for quite a few years now, and I guess in some ways we are both rather tired of the hard work. So I guess I need a break as much as he does. Maybe by next year I’ll feel differently, but for now I think more time in the sun and less on the road is the way to go.

My time at Time: Getting a job as proofreader

2011-05-21T16:59:00.071+10:00

This is the first in a series of articles about my first job in publishing – in the editorial offices of Time Magazine at Rockefeller Center, New York City. It was 1965 and I had just moved to New York with my new husband, who was already working for Time. With his help, I secured a job as proofreader and thus began a fascinating period in my young working life.

For four years in the late 1960s, I worked at Time Magazine in New York City, initially as a ‘proofreader’ and then in a position that used to be called 'girl friday', working for the Production Editor. Since then I have had a lot of different jobs in publishing, but I have never had a job in which I learned so much so quickly – not only about writing, editing, and publishing but also about the complicated, sometimes amusing, often frustrating but never boring relationships that exist in an environment where everyone is dedicated to achieving a first-class output in spite of incredible pressure and crazy time constraints.

All of Time's employees were expected to share in a fanatical pursuit of factual accuracy and grammatical correctness, of which the copy-handling system was but one example. Indeed, in what was then a predominantly black and white publication, with only a limited number of photos and a few graphics each week (mainly maps) to relieve the monotony of text blocks, the attention paid to the quality of this text would be foreign to many young journalists working today. So when I migrated to Australia in 1970 and began work as a journalist in Sydney, imagine my surprise to find many Australian journalists had a collection of favourite stories about awful errors in the pages of Time.

What I hadn’t appreciated as a starry-eyed young American, of course, was that Time, in spite of the best efforts of a worldwide stable of correspondents, was very much a US publication with a typically American self-centredness. The facts and impressions recorded and reported so diligently by international correspondents were, at that time, the raw material from which New York writers and editors built up Time's international stories. Canada was an exception. Time ran an editorial office there and produced four or so pages of Canadian content in a special section of each issue. And in the late 1960s, there was some discussion about setting up such an office in Sydney. But nothing like the Canadian editorial office ever existed in Australia, where Time maintained a production centre, but not an editorial facility. Anyway, to Time's founders America was the centre of the known universe, and ‘America’ meant the United States. Their successors who were my bosses seemed to narrow the focus even further, and the Time-Life Building in Rockefeller Center became the epicentre of the universe. And working for what everyone at Time considered the most important newsmagazine in the world, one came gradually to share this view.

Time's proofreading department was the battlefront on which the magazine waged war on errors. To get a job as a proofreader, I had to study my Webster’s Dictionary and the Time-Style manual (I remember this as a collection of loose-leaf sheets). I was then 'briefed' for the proofreading test by a friend of my first husband, who also worked for the company. But even with this insider preparation, I found the subsequent test formidable.

The proofreading test consisted of a 60-centimetre-long galley proof of a story that contained more errors than I had ever then or have ever since seen in one magazine-length story. Every kind of grammatical inaccuracy and semantic confusion, as well as obvious factual error, seemed to be represented. The biggest problem was finding enough space in the margins to show corrections, which had to be very precisely indicated, using the correct proofreader’s marks. It was also essential to distinguish between 'queries' and 'corrections’. But since the working methods of Time proofreaders were quite different from the conditions in which the test was administered, some latitude was allowed on this point.

After about 20 minutes, my corrected galley was checked by the large, taciturn man who was the boss of the typesetters. I remember sitting at his desk in a deserted office on a Monday or Tuesday, which would have been the only time of the week when his office was not full of running, yelling copyboys, writers, typesetters and layout staff. Blue pencil in one hand, red in the other, he studied my corrections. All around us were scattered the remains of the previous week's galleys and drafts. I learned later that cleaning ladies at Time were trained to clean around piles of old galleys and discarded layouts. At most, they picked up material off the floor and placed it neatly on tables. But deciding what could safely be thrown away was not considered a job for cleaning staff, who might not recognise that some torn bit of galley or layout needed to be kept for one reason or another. As a result, by the end of the week all production offices looked like a disaster zone. And the first job of the week for production staff was to sort through the previous week's mess and file or discard every piece of paper.

I was supposed to have corrected a certain number of errors in order to pass the test. Some allowance was made for the limited time I’d been given, because in theory at least, proofreaders were supposed to be given as much time as they required. When my corrections had been ticked and counted, my total came up two or three marks below the ‘pass mark’. Discovering this, the old typesetter, whose reputation for gruffness and bluntness had already caused me two weeks' anxiety, quietly took his blue pencil and added a few more correct answers on my behalf.

'You're a bright kid,' he said, 'and you betta not make me sorry about this later.' Then he winked at my nearby ‘sponsors’ and told me to report back next Thursday for on-the-job training. It seems I was now a Time proofreader.

In the second article in this series, I'll describe what it was like to work in Time's production department in the 1960s.

Charlotte Maudie Hazelwood

2011-04-29T12:15:00.000+10:00

Here she is: my granddaughter, Charlotte Maudie Hazelwood, born on 19 April, weighing 8.4 pounds. Obviously, that's Mum and Dad (Zoe and Brandon) sharing the spotlight.

Charlotte is ten days old today, and a perfect picture of happy, contented babyhood.

Oh, Mum's doing well, too. In fact, she and Dad have taken to parenthood like ducks to water. They share all the tasks (even the messiest ones), acting as if they've been doing the job for years. I'm so proud of them all. And privileged to be allowed to share in the great joy of welcoming a new baby into their lives.

All's well on the home-front

2011-04-18T02:43:00.002+10:00

After such a long time without posts, I have to start somewhere. So this is a just quick update of a few recent goings-on. But that's not to suggest there's really any excuse for my long silence. One simply gets out of the habit of posting. And as with letter-writing in the 'olden days', the longer you put off writing, the harder it gets to start.

On the home front, the news has been all about...RAIN. And lots of it. In the last four months alone, we've had more rain (1865mm) than in all of 2007 (1700mm) when eastern Australia was in the grip of drought. Of course, 2010 was was the year this state's drought finally broke: we had 2760mm of rain last year, 745mm of which fell in December alone! That had devastating consequences in many parts of Queensland this summer, though thankfully not in our area. Up here in the hilly hinterland we are relatively flood-free, though water poured down every hillside, including from the hill above our block.

I lost one whole bed of vegetables to the excess run-off, except for the row of Asian khon khang which was just getting started at the front of this bed when I took these pix. Eventually it ran riot over the whole soggy bed, and spread out over the path but everything else died.

So in recent weeks Nev (a handyman who is truly deserving of that title) has helped to correct some drainage problems. (Well, 'helped' is not accurate; he did ALL the work; I was only the planner.)

Water can now flow freely over rocks, into the drain

Nev dug out the bank where water flows down from the hillside above our house, and replaced the clay with stones. That should prevent mud from clogging up the good drains I already had running down that side of the property – deep rock-filled drains with agricultural pipe at the bottom, that take the water away down toward the dam at the bottom of our property. In time I hope these rocks will discolour to a warmer shade. But as long as they do their job, I'll be happy. I expect a lovely waterfall here the next time we get big rains.

Raised vegie bed with additional rainwater drains

That problem bed in the vegie garden has been raised and a new drain added all around it – with ag pipe at the bottom of a deep trench filled with stones. That should direct water away from this vegie bed and down into the paddock, joining up with another drain there that channels water coming down from our driveway and parking area. The bank of soil we left alongside the vegie bed drain, still covered by tarps here, will be mulched next week.

Eventually I may plant the khon khang along that bank, and an armful of it is already taking root in a bucket of water, ready for transplanting. This Asian green is good in salads when young, and can also be added to stir-fries, though it hasn't much flavour itself and has to be jazzed up with sauces. But it's rather vigorous, so must be kept away from dams. Up here near the top of the block, it won't do any harm. And it will grow well anywhere other vegies would drown.

My relatively new lemon tree, on the hill above the vegie garden, is carrying a nice little crop in its second year since planting. I just trawled through my plant tags but couldn't find one for the lemon, so I can't tell you the variety. But they're big, smooth, thinly skinned fruit with lots of juice.

Just alongside the lemon is a little grove of lady finger bananas. We've just finished the first bunch of the season, and there are another three bunches almost ready to pick. I have to cut them down green or else turkeys, possums and flying foxes eat some and damage others. A green bunch will usually ripen in a week or two. But after the first week, unless I'm giving some away, I put half the bunch into the fridge to delay ripening. Otherwise we have a glut of bananas all at once, then none for weeks. And with so much of the state's banana crop wiped out by this summer's severe floods, we're relying exclusively on our own supplies this year!

Also on the hill above the vegie garden is a thriving little batch of peppermint. I'm the only person I know who has always had trouble growing mint. It's supposed to spread so easily, as this one has. But in the past it hasn't liked something about my soil or my climate. But in this very wet year, I planted one punnet of mint and it just took off. I pick large handfuls every afternoon and make us a pot of mint tea. And I'm about to harvest even more to make a few litres of mint sauce before it dies down in the coming dry winter season.

But none of this is the really important news I hope to be posting this week. So watch this space closely in the next few days...

Family fun in the sun

2011-01-25T16:35:00.115+10:00

A couple of photos today is all I have time for. Too busy enjoying this exquisite post-deluge sunshine. Allen and I have just come in from a long, luxurious swimming session.

Allen wears a yellow flotation device around his chest. This provides enough buoyancy for him to feel confident going up and down the pool in either a dog paddle or crude back stroke. He's never in the water alone, but without the belt he has a hard time staying upright even at the shallow end. (In our pool, even here at the shallow end, where Allen's standing, the water is chest-deep. We built this pool for swimming, not wading. So the 'deep' end is exactly that: more than two metres deep.)

Allen's balance is poor at the best of times, even on dry land. So when standing chest-deep in water he can't manage even to stand upright unless he has the support of his flotation belt. But with it on, he's quite fearless and gets a lot of good exercise at every session. He used to be a good swimmer once, but swimming is another one of many abilities he has totally lost since his post-operative confinement. Funny what skills have deserted him. For example, he can no longer 'read' an analog clockface. He can recognise that it's time for the news, or nearly mealtime. But he just can't translate the clockface into words – doesn't recognise that the small hand on 10 and the big hand on 5 means 25 minutes past 10. And this is not because he can't find the words; he just doesn't 'read' clock-language any more. Solution: we bought him a digital watch. Problem solved.

And here's another photo I took just a few days ago, when we had a very pleasurable day here with Allen's niece Helen and her husband Bill. Helen and Bill were holidaying down on the Gold Coast and drove up to spend the day with us. Helen is one of two daughters of Allen's late sister, his only sibling, who was much older than him. They had good fun going through some of Allen's old scrapbooks. At one stage we heard a hoot coming from Allen's office, when Helen came across a photo of her grandfather's old ute.

"We used to all go to the beach in that car when I was a kid", she said.

In those days no one worried about carrying a bunch of small kids in the back of a ute.

It was a lovely, relaxed day. Bill and I cooked shish kebabs and marinated chicken on the BBQ. And just as we were about to serve blueberry pie, a couple of friends dropped in and joined the party.

Allen, battling his own afflictions, and Helen, valiantly fighting MS for many years, obviously share the same gutsy and fun-loving genes.

Sunday visitor

2011-01-23T13:18:00.009+10:00

Allen spotted it first. By the time I got to the kitchen window, our little visitor was happily sunning himself on the stones. But I think Allen said he had come down from the top of a nearby gas canister. I say 'I think' because it's very difficult for Allen to give a detailed, accurate account of any scene he's witnessed. He just can't find enough words to explain himself clearly. And if I ask too many questions to try and elicit information, he gets confused or upset. Then he's likely to tell me anything just to stop my questions.

Tree snake? Whip snake? Taipan??? (2011)

Whether this snake was climbing over the gas canister, or wound around the base of the canister is an important distinction. 'Climbing over' would mean this is probably a harmless tree snake. 'Wound around the base' means it could be a ground snake. In Queensland, snakes that climb up into trees and other structures are usually safe (unless the tree snake is a python and you're a baby or a little dog!) Snakes that only slither over the ground are best avoided, because they're more than likely to be poisonous. And even though this visitor was on the ground when I photographed him, I think he's either a tree snake (harmless) or a little whip snake (only slightly poisonous, and not very aggressive). (See * & ** below.) Whatever it is, you have to admire the wonderful camouflage. You could walk right by and never notice it.

Keelback on terrace steps (2010)

I don't think today's visitor is one of the little keelbacks who emerged from a nest under our terrace steps last year. The keelback had quite different markings, as you can see by comparing the top photo with this one of a keelback taken last year, when we seemed to have them all over the place for a few weeks during their breeding season. And even though keelbacks are ground snakes, in fact they aren't poisonous. Moreover, they are the only snake that can successfully eat small cane toads – those introduced pests that are slowly outcompeting our native frog populations. The cane toad is itself highly poisonous to any animal that tries to eat it. But the keelback somehow grabs the toad from the rear, and kills it before the toad can trigger its poisonous glands. Today's visitor didn't have the keelback's distinctive feature – those vertical black markings under the mouth.

Looking up our road, from our driveway entrance.

In our fourteen years of living up here in the coastal hinterland, I have never yet seen one of the lethal eastern brown snakes. Most snakes seem to me to be to be brownish in colour anyway, but the genuine brown snake is one of the largest and most deadly of the venomous snakes. My neighbour tells me that my predecessor on this block, the man who built this house and lived here for ten years, did occasionally see a brown snake on the property. But at that time, this was the only house on this side of the road. Adjacent one-acre blocks and blocks across the road had not yet been built on. Now there are houses up and down the road on both sides, and what were formerly neglected fields of tall grass and bushes are now lawns and gardens. Also, many people have dogs and though a brown snake can easily kill a curious dog, snakes generally prefer to avoid big animals and humans rather than attack, though we all have heard horror stories of aggressive brown snakes chasing people when they could easily have got away instead.

Oh dear. I didn't set out here to discourage friends and family from visiting. Honest. But I have learned to live with snakes, or with the knowledge that they're around. And let's face it: they're a lot less lethal than the gun-toting neighbours I might have had if I'd settled in some rural area of the USA instead of Australia!

An elegant carpet python making his way to the hidey-hole over Allen's office, where he spent two consecutive winters just a few years ago

* I sent photos of today's visitor to someone whose opinion I respect. He consulted all his snake books and came back with a tentative suggestion that our snake could be a juvenile taipan! That's not a good result (for us). He suggested I send the photos off to a local snake-catcher for a more definite ID. Watch this space!

** The snake catcher has replied: "The lovely snake you have is not a taipan or a brown snake. It IS a yellow-faced whip snake . It has front fangs but is not considered dangerous to humans. It will however cause some effects. As always seek medical advice." But my friend is not convinced. He's sent the photos to the Qld Museum for a second opinion! In any case, if I see it again I plan to treat it with great respect, whatever it is.

Surprise: 'We're expecting a baby!

2011-01-22T14:59:00.001+10:00

I can't believe I've waited months to shout this news from the blog-rafters: I'm going to have my own grandchild at last!

I'm already a grandparent-by-marriage to Allen's two grandsons and one granddaughter. I have learned so much from that experience and been grateful for those kids' acceptance of me in that role. But in April my own daughter will herself become a Mum. I've been both amazed and overjoyed by how much that means to me at this stage of my life.

I had long resigned myself to the possibility that this might never happen. That helping to nurse Z through the difficult birth of a PhD and acting as granny to a Jack Russell who thinks she's human might be the closest I would get to the pleasures of grannydom. But when Z&B married one and a half years ago after several years of living together, I allowed myself a little frisson of hope.

Still, it came as a wonderful surpise when, not long after she and B arrived here for a family weekend in August, Z whipped out a little plastic wand showing two blue stripes. I let out a genuine whoop and leapt off my chair.

Then in October, Allen and I were invited to join Z&B in Brisbane on the occasion of her important nuchal translucency scan at thirteen weeks. There we saw the 'little sprout' herself – though the baby's gender didn't become known until a later scan. But as my son-in-law said after that first scan, "it's much more than just a jellybean now". And so it was. In fact, I was truly amazed at the level of development, even at that very early stage in the pregnancy. I had never seen a baby moving inside the womb, other than on TV. It certainly is a humbling experience.

Now, six months into gestation, all is going very well down in Brisbane. And up here in Doonan, there's knitting and sewing underway for both bub and expectant Mum. I am looking forward to holding 'our' baby almost as much as I once looked forward to her mother's arrival.

With all that's happened in Allen's and my lives in recent years – my mother's stroke and then death, the diagnosis of Allen's brain disease, his near-death and long, complicated recovery after life-saving surgery, and adjusting to my caregiver role – this truly is, as I told Z, the best news I've had in years, a reason to look to the future with something other than anxiety. Life goes on...literally. And what could be more hope-giving than a new little life.

(My daughter's blog about this happy event is Iddy Biddy Hippo.)

PPA and hospitalisation

2010-12-06T14:20:00.001+10:00

I've written about this before (see Aphasia sufferers: Avoid hospital, if possible!). But something – I don't know what – has prompted me to summarise it here again.

My husband, Allen, was diagnosed with PPA in 2006. Annual scans since then show that the left side of his brain is deteriorating at a modest rate. And his communication competence has deteriorated accordingly. Even so, the extensive regime that he follows of various self-designed therapies of intellectual activity appear to be paying off, according to the gerontologist who treats him. And last month's annual visit to the specialist, following this year's nuclear scans, resulted in a big 'thumbs up': "You've made my day", was the gerontologist's summary. It might well have been otherwise, however.

In 2009, Allen required open-heart surgery to repair badly malfunctioning heart valves. The heavy sedation required for that invasive surgery, perhaps made worse by many hours on a heart-lung machine, had a catastrophic effect on Allen’s compromised brain. He experienced serious post-surgical complications. Initially, Allen did not wake for several days after surgery. When he did finally regain consciousness, he experienced epileptic-type fits. So additional medication was used to control those reactions, and this resulted in more days of virtual inertia and serious breathing problems. A tracheotomy had to be performed so Allen could be intubated, and a Pacemaker was inserted a few days later. After five weeks, further surgery was required when his original wound became infected and the surgical reconnections of the breastbone unravelled.

In all, Allen was nine weeks in Intensive Care, a further two weeks in hospital, and two more weeks at a rehabilitation hospital (though access to the latter was initially denied him, in view of his inability to fully cooperate with therapists; only the intervention of our surgeon secured him a place in rehab). Throughout Allen’s hospitalisation, many of the health professionals who treated him did not appear to allow for the complications that resulted from PPA brain damage. Eventually, after the second surgery that screwed together the damaged breastbone, Allen’s treating physician did give instructions that Allen should be allowed to do things at his own pace. This meant weeks of continued inactivity under full-time supervision of an Intensive Care nurse, and no rushing Allen to ‘get up on his feet’. Even so, it was weeks before doctors and nurses agreed NOT to give Allen sleeping tablets at night, as these had a devastating effect on his consciousness for at least 24 hours afterwards. However, they would not agree to stop giving him anti-depressants and, later, anti-psychotic drugs, even though the latter produced hallucinations that continued throughout rehab, where he was gradually weaned off all mind-altering substances.

It seemed to me that Intensive Care protocols made no allowance for the effects of brain damage on other medical procedures – even though we were actually warned about this in our pre-surgical briefings! After the operation, Allen was forced to try and stand and then walk long before he was sufficiently alert to cooperate – which placed great strain on his wound and, in my opinion, may even have contributed to the detachment of surgical repairs to the breastbone. Physical therapists did not vary their routines or timetables to take account of Allen’s good and bad periods of wakefulness. If he couldn’t manage the required movements at the time allotted for his morning therapy, often because of the effects of sleep medication, he would miss out on therapy for that day. There was effectively NO speech therapy administered in hospital or rehab – other than so-called ‘swallow therapy’ to determine what type of food he should eat and to ‘test’ his level of communication. Other than good physical therapy in rehab that resulted in his being able to walk with the help of a walking frame, the only useful therapy Allen received throughout his period in hospital or rehab was what I provided during long days at his bedside, seven days a week. Had he not had a partner to do that, he would most probably now be in a wheelchair in a high-care nursing home (which, at the time of his discharge from hospital, is where his physician told me to place him!)

We know that PPA damage is progressive, and that things may continue to get worse. But hospitalisation and surgery, far from being a remedy for a PPA sufferer, may well be a ticket to a nursing home, or worse. So before you or a partner who suffers from PPA undergoes any surgical procedure, be sure to do a lot of investigating and talking around. Make sure your surgeon AND relevant hospital staff understand something about PPA and the likely effects it may have on routine medical procedures. Find out what medication is routinely used in post-surgical treatment, especially in Intensive Care wards, and what if any effects such medication may have on a compromised brain.

We were lucky in having a surgeon who was totally supportive of Allen’s needs and, most importantly, who recognised and validated my expertise in interpreting Allen’s behaviours and responses and my knowledge about PPA. Initially at least, I did not enjoy the same relationship with the other health professionals who treated Allen through long weeks of post-surgical hospitalisation. And if your partner suffers from PPA, be prepared for the fact that if you have done the minimum amount of research about PPA that caregivers usually do, then you will probably know more about the condition than anyone who treats your husband in a routine hospital environment. So you, as advocate, may well be your partner’s most important healthcare provider. And this may be a tiring and thankless job, since health professionals’ initial response to you may well be hostile. You may have to fight your way into ALL consultations about your partner’s care – including being present when ‘rounds’ are done (initially, I was locked out of the ICU ward at these times). The only medical professionals who really know and understand your partner’s needs – e.g. your family doctor (if you’re lucky), your gerontologist or other specialist – will not be accessible to you and your partner in hospital. So your partner may be treated as if he or she is demented, which is distressing. Or just as bad, information, questions and/or instructions may be directed at your partner, which he or she either cannot understand or remember, and which he or she cannot tell you about, if you weren’t there at the time.

It is a battle to get best-practice treatment for a PPA sufferer in hospital. And I’m told by friends who have had a stroke or whose partner has had a stroke, that the same applies to most aphasia sufferers. So even though we who live with PPA are prepared for the fact that our lives have been turned upside down and it’s a constant battle to retain communication function, it’s an even bigger battle if you also have to undergo what might otherwise be a routine surgical procedure. Be prepared for that, be vigilant throughout the experience and then fight your way back to health afterwards, even if the medical experts give up on you.

Spring cleaning in Doonan

2010-11-11T14:20:00.007+10:00

After many months of mainly pleasurable slogging, interrupted by a two-week trip to NSW, I can finally claim that the garden is (more or less) under control. Oh dear. That sounds too much like a statement from the anal-retentive school of gardening! Let's say, instead, that these days walking around my undulating 1.3 acres of greenery gives me pleasure, not pain – and that certainly wasn't the case a few months ago, where every tour of the garden left me feeling I would never be able to claw back the mountain of weeds that had overwhelmed so many garden areas.

First, the stairway down to the so-called 'camping platform' is relatively weed-free, and the weeping lilly pilly hedge, the planting of which was Allen's last big pre-operative effort, is now well mulched. Admittedly, that nice little bit of level ground near the pond that we refer to as the camping platform has only ever seen tents twice, when the guest-rooms overflowed on two Christmases. But I live in hope that one day grandchildren or other young visitors will set up their tents down there to enjoy some peaceful sunsets. Meanwhile, we ought to refer to it as 'the badminton court', as that's what we mostly use it for in summertime.

The pool surrounds, too, are all weeded, and the annual springtime show has begun. At the moment, it's bougainvillea. But the humble abelia (bottom right in the photo) and showier gardenias will do their thing a bit later in the season.

Just in case, dear reader, you don't appreciate the amount of toil and bother this has all required, here's a peak at how the above area looked before the big spring clean-up! And that's not just any old weed in this shameful photo. Most of what obliterated all the plants around the pool is a dreadful vine with barb-like seedpods. The most I could do in any day's weeding was about two metres of garden! And each day before coming indoors, I'd have to unpick hundreds of the sticky weed seeds off all my clothes and gloves. That's subtropical gardening for you!

Some of the less showy corners haven't been overlooked either. This little pathway leads from the vegetable garden below, up alongside a small watertank the contents of which are used to top up the pool, to an area alongside my studio where we keep our wastebins etc. It's a route I often take, but until now it's been a slippery bank of muddy grass, and more than once I've nearly tumbled in my rush to get from one place to another. So I decided to use pieces of preserved pine and some of the gravel that was left over from the new drains that handyman Neville installed under my raised vegie bed, to make myself a set of secure little steps here – part of my ongoing 'make the garden safer and easier for old age' program!

When we finished draining and raising that vegie bed, to take away the water that pours down onto this area from the hillside above during tropical downpours, this is what the vegie garden looked like.

The next photo shows what it looked like this morning. So it seems those drains are working well. The 40 sugarbags of mushroom compost that I mixed in probably helped, too.

Incidentally, the white chair in these photos is one of four that I picked up at the tip shop for a few dollars. I've placed them in strategic locations around the garden where Allen might need a short rest while taking his exercise. He can pretty much walk around the whole block now, thanks to four different sets of railings installed for us by Maroochy Home Assist.

The Home Assist Secure service is a State Government program that helps people who have disabilities continue to live in their own homes. Allen became eligible for this assistance when an Aged Care Assessment Team determined that his post-operative problems entitled him to 'high care' status. That ACAT assessment was intended to convince me that Allen should be placed in a nursing home. Luckily, it failed to do so, but it has proven to be a useful label for other reasons.

So far Maroochy Home Assist has built us access ramps over door sills (when Allen was first home and needed to use a wheelchair), adapted our shower so that I could roll Allen in and out using a shower chair (that's also when he was first home – now he walks in and out on his own steam) and installed numerous 'grab rails' in the bathroom and toilet. They also send someone to clean out my rain gutters whenever I request it, and a plumber came to give me advice about our sewage drains. If there are materials needed for any job (e.g. the timber and cement for the various railings and support posts), we pay for the materials. But the labour is free. Unfortunately, they don't do big repairs or general gardening and weeding. But it's a great service, and we couldn't easily have managed without this help, especially in the difficult first months after Allen came home from rehab. A lifetime of our tax dollars coming home – that's how I see it!

The very first area I worked on when I began the Big Spring Clean was the garden alongside the driveway parking area. And I finished that just in time for our own little annual azalea show. In fact, this photo is now more than a month old, so the azaleas are almost ready for their post-flowering trim. But that's not nearly as photogenic a stage as bloom-time. So I'm showing you that slightly older photo here.

Luckily, my garden doesn't usually get as much out of hand as it did this year. But it was a difficult winter for both Allen and me, thanks in part to his fractured shoulder injury. Suddenly Allen again needed assistance with just about every one of the basic tasks he had relearned to do for himself over the previous year (like showering and even cutting up his food). So for four months during his slow recovery from the fracture, we focused mainly on indoor pursuits and twice weekly visits to the rehab hospital. And of course, we also spent a lot of time preparing for Allen's Sydney presentation. But things are getting back to normal now, so I hope that not only will it be easier to keep the garden in shape this summer, there'll also be more time for blogging.

Rose-coloured leaves on lilly pilly trees and azure flowers on jacarandas mean Spring has arrived in Queensland.

My Life in the Theatre – and Afterwards

2010-10-24T18:54:00.011+10:00

What follows is a copy of a 'talk' that my husband, ALLEN HARVEY, gave in Sydney recently, at the National Conference of the Australian Aphasia Association. Allen had written the text over the previous two months, and rehearsed its delivery for weeks prior to the conference, which had the name: 'Beyond Words'.

Primary progressive aphasia, the condition which is slowly eating away at the part of Allen's brain that controls speech, was the subject of one strand of the Sydney conference. Allen's presentation, which was accompanied by a slide show containing 90 photos, formed an interlude between papers presented by speech therapists with a special interest in this form of aphasia. The text of Allen's talk and a selection of photos from the slide show are included in this post.

Allen read his talk from a written text, because even though he can no longer converse fluently in complete sentences, he is able to read just about anything aloud from a written text – word-perfect, in this case. Indeed, one of the conference participants congratulated Allen afterwards, saying: "Your speech was so clear that I understood you better than any other presenter at this conference!" The training of a lifetime still serves, I guess.

Here, then, is Allen's talk...

I was born with holes in my heart.

The doctor told my mother: “He will not live beyond his thirties.”

Look at me now! 81 and still going strong.

I had my first open-heart surgery in 1962. Last year, I had open-heart surgery again. The heart was fixed OK, but I had big problems after the operation.

I have Primary Progressive Aphasia, and my brain didn’t like all the drugs I had during surgery. So! I was in Intensive Care for nine weeks.

The doctor told my wife: “You’ll never take him home.”

Well, here I am again! Just stubborn, I guess.

Aphasia is a sneak. I didn’t feel anything. I never had a stroke, and I didn’t get hit in the head like some others. Actually it made me laugh when I said the wrong word, or when driving my wife asked me to turn right and I turned left. At first, I took no notice. But my wife and kids noticed.

I couldn’t remember names. I would say the wrong word and even stutter a little. This went on for some time. Eventually, we decided to see a doctor. We thought maybe I had a stroke.

I had a brain scan, and the doctor told us: “No, not a stroke. You have Primary Progressive Aphasia. There’s no known cause. And it will probably get worse.”

Let me tell you about my life, so you will see what aphasia has meant to me.

All my life I’ve worked in the theatre. Here’s how I got started.

When I was twenty a friend asked me, would I be in a musical comedy? “We need men for the chorus”, he said. So I said: “All right”.

I went to a rehearsal and I saw a lot of people of all ages, talking and laughing. Suddenly a voice called: “Attention, please, ladies and gentlemen. I want to do the scene in the ballroom”.

I found out this man is called the producer, and he tells the actors what to do. I decided: that is what I want to do.

In the Sydney paper I found the Independent Theatre in North Sydney. It presented plays and also had a Drama School. So I started doing two classes a week.

Over the next five years, I learned stage management at the Independent by watching the plays, and I learned producing by watching rehearsals.

So that’s how I got started. After that, I worked six years in stage management, production and acting, in Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth.

These pictures show a few of the shows I worked on.

I also did tours to country towns...

...and several tours of New Zealand

In 1960, Canberra Repertory asked me to be their Manager and Producer. I said yes. With my wife Meril (Grace) and sons Julian and Andrew, I was in Canberra for four years.

Next, the Elizabethan Theatre Trust and the British Council gave me a scholarship to study acting and production in the UK for one year. And the French and German embassies added some money.

And so I visited drama companies and saw plays, operas and musical comedies in England, Germany, Italy and France – one hundred and twenty-nine different productions. On my way home, I saw twenty more plays in New York and Canada.

Back in Australia, the Theatre Trust made me production director of the Theatre Royal in Hobart. During two years there, I produced about fifteen plays, one opera and two musical comedies.

Next I went as director to the National Theatre of Perth, and after that back to Canberra for a while.

Through someone I met in Canberra, I was invited to Hawaii to open a new theatre for the Bishop Museum. I stayed two years in Hawaii, producing plays, exhibits, dances and songs – all relating to Hawaiian history. I also wrote, produced and acted in a play about Robert Louis Stevenson, who came to Hawaii many times.

Back in Australia I moved into arts administration, first at the Australia Council and then as Executive Officer of the Tasmanian Arts Advisory Board.

Then I wrote two plays – one for the ABC and one for a theatre-in-education company. I also wrote dozens of radio and TV scripts for ABC education.

And I wrote and produced a series of musical revues.

In Tasmania in the late 70s I also met my current wife. Carol and I have been together for more than 30 years.

Our family includes my sons Chris and Julian, daughter Zoe and three grandchildren.

Son Julian marries Teri in September 2009

Daughter Zoe marries Brandon in July 2009

Another son, Andrew, died in a motorbike accident.

Julian & Chris at my 80th birthday

Andrew Harvey 1959-1968

When I finally retired in 1996, I had been a director, stage manager or actor on one hundred and sixty different productions.

For the next 10 years Carol and I lived and travelled in developing countries, where she worked on aid projects.

We lived in the Philippines and Laos, and we stayed in Vietnam and Cambodia. We would visit villages and schools. Carol says I was like Prince Philip. I would walk behind her with my hands behind my back, and chat with everyone.

Now I have a new job: dealing with aphasia! I’ve had speech therapy several times. I had two semesters at a University clinic for people with aphasia.

This year, Carol and I took part in an aphasia clinic on the Sunshine Coast for eight weeks. The seven couples from that clinic have now formed the Sunshine Coast Aphasia Group. We meet two times a month for conversation and activities.

At home, I spend my time writing memoires and letters, reading, doing word puzzles and computer programs for aphasia, and singing every day.

Sam helps Granpa Allen with his speech therapy homework

I also try to keep active. I go to rehab twice a week for exercise and therapy.

And I help Carol in the garden.

Well, that’s my life so far. I’ve gone well past thirty. Wouldn’t my mother be surprised!

Ode to the first day of Spring

2010-09-01T00:31:00.001+10:00

It's been a long time since I posted anything here. So this is a modest beginning to what I hope will be my blogging comeback! Friends have asked if anything's wrong to account for my recent silence. Quite the opposite.

We've both been doing very well. Allen's been busily engaged in a rehab program for the past three months, and this will continue for another six weeks. At home, he's working every day on his presentation for the upcoming national conference of the Australian Aphasia Association in Sydney. (We'll post that here in a few weeks, with accompanying photos.)

As for me, I've been working many hours each day in the garden, making up for almost two years when all I had time (or energy) for was borderline garden maintenance. I'll be showing the results of some of my work in future posts.

For now, here are just a couple of photos of a few highlights on the terrace and in the garden.

This beautiful orchid was a gift to me from JW. For me it's a living reminder of her late husband, our very dear and much-missed friend RW. He grew these and other orchids, so when we visited JW a few years ago on our way home from Sydney, she gave me one to take home to Qld. Since then the plant has sat in a corner of the garden, in what should be a perfect microclimate, but it has never bloomed – until now. This year the plant threw up two long flower spears, each of which has a half dozen exquisite blooms. That has to be RW wanting to share the better luck we've enjoyed in 2010.

Not far away from the orchid, two of my begonias are also blooming. (I'll try for a better picture in sunlight; this one was taken as the day was darkening.)

In the light-coloured pot between the two begonias is a ponytail palm I offered to rescue from Zoe's terrace, where it wasn't able to compete with her showier native plants! I'm not actually a great palm lover – most of those I own I inherited with the place, except for half a dozen I planted around the swimming pool. But I am rather partial to ponytails because ten years ago, when I was recovering from breast cancer, my mother sent money with my sister, who visited during my recuperation. N had instructions to buy a plant for my garden. I selected a ponytail palm, and planted it near the pool. For quite a few years it grew and developed into a fine fat specimen. Then, mysteriously, something – I think maybe termites – ate through the 'bowl' at its base and the plant collapsed and died. Now, I have another down near the pool, but I'm still partial to this little orphan.

Finally, today, my little Brazilian cherry bush (it's not big enough to be called a tree) is in full flower. I included this fruit in an earlier post (Summer bounty), where I also showed a photo of the jam we make with it, which is a great favourite of ours. This year the plant is flowering so profusely that if even a quarter of the blossoms develop into fruit, we'll be swamped.

Even from way up on the house terrace, where you look down on this area of the garden, you can clearly make out the snowy appearnace of this little beauty. The hundreds, maybe thousands, of little flowers may be individually insignificant, but en masse they turn the plant into one big powderpuff. Now let's hope that mushroom compost I've just spread underneath the canopy does its stuff. There must be a dozen bottles of Brazilian cherry jam here!

Pumpkin and pastry

2010-07-20T23:03:00.011+10:00

There is so much happening here that I have hardly been near the computer in days. Well, that's not quite true, but it is a convincing opener, right?

JW is making her annual winter visit. It's always lovely to have her company, not only because she gardens, vacuums and today, even did my ironing! No. The fact is she and her faithful pooch Lik-Lik are lovely company. We have loads of good talk, good food and the odd (i.e. daily) drop of red or white.

JW's been instructing A in using watercolours so he can add some colour to his drawings. Tomorrow we are all off to lunch, then Thursday is A's final day in the 6-week rehab program, and Friday his first art class. On the weekend, Reality Bites begins. So I guess there is quite a bit going on – even without counting my trip to the tip today with a trailer-load of prunings and then a stop at the landscape supply place on the way home to fill the trailer with hoop pine mulch. Later this week we will spread that on a section of garden that JW and I cleaned out earlier this week.

Last week while cleaning out the vegie garden we harvested the last of last year's pumpkins – three of mixed size that I found under the winter weeds. Here are two of them, in an arrangement that JW photographed as a fit subject for A's next watercolour project.

This afternoon I turned the art project into a pumpkin pie to take along tomorrow, when we have lunch with Dee, a very special Tasmanian friend who is wintering in nearby Noosa this month.

And since I was making pastry, I thought I might as well double the quantity and make a quiche for tea (see below). It was a spinach and ricotta quiche, with a few trimmings of mushrooms. But the frozen spinach more or less disintegrated during preparation, so the final result was a delicate light green in colour. Quite pretty, and tasty too. But with colouring better suited to a Christmas meal, I thought.

If this has been a very quotidian post, part of the reason is that I'm writing to stay in touch with daughter ZH, who is somewhere in Israel, attending a conference. This is her first overseas trip without hubby for company, so all the mundane news is partly for her benefit.

Come meet us in Maroochydore

2010-07-19T12:25:00.000+10:00

Seven couples here on the Sunshine Coast have got together to support each other in dealing with aphasia, a communication disorder that affects a person’s ability to use language to communicate. We're calling ourselves the Sunshine Coast Aphasia Group, and we met earlier this year when we participated in that clinic, organised by Sunshine Coast Speech Pathologists, which I've written about earlier.

Aphasia most commonly occurs as an after-effect of stroke. For five of the seven couples in our group, that is how one partner acquired aphasia – through damage to the language-generating part of the brain as a result of one or more strokes. But other events may also cause aphasia. One person had an accident which resulted in damage to that part of the brain that controls language. And of course my own husband has a rarer version – primary progressive aphasia – in which the language-generating areas of the brain begin to deteriorate for no apparent reason. Unlike with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, primary progressive aphasia affects only one part of the brain. So as is the case with other aphasia sufferers, my husband has not lost his intelligence or personality. But he is greatly frustrated in his ability to express himself and must struggle endlessly to make himself understood.

Aphasia can take many forms. In my husband’s case, speaking and writing are greatly affected, but he can read quite well. As with many aphasia sufferers, he can also sing along to any song for which he has the words! But the simplest commercial transaction in a shop is a major challenge. That’s because his ability to work with numbers has also deteriorated. So even though he once managed large budgets for theatrical productions, now he has difficulty buying a newspaper, and answering the telephone requires him to read from a printed script.

Aphasia presents differently in every person, however. Some people cannot read at all; many cannot write. Not surprisingly, people who have aphasia may withdraw from contact with the world, or even from family and friends, unless they receive the right kind of support. Often they must learn to engage with the world in a new way. Hence, initiatives like the Sunshine Coast Aphasia Clinic are a godsend for aphasia sufferers, and for their carers, who have a vital role to play in helping maintain the family’s quality of life.

Our group was pretty special in that it happened to include seven couples who were all eager to make contact with others who were struggling with this affliction. For most of us, this was the first time we had the opportunity to share our stories of living with aphasia, and to learn how others cope with the daily challenges we all face. It’s very common for people who come into contact with an aphasia sufferer for the first time to assume the aphasic person is intellectually subnormal, because of the difficulty persons with aphasia may have in expressing themselves. But among ourselves, we find we can relax and have some fun with our peers without being judged.

As our eight 2-hour sessions came to an end, the group decided we would continue to meet socially once a month in a public place. Anyone who is living with aphasia would be welcome to join us. These will be social gatherings, not meetings, but the Australian Aphasia Association, which some of us have joined, will add our group to their list of regional aphasia support groups that is circulated in the organisation’s newsletter, Aphasia Link. That may help other persons with aphasia and their partners or caregivers to link up with us.

The Sunshine Coast Aphasia Group held its first coffee morning on Monday, 12 July. We had a great morning and were still lingering in the cafe's outdoor eating area at midday! If you have aphasia, or are supporting someone with aphasia, or even if you'd just like to know more about aphasia, you are welcome to join us at our monthly coffee mornings on the 2nd Monday of every month at Banjo's (Woolworths Complex, 50 Plaza Pde, Maroochydore) at 10 am. It's not necessary to book, but if you want more information you can contact me by email (chartreuse at ozemail com au). I can then give you my telephone number, if you'd like to speak to me or another member of our group before coming along.

Allen and I are pictured here with two Queensland Health speech pathologists (Cathy on the left; Ruth on the right), and other members of our new Sunshine Coast Aphasia Group, whose friendship and camaraderie A and I value greatly. (Cathy and Ruth were two of the four 'speechies' who organised and facilitated the 8-week clinic that initially brought us all together.) I have not shown faces out of respect for people's privacy. But we are continuing to meet every month, and others are welcome to join us!

If any readers would like more information about aphasia, or about our monthly social gatherings in Maroochydore, please contact me at "chartreuse at ozemail com au" (making the necessary symbol substitutions for 'at' and adding in the full stops.) I'll get back to you then with my personal contact details.

A stormy winter evening

2010-07-10T00:49:00.000+10:00

Just a few hours ago, I walked around the garden and snapped a few shots in the late afternoon light – made more dramatic by a stormy sky presaging a winter storm. And now the rain as started. So the afternoon sky wasn't lying. And once again, the tanks and pool will be overflowing in a season when we are usually using water sparingly, and thinking about topping up the pool. But here are a few things I came across in the garden today.

This poolside hibiscus (Bruceii) refuses to accept it's the end of the season. It keeps flowering and flowering. But next week when I get back down to that area to finish pruning the vegetation around the pool (I'm about halfway done that job), I'll be cutting back these 2-metre tall branches to encourage a bushier habit next summer. It's such a shame these gorgeous flowers don't survive as cut flowers. But I can at least float a few of them in a bowl of water when I chop back the plant. They're too splendid to go immediately to the compost.

Another bit of dramatic colour against the evening sky is this bougainvillea (in spite of its orange to apricot colouring, it is actually called Californian gold). I trimmed the plant recently, and most of it is securely attached to a pergola. But this shoot stubbornly pushes up toward the winter sun.

Earlier in the day I had photographed these snow white flowers of one of my favourite trees. They are ti-tree blooms, dripping with nectar. I don't know the precise variety because the tree was already here when we bought the house 15 years ago. The flowers have just opened in the last day or two. I expect we'll start to hear the humming of swarms of bees that usually gather nectar right alongside the parrots that feed high up in the tree's canopy, which you can see below.

As a matter of fact, there appears to be a beehive at the very top of the tree. I think about it every time I walk up the driveway, right under this spot. I hope it never comes crashing down!

Pink is a prominent colour in my winter garden. Many of the bushes I trimmed during the annual winter pruning are just now sending out new growth, which is often tinged pink. Below left is one of the Brazilian cherries, and in the foreground below the trimmed branches of Rhaphiolepis 'Apple Blossom' are just beginning to flower. This is not really an apple, of course – we can't grow apples or pears here – but the blooms are very like apple blossom.

Two types of produce caught my eye today. First, I picked up the last three little jap pumpkins. These had been left on the ground after I finished cutting out all the two-year-old vines that had taken over one of the vegetable beds and spread up onto the hill above, among the bananas. In the last couple of weeks we've enjoyed two more pumpkins – in a pumpkin and leek soup, in a particularly successful pie and roasted in the pan with a big leg of lamb.

And then there are the grapefruit! They're big, they're numerous and they're almost ready! In just a few days, I'm sure, we'll be eating the first ones. This is the best crop we've ever had, and if the flavour lives up to the looks, we'll be starting our breakfasts with grapefruit for the next month or more.

Just as I was about to go back indoors, I looked up toward the western sky, where the gathering storm clouds were putting on quite a show in front of the setting sun.

To my surprise, I spotted a new home going up on the top of a hill to the west. You can hardly see it on the horizon, but what a fabulous view there would be from up there. I'll have to get my field glasses out tomorrow for a closer look.

Aphasia. What a shame!

2010-07-04T13:44:00.112+10:00

A and I have had quite a long time (about four years) to come to terms with the scourge of aphasia, and how it can blight its victims' lives. To be sure, we had even greater life-threatening medical issues to deal with one year ago. But as difficult for both of us as A's three-month hospitalisation and slow recovery from open-heart surgery were, the challenges of all that never had as damaging an effect on our relationship or our quality of life as does our ongoing battle just to be able to communicate with each other.

One reason A's inability to express himself readily in speech and writing affects us to such a degree may be that for all of our adult lives we have both placed a high premium on oral and written communication. Now, however, that critical aspect of our life together is undermined daily and in more ways than can easily be explained or imagined.

Here is just one small example. Over six weeks, A is participating in a 'Falls prevention' program at a nearby rehabilitation hospital. I drop him off there on two mornings a week, and on each of those days he has four hours of intensive therapies – physiotherapy, occupational therapy, counselling, group discussion, even basic tai chi! This is the first time in more than a year that A participates in something on his own. As I wrote in an earlier post, other than time spent with a Blue Care carer, until now A has not followed any program or taken part in any activities in which I did not participate. So this is a big breakthrough for us both.

I know A is really enjoying being part of the rehab group and 'doing his own thing'. When I pick him up four hours later, he is bursting with enthusiasm about this or that part of the day's program. But it's a good thing that he comes away with a few handouts giving some idea of the content covered that day, because all his attempts to tell me about the day's activities usually end in an exasperated groan of frustration on his part. He just cannot find the words he needs for what he wants to say or describe. And I am on tenterhooks the whole time, suspended there, trying to understand what he's desperately striving to tell me. We play 20 Questions, me interrogating and guessing, him sounding out meaningless syllables that seem to him to be related to whatever word or words he's searching for.

A can usually communicate only a small amount of whatever message he is trying to convey, and almost nothing of any subtle or humorous asides that he might like to include. And unlike for stroke victims who may improve with time, our situation is never likely to get better. In fact, it is most likely to get worse.

"Yes, aphasia is a terrible affliction. But to me, there is no shame involved, only sadness."

Far from wanting to suffer all this in private, however, I often find myself wanting to scream at anyone prepared to listen. At the very least, I'd like more people to understand something about the condition and how difficult it is to live with, especially when everything else about us may seem to the casual observer to be quite normal. I'd like people to stop telling me how great A looks, and instead spend some time trying to talk to him, or at least ask me what they can do to help. I know some people prefer to remain very private in their battle with aphasia. But for myself I just cannot understand why anyone would be worried about letting their name be used publicly when it might help to bring this debilitating condition out into the open, where others may begin to understand it.

What shame could there be in being recognised in your community as people who are dealing with aphasia? Yes, aphasia is a terrible affliction. But to me, there is no shame involved. Only sadness. But who does it help if we go on trying to deal with it behind closed doors? Mightn't it be easier to bear if more people around us understood what we are dealing with and could help? Who knows if sharing our story wouldn't help someone else who is just starting down the road and searching for ways to cope.

I know that no two experiences of aphasia are exactly alike, so I guess everyone must deal with aphasia in their own way. But some kind of acceptance, some willingness to say out loud or in print, "Yes, we have this problem, and here's what you can do to help", seems to me to be a good first step to take.

Pandanus and poinsettias

2010-07-01T10:03:00.002+10:00

My faithful friends among you will know that I'm having trouble getting back to regular posting. So this one is a bit of a cop-out. No great thoughts here. Never mind. Maybe I'll get the serious blog habit back soon. Meanwhile, here goes...

A and I are spending a good deal of time outdoors, now that (a) our weekly trips to Brisbane and Maroochydore for aphasia therapies have concluded and (b) an unseasonal spell of (relatively) cold weather appears to have passed. Even A has got into some gardening – albeit in a gentle manner. He had just finished raking all the dead leaves that fell onto this little path from an overhanging tulip tree, when he sat down to enjoy the last of the afternoon sun.

Anyone who's not from these here parts mightn't recognise the basketball-size fruit in this photo. These don't normally fall from the tree whole, like this one we cut down. Just as well, because this particular example weights 3.5 kilograms (that's just under 8 pounds). Left alone, the fruit ripens further, until it splits open while still on the tree. Then the individual segments that make up the fruit drop to the ground, one by one. This probably gives the large seeds contained in the segments a better chance of rolling away from the tree and finding a spot in which to germinate. Even so, with each fruit containing several dozen segments, and 20 or so fruit on even a small tree, that's a lot of fist-sized kernels to pick up (or trip over). Aborigines had a way of using these fruits as food, but I haven't tried them yet. They also used the long, tough, strappy leaves for all manner of woven goods (mats, baskets etc.) The tree's name? Pandanus.

My garden has about six pandanus trees in various sizes, including this large one that overhangs the pool pump house. Thankfully, I haven't yet noticed on my trees any sign of the dieback that is killing a lot of pandanus growing in areas like ours, where the cause of the disease – a North Queensland insect called the planthopper – doesn't have any natural predators.

In another part of the garden, an annual display I always look forward to is again thrilling us every afternoon, when the sun's last rays shine through the nearly transparent and spectacularly red 'bracts' (or leaves) that surround the otherwise insignificant flowers of the poinsettias. I especially love this somewhat neglected, and admittedly straggly, specimen halfway down the paddock.

Every time the flowers are finished, I debate whether or not to prune the 2 metre stems of the above plant back to some sensible size, as the gardening experts always recommend. I do that to the poinsettias growing in other parts of the garden, including some I keep in containers for a Christmas display and a few others, like this pink variety near the back verandah.

But somehow I can never bring myself to take the secaturs to that rambling specimen growing out from the base of a large old gum tree in the paddock. It's a wild and beautiful plant, reaching out from under leafy mulch on two sides of the tree, which also has a large philodendron climbing up its trunk and a few other trees and bushes alongside, making up a delightful little ecosystem. One year, a big old kangaroo often slept away his days in a nest-like cavity under all that vegetation. Well, as far as I'm concerned, that particular poinsettia can keep its long waving stems. And in return, every year it puts on a magnificent display, those nearly translucent fire-engine red bracts seeming almost suspended in the bright afternoon sunlight, or glowing rosily as in the photo above, taken just after dawn.

Most poinsettia bracts radiate around their little central flowers on a flat plane. But on some parts of my renegade plant – or maybe there are several plants growing closely together, because these flowers only appear on one side of the big tree – the bracts, like the stems, have gone a bit wild. The result is an almost dahlia-like bloom – yet another reason this poinsettia deserves to be allowed to ramble as and where it chooses. My garden has room enough for a few rebels.

A kooky visitor

2010-06-19T17:16:00.004+10:00

A few days ago, when I sat down to write Feathered visitors, about the birds that visit us regularly, I was surprised to find I had no photographs of a bird we hear almost every day, though we don't see him as often as that. That bird is the kookaburra, an Australian icon, also called the laughing kookaburra because of his curiously raucous birdsong.

Then today, just as A and I were coming up from the lower garden where we'd gone to pick a few oranges for tomorrow's breakfast juice, we were surprised to see a fat little kookaburra resting on an overhead branch quite near the back porch.

These birds don't usually hang around near the house, preferring to spend their time in the branches of the tall gum trees down in the paddock and up along the edges of the road. I think this year one family was roosting every night in the row of small bushy trees that our neighbour has planted as a hedge along the fenceline that divides our properties. I would hear them there every evening at dusk, noisily calling out the end of another day. But even when they are singing from the highest branches of gum trees across the road, we easily hear them. Theirs is not an especially beautiful song, but it is peculiar and distinctive among Australian birdsongs. And the cackle of kookaburras never fails to bring a smile to my face, sounding as it does as if the birds are having a boisterous quarrel.

A couple of years ago I had a close encounter with a very fat specimen. I was turning over the rich soil in this newly constructed vegetable patch. Sackfuls of horse manure had been spread on the new beds and left to rot over several months. And as I turned the rotted manure into the topsoil, scores of juicy big worms appeared. Not long after I started the job, I noticed a large kookaburra perched in a nearby tree, watching me, obviously uncertain whether to risk diving down for a feed of worm. I picked up a large worm and threw it onto the gravel path alongside the garden bed. The kookaburra immediately flew down and pounced on the worm. The he flew up to the sit on one of the bamboo tomato towers in the next plot. I continued turning over the bed, throwing the bird a worm now and then. He didn't catch them in mid-air, as the butcher birds do whenever I toss them scraps of leftovers. But he was quite comfortable being fed by me for nearly an hour. Don't look for the bird in this picture, though. As soon as I went up to the house to get my camera, he disappeared!

Up close, the kookaburra really is a most magnificent fellow, not as splendidly coloured as his smaller kingfisher cousins, perhaps, but thickly plumed, and as he often sits hunched over in a little ball he looks more like a child's fluffy woollen toy than a bird. He's well known as an early riser, too. Often he's the first bird to sing at the crack of dawn. In fact, if a family is nesting or roosting in a tree that has a view of our house, and for one reason or another I get up before dawn and switch on a light, the kookaburra will mistake my lit-up window as the dawn's early light. And sure enough: a short sharp chorus of kookaburra laughing will start up right after my light goes on, and stop when I turn it off. Because of that, plus the bird's slightly bizarre looks and strange guttural song, I can't help thinking of the kookaburra as being slightly dopey. Even so, he's always welcome at our place.

Partners in caring

2010-06-17T19:15:00.005+10:00

Today is a cold wet day here in Queensland. Of course, 'cold' is relative. It's about 17 degrees Centigrade (64 Fahrenheit) and there's no wind at all. So I can hear North American and Tasmanian readers snorting in derision! But it did rain last night; the gauge says 22 mm – just enough to bed down my new mulch and provide a good drink to the grapefruit and oranges that are near to ripening. But this morning it's still damp out and there's hardly any sun, which is not a typical winter day here in Paradise. So we are feeling hard done by.

Except for this: I am home ALONE for the first time since A came home from hospital this time last year. Until today, except for one four-hour session each week when a Blue Care carer has come in to spend time with A while I go off somewhere, A and I have spent every waking and sleeping hour of the year in each other's company. And I have never in all that time been home alone. It has to be a testimony to our deep affection and great friendship that A and I have managed to get through this post-operative year without any eruptions that I can recall. But much of the credit for this has to go to him – to his easy-going nature, his willingness to accept change and his refusal to give up trying to get on with all those intellectual pursuits that have made him who he is. Even when, in the first few months after his release from hospital, he could not yet get to his feet without assistance, he would spend hours every day reading, relearning how to form letters and practising his writing, singing along to favourite songs and practising his speech.

This week A began a six-week program of rehabilitation at Eden Rehabilitation Centre. He'll go twice a week, for four hours a day. He's an in-patient during these sessions, so the program is covered by our health insurance. Focussing on 'Falls Prevention', the sessions include physiotherapy, occupational therapy and various other therapies tailored to meet the needs of the four people participating (three elderly women and A!) It's about a 15-minute drive for me to take him there, and the 8am starting time is a challenge for late-risers like me – though no problem for A, who easily gets up at 6am, which is what we both need to do to be ready in time. But except for one hour once a week, I'm not expected to participate in these 12 half-day sessions. So for most of A's time there I am free to do whatever I like. Today I decided I would come back home and just be here – alone.

Solitude has always figured high on my list of indulgences. The informally negotiated terms we agreed when A and I started living together more than 30 years ago included an acceptance that neither of us would give up following individual pursuits and chasing our own dreams. For A, this meant implementing a plan he was already formulating before we linked up, to give up his secure arts administration salary and return to freelance theatre work. We made sure to get a mortgage on our first home approved before A's resignation, because at that time banks were reluctant to consider anything but the male breadwinner's salary when making decisions about mortgages. Mortgage secured, though, A quit his job in administration and resumed work in theatre and scriptwriting.

Some years later, when my career development depended on an interstate move, there was never any question that A would agree to this. His being freelance made it easier, but at his age then (58), finding new outlets for his freelance services was not easy. Ten years later, when my consultancy work meant more overseas travel, A might well have been reluctant to make more changes at a stage of life when most people are well set in their ways. But when the time came to make a decision, he enthusiastically wrapped up his professional activities and made a graceful transition to supportive house-husband.

Being 17 years older than me probably made it easier for him to give up work, but it was late in life to take on the job of running a household, especially in a developing country! Even so, A tackled that with dogged persistence and great good humour. His experiences dealing with plumbers in the Philippines, where clients were expected to buy and supply all the necessary parts for any job before work could begin, are worthy of a separate post! (In the end, the fact that our flush toilets functioned at all was due more to A's handiwork with bits of metal and plastic – and rubber bands! – than to local plumbing expertise.)

So I continued doing aid work – in the Philippines, Laos and Vietnam – and A continued to manage our domestic life. Sometimes this meant setting up house for a few months in a hotel room, with lots of negotiation about such things as better reading lights, additional pillows for reading in bed, a second desk for A! Inevitably, when the time came for departure there would be heartfelt farewells with staff, thanks mainly to A's being on such good terms with everyone. Cleaning girls would give us gifts, as well as vice versa, and we would find ourselves at weddings and other family events with the families of young hotel managers and others whom A had befriended. In one two year assignment, we never again had to stand in line at the state bank's currency exchange office after the girls working there adopted A as a surrogate grandfather.

Over the years of my various assignments, A has helped to train local scriptwriters for educational TV, helped senior secondary students in Laos to direct a film as part of their introduction to media, and made market ladies giggle in gleeful expectation every time he would alight from a tuk-tuk to shop for the week's provisions. Now, those same qualities that enabled him to deal calmly with situations that many his age (and younger) would have found trying are helping him to tackle the more stressful challenge of losing his ability to use language. He's a survivor, and perhaps most importantly, he is adaptable. Nor is he too proud to admit what he doesn't know or can't do. And he doesn't mind accepting help. All of that makes my role as caregiver so much easier.

Even so, in recent years we have both had to give up things that meant a lot to each of us. We've lost access to my good income stream a lot sooner than I had planned. A has lost his independence, self-reliance and the pleasure of participating actively in the upkeep of house and property. He can no longer take on the little building projects he once loved. And I know he worries about being a burden. I have had to give up work that I loved and the chance of a livelier retirement than I expected. But perhaps most of all for me, for much of the past year I have had to forego the occasional spells of solitude I enjoyed while travelling alone on short-term contracts, disappearing into my studio for days at a time or just being at home alone while A was out pursuing his own activities.

Now we live in each other's pocket, it seems. For both of us, that's a new, more conventional existence than what we were used to. Luckily, we seem to have got through this difficult year of transition to...well, who knows to what! One thing we've realised is that none of us knows what will come next in life. This year we have learned not to worry about that so much, and just to live in the present.

Feathered visitors

2010-06-15T22:34:00.000+10:00

It's about time I posted some photos of the birds that visit us regularly. I expected I'd have an abundance of photos to choose from, but in fact I didn't find that many really good photos in my bird file. Nevertheless, I'll use what photos I have on hand. And as I get better ones of any of these birds, I'll update this post. Maybe this will motivate me to work a bit harder at capturing better shots of some of these elusive but spectacular visitors.

Probably our most regular guests at the two bird feeders are small flocks of rainbow lorikeets. These birds are more plentiful at times when food is less abundant in the bush. I don't feed them a large amount of seed unless times are tough for them. But I have planted grevilleas and banksias near the bird feeders, and the flowers of those bushes are an even bigger attraction to the parrots than any birdseed I put out.

Slightly more exotic (at least to interstate visitors) is the pair of king parrots – Mr King (below) with his electric red head and breast positively glowing in sunlight, and Mrs King, a bit less flamboyant, perhaps, but in better light you would see that her green plumage is tinged here and there with touches of turquoise. They are a shy twosome, rarely allowing me to get near enough to take a good photo. And though they almost always visit as a pair, often one will sit in a nearby tree or bush, or on the back of a chair (as at right), while waiting for the other to feed.

Just as lovely as their showier cousins are the delicately toned pink and grey galahs. We don't get them too often, and it's probably just as well because they can get through a plate of birdseed pretty quickly. Large flocks are a menace to farmers, of course. But it's hard to think ill of anything as pretty as a pair of cooing galahs.

Speaking of menacing feeders leads quite naturally to thoughts of cockatoos. We have both the sulphur-crested white and the yellow-tailed black cockatoos at our place, though I've only seen the black ones down by the dam and never had a camera handy at the time. More common are the white fellows. They usually feed high up in my African tulip tree, whose giant seed pods they rip open and then drop from a great height. And every year they devour most of nuts on my pecan tree before I get any. But now and then one or two birds – sometimes five or six – will come down and raid the birdfeeders. Lucky they aren't aggressive. That big beak could do a lot of damage.

The last parrot I should mention is the dear little pale-headed parrot, an extremely timid visitor who comes alone or sometimes with a mate. Everything about him is delicate – colour, song and eating habits.

A family of frogmouths often used to spend the day sleeping in one of our trees. The bird gets its name, I guess, because when he opens that huge mouth, supposedly to frighten predators, he does look very much like a frog. But usually, he just sleeps the day away, posing successfully as a dead branch. It's months since we've seen a frogmouth in any of what used to be their favourite trees. But we have seen a few dead ones on nearby roads. Unfortunately their habit of eluding predators by keeping still isn't much use in the face of oncoming cars.

Not nearly in the same beauty stakes, but probably one of the most glorious songbirds hereabouts is the pied butcherbird. (Check out the songs of this and 39 other Australian birds at Birds in Backyards. The butcherbird featured there is the grey one, and our Queensland variety is black and white, but the song is the same, to my ear.)

The butcherbird is so called because of his eating habits and diet. Finding himself with a surplus of 'meat' (such as large insects or even small snakes), he will 'hang' the leftovers in a V-shaped fork of two branches, or on some protruding piece of branch or stem, ready for his next meal.

I once saw one of 'our' butcherbirds use that lethal beak to dislodge a little micro bat from a snug spot up behind one of our porch rafters, where the bat was sleeping away the day. The bird then chased the disoriented bat around the verandah for a few minutes, finally 'catching' him and flying off somewhere to enjoy this treat. Prior to this I didn't even realise these tiny bats were living up there.

I can't talk about birdsong without mentioning the inimitable eastern whipbird. We are lucky to have at least one pair of whipbirds who visit us regularly – especially after lots of rain, when they patrol the well-protected banks above and below our house several times a day. There, close plantings of various shrubs and small trees offer the protection these birds like to hunt in. But other than sticking to these shady enclaves, they are remarkably unconcerned about us coming near.

The difficulty in photographing whipbirds is that they rarely stay still for more than a few seconds. Travelling almost always in pairs, the showier male and his olive green partner bob around amongst the branches, often dropping suddenly to the ground to stir up dead leaves and mulch in search of the insects they favor. I have also seen one pair feeding on the little red berries of an asparagus fern, so they must be omnivores. They keep in touch while moving about via their hauntingly beautiful song, which is actually a duet. The first whiplike part is uttered by the male, and the two short notes at the end are the female's answer. There is also a little muttering chatter they make in between songs, which I find particularly attractive: "I'm right here", it says. "Are you still there, too?"

Another regular visitor is the large white-headed pigeon. I sometimes worry about the chains that support this birdfeeder when several of these fat beauties land there at once. Their size may have made them a target for hunters in earllier times, but they don't seem to be bullies. Often I see one or two of them waiting in overhead trees while the boisterious rainbow lorikeets eat their fill. And as soon as I approach with a camera, off they go, in a great flutter of their large wings.

I wouldn't be sad if this next visitor turned his back and abandoned our garden for good. He's the native turkey, and I'm sure he has a role to play in the Australian bush. But he's not very welcome in most backyards and gardens – even those based on native plants. And you can't see it here, but he has great big feet that can rake up a cubic metre of mulch in one afternoon, or tip over and break a big ceramic feeder. Once you've allowed a male turkey to build his massive nest in your yard, as we have, the measures you'll have to adopt to discourage him from coming back to the same place every year are all illegal.

Equally messy visitors, but somehow more acceptable, are little pairs of wood duck that adopt our back verandah every now and then for a week or two at a time. One year a pair built a nest under a bush alongside the swimming pool, but something, probably a monitor lizard, got the eggs. I try not to encourage the ducks because their bathroom manners are atrocious. But while she lived with us for a year, Mum was very fond of them. She would sit out every day with her little pot of grain, waiting for them to call by for a snack. I think they still come looking for her.

Mulch good enough to eat

2010-06-12T00:51:00.003+10:00

It's Friday and the kiddos arrive this evening for the weekend. That's always good motivation to finish up a few tidying tasks that have lingered on through the week.

First, there's half a trailer-load of 'hoop fines' mulch to be spread. It should be just enough to finish the second terrace on the northern side of the house. The top terrace contains my prolific lime tree and some gardenias as well as my faithful old rosemary. The second terrace has bird-attracting native shrubs. I've checked a few websites and it seems that with the addition of blood and bone, hoop fines should be fine around all of those.

In fact, this is not the mulch I planned to buy when I went down to Doonan Sand and Gravel last weekend. I went looking for curly hoop to top up a rather steep bank alongside the road, where I renew the mulch around my lilly pillys every year or two. Curly hoop lasts longer and keeps the weeds down OK. It also sits well on sloping sites because the pieces of bark intertwine and 'stay put'. Doonan didn't have the exact type of mulch I wanted, but a 1-inch hoop seemed OK for the same purpose (why do we persist in measuring our mulch in inches when we've been metric for 40 years?)

Unfortunately the hoop-fines bin was right alongside the bin containing 1-inch hoop. So when I went into the office and asked the lovely lady there to load up my trailer, I may have said only 'hoop'. She sent her obliging son off to do that. She and I chatted on for a while about how nice it is to have obliging children around! And by the time I got back to the trailer, it was already half full of hoop fines, not 1-inch hoop! Her obliging son and I discussed how best to start over (emptying a trailer is a lot slower than loading it!) But then I realised my level front terraces could use the extra lift provided by a richer mulch, so I bought the 'fines' after all. And I'll go back for the 1-inch hoop as soon as the trailer's empty. The mistake was as much my fault as their's, so they really needn't have given me a discount! But my! my! what a lovely mix this is: reminds me of a chocolate-coloured shredded wheat! Don't you just love much!

Back on (blog) track

2010-06-08T22:16:00.002+10:00

I'm back! Of course, I've been here all along. We both have – A and me! But we've been engaged in a furious round of medical and allied health appointments, as well as participating in two different sets of aphasia clinics, each lasting several months – one in Brisbane (therefore that's a whole day's commitment each time) and one closer to home on the Sunshine Coast. Then A began a series of weekly physiotherapy sessions at the rehab hospital where he was a patient following his hospitalisation in 2009. What with running around to all these places and helping A in the routine tasks of daily living that he hasn't been able to do without aid since he fractured his shoulder in a fall in late March, I have been just too busy to spend much time here on blogging.

We are still seeing various doctors about a problem with A's kidneys, a condition probably exacerbated by all the antibiotics that were required to save his life from that terrible post-surgical bone infection. He may need a minor surgical procedure to insert a stint into one kidney to alleviate that problem, but I'm assured this is a minor procedure, one I hope will require only local anaesthetic.

So things are getting back to 'normal', or what we've now come to accept as normal. A's shoulder bone is finally healing – though we had a big scare after two months when one doctor suggested the fracture wasn't healing and so might need some kind of surgical intervention. But a specialist bone doctor put our fears to rest, saying he could definitely see new bone forming. And now we can see evidence ourselves that the shoulder is getting better.

This morning I heard a yelp from the kitchen, where A was busy unloading the dishwasher (that in itself another sign he's getting better!) I was briefly afraid he'd done some damage or fallen again. But it turned out this was a yelp of joy, because he'd just been able for the first time since his fall to raise his arm high enough to hang up the pots from last night's dinner!

This week is the first week in months that we are able to spend almost every day at home. All we have is one doctor's appointment and one physiotherapy session. Oh, and a Film Society screening on Wednesday evening (The Eclipse). As a result, I've been able to spend the first two days of this week in the garden. From just one small section of garden bed on a terrace above the swimming pool, I've cut out a whole trailer-load of a terrible new vine-like weed that has sprung up in the past year (don't know the name, but it has awful bean-like fruits so will probably sprout again; I will need to be vigilant). A has spent the first two mornings of the week at his new pastime – drawing. We are retired, at last!

Incidentally, doesn't our new pergola look great? Can you imagine any better use of the top of a 40,000 litre rainwater tank? Now watch this space and soon you'll see a few other scenes from my newly weeded garden!

A final goodbye to our mother

2010-05-10T14:24:00.005+10:00

This Mother's Day weekend, our family and friends in Massachusetts celebrated our mother's long life in a memorial service organised and hosted by our brother P. Mom died and was cremated in January of this year, and you can read her obituary in an earlier post. But as often happens these days with New England funerals, the memorial service was postponed until Spring.

The morning began with a service of thanksgiving and remembrance at the Daniel Morril Funeral Home in our home town. It was presided over by Father John Pastor, who had often visited Mom in her final years at Radius Nursing Home. Fr Pastor noted with amusement that Mom told him straight out at their first meeting that she wasn't very religious. But he was pleased to officiate, and I'm told he did a wonderful job!

More than 35 members of our extended family and friends-of-family attended, including, of course, sister D and her three beautiful daughters (see Those gorgeous 'Benoit' girls), who flew up from from Louisiana for the weekend. Numerous cousins and their families – some of the countless sons and daughters of Mom and Dad's 16 brothers and sisters – also attended.

Our brother had prepared a slide show featuring photos from Mom's long life. This was projected on a large-screen television for guests to view as they arrived. And to introduce the service, D had selected In my life, a song from Mom's all-time favourite group, the Beatles.

After the service, everyone drove from the funeral home to a chapel at a nearby country cemetery. There Mom's ashes were laid to rest alongside our father's on an idyllic hillside location our parents had selected many years ago. Then everyone retired to Cohasse Country Club for a sumptuous buffet lunch hosted by our brother, and peppered by lots of remembrances and laughs, as well as tears. Dad's 92-year-old sister happily took the role of distinguished elder during the lunch. She and the other guests reminisced and shared a fund of amusing stories from our parents' long and happy lives. (Mom was 88 years old when she died; Dad was 86.)

Unfortunately, my sister and I and our two daughters here in Australia were not able to travel to the USA for the weekend. So each of us had written a brief letter to our mother/grandmother, and these were read out during the service.

My niece in Tasmania sent a poem

For reasons of copyright, I'm not able to reproduce Granddaughter A's thoughtful offering for the service: The Wild Geese by Mary Oliver. (In a quirk of fate, Fr Pastor had selected that same poem as one of his readings.) Along with the poem, A sent this note to our brother and sister there in Massachusetts: "I send it to you with lots of love, and warm thoughts of Granny. Think of it as an electronic hug, and may all the birds in all the poems sing and fly for Granny." The beautiful poem was a perfect choice, though A may not have known that the annual migration of Canadian geese in the skies over their New England home was something our parents looked forward to every year.

My daughter sent the following letter to her grandmother:

DEAREST GRANMA,

I’m not really good at thinking of things to say in these types of situations – I’ve only ever been to one funeral in my entire life. So I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to say now except to let you know B and I are both relieved you are finally comfortable with Grandpa. I’m sure you’re indulging in all the things you like – donuts, hotdogs and baked beans; Johnny Cash music; house-coats; yodelling; scratch lotto tickets; sewing, knitting and crocheting; all while watching Mash re-runs or listening to talk-back radio.

I’m not lucky enough to have many memories of you as I have spent the vast majority of my life living away from most of my family – I never really knew you the way Mum did. But my earliest memory of anything at all is one that involves you. I was sitting in your kitchen in a highchair eating baked beans! The other memory I have was the time you were thrilled that, when pushing your dining chair back under the table, I matched up the chair legs to the existing indentations in the carpet without being asked. Our appreciation of each other grew a little more that day, I suspect.

Rest soundly now in the arms of Grandpa and be safe in the knowledge that quite a number of your habits and fancies are genetically safe with me :-)

All my love......Z

My sister in Tasmania sent this lovely tribute:

IN LOVING MEMORY OF MY MOTHER:

Crocheting still reminds me of you, Mom, more than almost anything else. And I'm never happier than when adding row upon row of geometric stitches, reminding me of simpler times gone by. Of course, I also fondly remember your knitting, your patchwork, your sewing, your love of music, your love of the sun, our laughing sessions...but I feel your warmth and closeness most when I am crocheting, using stitches you first taught me all those years ago. I'd have loved to share this new afghan stitch with you. So I'll do it now...

Loving you always.....N

And here is my final letter to my mother:

DEAREST MOM

The only thing that helps me to bear your loss, Mom, is the thought of how certain you were of seeing Dad again in heaven – how much you looked forward to that, and how you believed you would actually SEE him, too, with your own eyes.

Losing your sight was such a cruel blow, after a lifetime spent making beautiful things and creating a wonderful home for all of us. I don’t know how you coped with that loss, and still managed to care for Dad at home when you were already legally blind yourself and physically disabled from arthritis and other problems. I admired you then so much. But only in the past year, with all that has happened to my own husband, have I had some inkling of what you must have gone through in Dad’s final years, and how hard that would have been.

I can only wonder in awe at your strength, your toughness and your love. We all benefited from those qualities, Mom, and that’s a legacy that will live on in the lives of your lucky children, your beautiful granddaughters and your great-grandchildren.

I miss you so much, but we give thanks today for your life and for all that you and Dad gave us. Rest in peace, my dearest. No one deserves eternal happiness more than you.

Taking a break

2010-04-26T19:18:00.001+10:00

I am on a brief break from blogging. Back soon. Meanwhile, these visitors to my backyard today joined a pair of king parrots (who wouldn't let me get near enough to photograph) in helping lift my dwindling spirits.

Sunshine Coast aphasia clinic – at last!

2010-04-13T22:59:00.000+10:00

Off to Maroochydore this morning for the second in a series of eight Adult Communication Group workshops in Maroochydore. This clinic, specifically designed for aphasia sufferers and their partners, is a welcome and long-awaited regional initiative of the Queensland Department of Health.

The program has been developed by four speech pathologists based at various locations on the Sunshine Coast. Three of them are Interagency Speech Pathologists with Queensland Health and the fourth is from Eden Rehabilitation Hospital in Cooroy. Working in pairs, the four speech pathologists take turns organising and facilitating these weekly two-hour sessions, which are held in a meeting room of the Maroochydore Library.

Last week was our first session. Eight couples are participating. Most of the partners with aphasia have had a stroke which has caused their brain damage, but at least one person has aphasia as a result of a brain injury that damaged the language-generating areas of his brain. A seems to be the only person who has primary progressive aphasia. But all of us are living with aphasia, and it’s a lively and interesting group, with a wider age range than most groups we’ve participated in.

Some of the carers are very articulate, too, and frustrated by the fact that for most of them this is the first time they have had access to any group specifically designed for aphasia sufferers and their partners. Some said they and their partners had come all the way through the post-stroke hospital experience without ever hearing the term ‘aphasia’ used, without having their specific communication problems analysed and without being prescribed appropriate therapies to address their communication difficulties.

I think we will enjoy these clinics. And if the first two sessions are anything to go by, the sessions will be very well organised, too. The presenters prepare relevant and interesting activities and the handouts they distribute include visual clues as well as text. This shows their awareness that some people with aphasia can’t make much sense of written language.

Such is the case with at least one participant in this clinic, for example, whose command of oral language seems almost fluent by comparison with A’s. Yet he said he has difficulty making sense of written language. A, on the other hand, often has great difficulty speaking in even simple sentences, but he can read at almost his pre-aphasia level. Welcome to the Planet Aphasia**, where we all must now live.

In today’s session, we learned more about each of the couples – especially the partners who have aphasia. Each of them had to bring in an item to demonstrate an interest or activity that is or was important in their life. A brought in a couple of his scrapbooks containing clippings, theatre programs and other memorabilia documenting his 50+ years working in Australian theatre.

One man from France, married to a local woman, has lost most of his second language (English) as the result of his stroke, as well as having difficulties with his native French. He brought along a variety of small percussion instruments and led us all in ‘playing’ and singing several rounds of Frère Jacques (his name), which he himself could sing without hesitation – a phenomenon shared by A, who sings along on most days to familiar songs he has copied onto his computer specifically for this purpose.

Another participant brought in a selection of beautiful tropical flowers that he and his wife grow on their seven-acre property in the Sunshine Coast hinterland. One flower was a gorgeous tiger-striped orchid which trailed numerous thin tendrils some 10 cm long. He didn’t know the name of it but we took a photo which someone will try to identify.

One man showed photos of the pizza oven he had built in his backyard. He explained that he made pizzas for friends and family there, but for himself he mainly used the oven to prepare a classic Italian treat: slices of oven-dried pork, the exact name of which I can’t recall though when he said it I remembered having seen this in a delicatessen’s smallgoods section.

Everyone’s ‘object’ provoked good discussion, which was the main aim of the activity. And each week the organisers appoint one participant as timekeeper, whose job it is to make sure no segment of the agenda goes over time. That meant we had time left for each of our partners to mime or draw a given phrase which the rest of us had to guess – what we called our Spics ‘n Specs segment. Another volunteer makes brief notes of each week’s session and prepares minutes – no small task for anyone with aphasia who might take hours to write even a short paragraph.

What with morning tea and lots of chit-chat, the two hours fly by. I can’t help noticing how ‘at home’ I feel with these Sunshine Coast couples, too. Many of them live or have lived, like us, in semi-rural situations. And perhaps for that reason, this clinic has a different atmosphere to that of the clinic we attend in Brisbane. I don’t mean to imply the Brisbane clinic isn’t very good; it is. But not surprisingly, in Brisbane I always feel a little ‘at sea’, as we live a different kind of life up here on the Sunshine Coast than most of the people who attend that clinic. And whenever I go to the city for any reason, I tend to feel a little exotic. People there are friendly enough, but A and I have a different set of references, it seems. Up here on the Coast, however, we ‘fit in’ more easily. Maybe that’s more important to me, as a carer who needs to connect with others. But it’s a comfortable feeling of belonging. And with loneliness a hallmark of being a full-time caregiver, ‘belonging’ is no small feat.

Whatever the reason, we are delighted to finally be meeting a group of people from our region who, like us, have to learn to live with aphasia.

_________________________

** From the Planet Aphasia is the title of an excellent blog by the American carer of a partner who has profound aphasia and apraxia. Check it out; it’s well worth a read!

And it’s only Monday!

2010-04-12T18:47:00.000+10:00

This morning I took A to the dentist for the first of several visits to have a tedious 'root canal' job ("...a dental procedure that replaces a tooth’s damaged or infected pulp with a filling. The pulp consists of specialised dental cells, blood vessels, tissue fibres and some nerve fibres located in the hollow space in the central part of the tooth..." – that’s a quote from the Better Health Channel, a useful Victorian government website providing health and medical information).

Background: We have just finished dinner last Tuesday in front of TV – A in his Superman chair, so called because it flies him up into the air at the push of a button. (Since I bought him a great little adjustable tilt-table on lockable wheels to use with this chair, the electrically operated recliner has functioned as sometimes-desk chair, hobby chair and dining chair, as well as TV chair and frequent site of daytime naps.) I forget what was on the menu on this night – lamb chops, I think.

As I am clearing away the plates in a bit of a rush, keen to be ready for Foreign Correspondent, A pipes up with: "I think I lost a tooth". I immediately think to myself: "Oh no, one must have fallen off his partial plate. Did he swallow it?" But he removes his plate (bottom jaw) and smiles at me. And no, it's not a bottom tooth that's missing; it's one of the two front teeth in the upper jaw! If I remember correctly, that not really HIS tooth either, but an expensive 'cap' attached to a tooth fragment. So where is the cap? And can it be re-attached?

After a frantic search through table scraps, I finally locate the gleaming little metal-backed porcelain curio. On closer inspection, I see that the cap must have been attached to the tiniest fragment of original tooth, which has now completely snapped off. Not surprising, really, given all the pushing, tugging and tubing that A's jaws were exposed to last year before the decision was made to do a tracheotomy at the end of his first week in hospital.

First thing last Wednesday morning, I ring the dentist’s office. They kindly agree to fit us in at about midday, to see what can be done. But there’s a hitch: we have long ago scheduled A’s Extended Primary Care review with the specialist nurse at our doctor’s office for this Wednesday morning. She only takes these appointments on Wednesdays, and this is our only available Wednesday. Every other Wednesday, we travel to Brisbane for A’s speech therapy clinic at the university. But this Wednesday there’s no Brisbane clinic due to uni holidays. So we can’t reschedule the EPC review. We will just have to rush from there to the dentist – about half an hour’s drive away.

And there's another complication. Wednesday is also the last day of grandson Sam’s one-week stay, and we have promised to take him to a movie in the afternoon. Never mind. The dentist should fit in between the EPC appointment and the movie, with enough time before the movie to grab some lunch somewhere. (Wise old grandma knows better than to go to the cinema with a hungry 12-year-old. The $12 we gave Sam for his movie-time ‘snacks’ would never be enough to fill him up without some lunch beforehand.) The three locations (doctor’s and dentist’s offices and cinema) are all in different towns spread out like points on a ribbon here in the Sunshine Coast hinterland. We will have to move quickly all day (not something A is very good at!)

Fortunately, it all goes like clockwork – greatly helped by Grandson Sam’s good nature and patience, even though the book he’s currently devouring got left at home during our hurried departure on Wednesday morning. But his Nintendo DS Lite made it into my bag, so he spends the waiting time at the doctor’s office happily enough, training his pet Nintendo dog to obey and do tricks. (See any transferable skills there? Oh well, it is school holidays.) Then the dentist’s receptionist lets him choose which TV station to watch in her waiting room.

The dentist manages to ‘bond’ A’s cap back in place with some kind of (we assume) non-poisonous cement! But she isn’t too optimistic about the chances of success. She warns me to watch carefully to make sure A doesn’t swallow the cap if it detaches again. At first I think she is concerned for the damage this might do to A's gastro-intestinal tract. Then I realise she is only suggesting that a swallowed cap will make a very expensive meal, because if this bonding doesn’t work, then a ‘root canal’ procedure, to dig out the remains of the tooth and replace it with a ‘post’, will be the only option. And that will all go much easier (and cheaper!) if we haven’t lost the cap, which can be re-jigged to fit over the post. (Is she suggesting I might somehow want to retrieve a swallowed cap a day or so later?????? Really, there are limits to a carer’s devotion!)

After a quick lunch at our favourite noodle bar (Sam bringing in a sausage roll from next door), we arrive at the cinema just in time to get priority seating before the doors actually open to the public – thanks to Granpa’s tottering status when surrounded by ankle-biters. Sam is very impressed by this, as we get to choose whatever seats we want. By the end of the day, though, we have been going non-stop for seven hours. Even allowing for the time A slept during the movie, we are all pretty tired by the time we get home.

Next day, Thursday, is Blue Care day, in which one of several different angels comes and spends four hours with A while I go off and ‘do my thing’, whatever that may be. In the first months after A’s hospitalisation, I would have to run around doing all the week’s errands, including groceries, as this was my only time away from home. But now A happily accompanies me on all such errands, provided I slow to a snail’s pace or, sometimes, ‘borrow’ one of the shopping centre’s disability go-karts (which he loves). So now during A's carer visit, I am free to entertain myself however I see fit for these four hours each week. At first, without a plan and unused to this freedom, I would drive around aimlessly, unable to decide how best to spend these sacred few hours. Now that I’m better organised, I usually go to a favourite nursery and browse the plants, maybe buying, maybe not – it doesn’t really matter. Very occasionally, I have lunch with a friend. Other times, I just walk by the river or in the National Park. It’s all good medicine.

On this Thursday, though, I am supposed to meet Sam’s ‘real’ paternal grandma (he has quite a few step-grandmas like me!) a half hour down the highway, where we will effect the grandson handover and have a quick coffee! That doesn’t quite go to plan, however, since my Blue Care angel doesn’t arrive until 15 minutes after the time scheduled for my highway rendezvous with Sam's other grandma. Thank god for mobile phones (how did we ever manage get-togethers without them?) The meeting place is quickly changed, with Grandma Grace (GG, as she’s known) offering to drive further in my direction. So I finally hand over the red-headed package safely, GG treats Sam and me to some lunch, and I head off with enough time remaining for me to call into my favourite nursery, Fairhill Native Plants, on the way home. (You can see one outcome of that day's purchases in another recent post.)

Arriving back home on Thursday after my time-off-for-good-behaviour, I walk in the door to A’s big smile, a gap showing where the top front tooth should be! Luckily, our Blue Care angel has retrieved the cap, which hadn’t survived the chicken sandwich, let alone the apple that followed. Obviously the repair was doomed. The next morning, after a couple of phone conversations with the dentist’s receptionist and A’s assurances that he is OK to manage the long sessions in the chair that will be required, we get two appointments this week for the invasive drilling and fitting that, we hope, will re-anchor that salvaged cap into the top jaw 'till death do us (or it) part'.

And the result today: Here we are this morning at the dentist's again. A is just settling into the chair when the dentist asks: “Is he on any blood pressure tablets?” My god, I realise, I don’t really know what two of his five daily tablets are for. (Caregiver-guilt strikes again!) I ring our doctor. The dentist holds the needle in her hand, poised to inject, but our doctor is on the phone to someone else. Minutes (it seems longer) go by. Finally I get the doctor's answer: Yes, one of those tablets is a blood pressure tablet. No problem, says the dentist, as she quickly changes to a different drug, one without adrenaline, which is OK to use with someone taking blood pressure tablets. But then the doctor, still on the phone, asks to speak to the dentist. ‘Has A had his antibiotics first?’ It seems that after mitral valve repairs, anyone undergoing an invasive dental procedure should begin a course of antibiotics at least an hour beforehand to minimise the likelihood of an infection which could make its way to the heart.

I should know this from my experience years ago taking my elderly mother to the dentist. She had the same problem but hated taking pills so much, she eventually stopped going to the dentist just so she wouldn't need to take antibiotics! I had even thought of phoning the doctor early this morning to check that very thing. But I rationalised that surely someone would have told us this at the time of the operation, or at the time of dismissal from the hospital. Did we ever get a list of do’s and don’ts after heart surgery? I guess we probably did. But A's massive post-operative complications overshadowed all the usual cardiac-related warnings we might have paid more attention to otherwise. Anyway, his supervising doctor in hospital never expected A to be able to come home, let alone undergo major dental work.

Well A got his antibiotics (probably not quite an hour before, but fingers crossed!) and I’ve added another no-no to the growing list of warnings in my caregiver’s survival manual. At the end of the week, we go back to the dentist for the rest of the procedure. Here’s hoping it goes too smoothly to warrant another post, except for before and after pictures.

Kangaroo paws

2010-04-09T17:19:00.006+10:00

Just finished planting out kangaroo paws (Anigozanthos) along the top edge of the in-ground water tank - a good spot in full sun which is neither too wet nor too dry.

The two plants in the middle of the photo are Bush Pizzazz (deep magenta flowers) and the plant on the right is Bush Elegance (deep burgundy flowers on a plant that should be slightly smaller in overall size when mature). I also planted a fourth Bush Elegance across the rocky path, just out of view off the top right-hand corner of the photo. The last of this season's sage plants along the edge of the water tank are just about finished, but the compost I put into the holes for the kangaroo paw may give the sage one last flourish.

Back to school for Sam

2010-04-08T23:46:00.005+10:00

Sadly, grandson Sam went home today. But we had happy times during his week-long visit – including our Valley Rattler excursion described in an earlier post and yesterday's trip to the cinema to see How to Train your Dragon, in 3-D no less. (In spite of a booming soundtrack, Granpa managed to sleep through a good part of the movie.)

Sam found lots to do at home, too. On this visit, he only managed to fit in one long swim. He usually spends hours in the pool every day when he visits, but this time we were so busy and on some days the temperature was a bit too cool to be tempting. Even so, he got in a good few hours while I weeded a garden bed alongside the pool.

On our last evening before Sam's departure, we drove down to an off-the-track part of Doonan for a bit of roo-spotting, along roads that have never before failed to yield a good number of wallabies feeding at dusk.

Unfortunately, this time we didn't see a single wallaby, though we did come face to face with a small group of beautiful young bulls calmly feeding. Sam tried to photograph them, but managed to get only one rump. He did get some lovely shots of a beautiful sunset, however, including this one of a truly spectacular cloud formation.

The Valley Rattler

2010-04-07T00:29:00.004+10:00

Grandson Sam, Granpa A and I spent Easter Sunday riding the Mary Valley Heritage Railway from Gympie to Imbil and back, on a beautiful steam train known as the Valley Rattler.

The heritage railway has operated this colourful old steam locomotive pulling half a dozen authentic carriages as a delightful tourism initiative since 1998. The train takes up to 480 passengers per trip on a return journey from the old Gympie Railway Station (Queensland) to the inland town of Imbil several times a week. The outbound trip takes two hours and then there's a two-hour layover at Imbil. Here passengers can lunch at one of several cafes or pubs. Or by arrangement, the railway will provide box lunches that are collected on arrival at Imbil. Some people on our train brought picnics and there was plenty of space for casual dining around the Imbil station grounds.

Imbil was positively bustling. A small market offering local produce and other market-type attractions is set up along the historic main street, which still contains many of the original old buildings now turned into modest cafes and shops. After lunch and some shopping, passengers re-board for the return trip and another two hours of very pleasant sightseeing.

The train travels through picturesque bush and farming country in the iconic Mary River valley, crossing the Mary and several other rivers and creeks on the way. We stopped once on the outbound trip – at Kandanga – and once on the return trip – at Dagun – where we were able to sample and buy various local wares and refreshments in mini-markets set up specially for our benefit in and around the original station buildings in each place. A wine and cheese tasting was the highlight of the Dagun stop on the way back.

From the moment of boarding at 9.45 am until our return to Gympie at 4 pm, Sam had a great time, and so did we. Our beautifully wood-panelled car (Car 'C' No. 1038) was built in 1923 at Ipswich. It was originally a 1st class car that had been converted to 2nd class in 1984. Even though we hadn't paid top dollar for a seat in a 'club car' (the cost for the three of us was just over $100 plus lunch), it seemed to me as I walked through the other cars in the course of embarking and disembarking at various stations that ours had the most sumptuous and comfortable seats on the train. Maybe that was because we booked well in advance. (The train was just about sold out, I believe, and advance booking is a must.) We shared our little cabin with another threesome who were great company. And the long, well-sprung upholstered bench-type seats on both sides of the cabin could easily have accommodated another person each, so the six of us had plenty of space to spread out.

Some of the platforms presented a challenge to A, as there were no modern facilities such as ramps or lifts. Instead, sets of metal stairs without handrails were lifted into position at each stop. But there were always offers of assistance from staff and other passengers. Even so, Allen chose to sit out the last stop with one of his puzzles, while I ferried him samples of the wine and cheese on offer. It had been a long day, after all.

What the train lacked in modern amenities (I will spare you a description of the loo facilities) was more than outweighed by the very friendly and helpful staff, all of whom were in period costume and used equipment and tickets faithful to the early days of train travel in Queensland. I'm not sure but I think some of the staff are volunteers, too. And a few were what is sometimes referred to as 'disabled', but that label certainly isn't appropriate to describe the standard of their very capable service. So it wasn't only the facilities that were 'old-fashioned'; the service was the same – old-fashioned in the best possible sense.

A small setback

2010-04-03T19:39:00.004+10:00

Well here it is 10.30 am and all three of us (the two wrinklies plus grandson) are showered, breakfasted and each at our screens. It's incredible how long it takes A and me to get organised in the morning since he fractured his clavicle (that's shoulder, for the anatomy-challenged among you!) This happened about nine days ago while A was maneuvering himself into position to begin an exercise routine. He had been doing his daily exercises independently for a while, but on this day he lost his balance somehow and toppled over, head and arm striking the edge of a bookcase or chair as he crashed down heavily onto the tile floor.

I came running when I heard the yell. Just getting him up was a challenge, but then I remembered that velcro-fastened cummerbund thing with 'grab' handles that we'd bought for his first weeks out of hospital. So after wrapping that belt around him, I managed to haul him up into a chair. At first I was most worried about the amount of blood splashed around, which seemed to be coming from a wound at the top of his head. But after checking him all over I realised some of the blood was from grazed skin near the left elbow.

Our Blue Care helper arrived just about then, and together we cleaned up A's injuries, which proved to be just flaps of skin rubbed off and no serious cuts. I was particularly impressed with the arrow our helper drew on the waterproof dressings, after we had applied these to the grazed skin areas. The arrow showed the direction in which to rip off each bandage later without pulling against the direction of the loose skin flap underneath. Even our doctor was impressed with that when we brought A in the next day to sort out why the shoulder was so sore and swollen.

X-rays showed a possible new fracture to the clavicle on top of an old one from A's youth, when he'd fallen off a bicycle. Swelling and soreness since then have confirmed this, so A must wear a sling for the next month or so, and has to do everything one-armed – which has greatly reduced his sense of independence, and also his confidence. But it's not too serious an injury, and has served to remind us of a big danger for someone of A's condition at this stage of life: injury from falls. We must be more careful in future.

Easter weekend with Sam

2010-04-02T21:55:00.000+10:00

Our Easter weekend with grandson Sam has begun. Grandma Grace drove him up late this morning, and after lunch we got busy in the kitchen. Sam made a batch of chocolate crackles (lovely, they are, too!)

After lunch, Sam helped to trim a small hedge of alternanthera in the back yard. Then he helped his Granpa to do a few puzzles -- which they completed successfully (of course).

While dinner was cooking, Sam and Grandma worked on their computers in the studio. Sam's favourite game today was a game called bike champ (motor bikes not push bikes). Level 27 was the hardest. Afterwards we watched game videos on youtube on the computer Sam was using.

Three blind mice

2010-04-01T18:16:00.000+10:00

Three blind mice, three blind mice....

See how they run, see how they run.....

Oh how I miss that dear old python who once lived 'upstairs'. While he boarded with us, we never had to worry about families like this one caught trying to sneak into the house. And I never had to run around catching mice by the tail (or trying to).

Tough plants in tricky spots

2010-03-23T13:00:00.003+10:00

All around my garden you will find collections of 'filler' plants, little clumps of stalwarts that have managed to grow and even prosper in difficult spots where their more exotic predecessors long ago gave up the ghost. Living as we do in a sub-tropical climate where these plants are pretty mundane, they aren't often photographed and visitors rarely notice them. But I often stop when passing to admire their tenacity. And on occasion I have had to defend them when a casual observer has suggested I 'get rid of that thing'. No, I say, these are survivors who have served me well. I can afford to let them have a piece of otherwise unproductive clay. (Secretly now and then, I even throw them a dollop of fish emulsion!)

Here, then, are some plodders.

That's an alternanthera above – not sure which one because my 5-metre row of this little hedge came from offshoots given to me by a friend. It occupies a tough edge alongside the front terrace, in full sun for much of the day during summer and so sometimes quite dry, but also getting lots of run-off from the terrace in big rains. A lime tree and other shrubs nearby don't spare these plants much sustenance, but they soldier on regardless, giving a multi-colour display all year round where other perennials and less hardy annuals have failed.

This abelia thrives in two difficult spots. They, too, live in a patch that alternates between dry-as-a-bone and soggy-wet. Under one of these shrubs, in a narrow strip between the pool and a retaining wall, a duck once laid a clutch of eggs. Sadly they were raided by (I think) a lizard before hatching. The little bell-shaped white-and-pink flowers go on and on all summer and beyond.

Here are two versions of the same plant – a variegated dracaena or cordyline – which I keep for no reason except that they have thrived in a spot where it took a long while to establish my gardenias.

And though the gardenias alongside are now doing well (their leaves even poking through the low-growing one above left), there is something about the delicate pastel colours of these strappy leaves set against the background of darker greens in the distance that continues to earn them their keep. But the shape is all wrong for this bed now, so this autumn I will take them out and use the tops to start a new clump in some other difficult spot.

I don't frankly know if the flowers at left are those of heliconia (false bird-of-paradise) or strelitzia (real bird-of-paradise), but given their modest single colour I suspect they're the false one. Once again, the plants are offshoots from a friend's tropical garden. But they're doing well under the dappled shade from a big old ti-tree where other plants have failed. This little clump alongside the parking area makes a pretty picture when viewed from my studio windows down there on the other side of the driveway.

Another real bonanza along the driveway is a tough old mandevilla vine, whose overhanging branches bearing big yellow blooms I must, regrettably, trim away very soon if we are to continue to be able to open and close the front gate.

Tibouchina in full flower

2010-03-18T21:13:00.004+10:00

When I see a plant like this miniature tibouchina in full flower, I'm reminded I must acquire a better camera. (Or, you say, just become more skilful at taking pictures?) The colour of these purple flowers was much more intense in the early evening light than I was able to capture in either photo. Just about every bloom on the plant in the photo above aimed directly north, to drink in every bit of daylight.

The close-up shows flowers on a second plant, which went in at the same time a couple of years ago; these are more loosely distributed and the whole plant has a quite different growth pattern, probably thanks to the dappled shade from overhanging palm branches. In botany, as in real estate, what matters most? Position! Position! Position!

Crayfish nurseries?

2010-03-17T09:18:00.001+10:00

Up at the top of our 1.3 acres, a long, long way from the dam at the bottom, these holes regularly appear. Many visitors have told me they are freshwater crayfish burrows, but what are the little critters burrowing for? The holes always appear in the same area, which is rather soggy and where I suspect some underground spring activity. But there's plenty of wet clay ground down near the dam. The clay that is piled up neatly around the top of the burrow is renewed regularly. If they're crayfish holes, what are they for? I once found one of the crays floating in my swimming pool not far from this area, so I know they do come up the hill this far. I just don't know why. Must have something to do with having young, I would guess.

The seven stages of caregiving?

2010-03-15T09:06:00.890+10:00

I confess I have not lived up to my purpose in starting this blog – which was, 'to reflect about living with, caring for and being cared for in turn by a home, a garden and a partner with primary progressive aphasia. I have published many posts about the home and garden. But 'caring for' and 'being cared for' haven't figured too prominently among the entries here.

In the main, that's a good sign. It means life has returned to some kind of normal after the traumatic events of 2009. That year, or certainly the first three-quarters of it, revolved around sickness and the effects of impairment – physical, mental and for me especially, emotional. At a few low points in the year, I did feel as if that would be what the rest of our life would be about – certainly, the rest of our life together. And while I'm being honest, I also admit that once or twice for just a few minutes I thought it would have been better for Allen, and certainly for me, if he had died on the operating table or soon afterwards. But except for one terrible day toward the end of Allen's hospitalisation, those gloomy thoughts never hung around for a whole day. And mainly I refused to believe the outcome would be anything but this: I would get Allen home, and we would be OK. It was a long time before I dared to define what 'OK' might mean. But our life here would work its magic. Of that I was certain.

My work in the past ten years has required frequent uprooting, not permanent uprooting perhaps, but I have many times found myself arriving at a hotel room or short-term apartment, unpacking my suitcase, computer and briefcase and getting ready to hit the deck the next morning as...well, mainly, a problem-solver. Never mind what the problem was, and quite often it bore little resemblance to the contracted terms of reference of my consultancy, I could get in there and fix it. But even though to people who had no knowledge of those environments my aid work in developing countries appeared to be challenging, in fact with only very few exceptions my experiences were rarely earth-shattering or heart-wrenching. Out of the ordinary, perhaps. But pretty workaday nevertheless. Even so, the ability to deal with whatever they throw at you, while living and working in unfamiliar and sometimes inhospitable circumstances, without your usual support networks – all that was probably good training for surviving life-threatening medical events.

I also had one other tremendous advantage: a partner who isn't a quitter and, maybe most important of all, who is not so set in his ways that he can't adapt. In the 12 months since Allen was admitted to hospital for his second open-heart surgery (the first, 46 years earlier, having got him to 80, he didn't hesitate one minute when asked if he'd consider doing it again), I have met quite a few carers, most of them women, and the partners they care for. I have heard some inspirational but also several sad stories – of a man who would not agree to give up driving and so continued to endanger his and others' lives every day, of a man who could not bear to relinquish control of the family finances and kept changing and then forgetting bank passwords, of stubborn, proud men who could not bear to relinquish the role of Big Chief and so made their carers' jobs much more difficult. All I had to deal with was a man who, for several months, had terrible bugs eating through his breastbone and heading for the heart, and who couldn't eat, couldn't talk, couldn't breathe without a ventilator, was often delirious and couldn't understand much that anyone but me told him.

For me, if not Allen, those three months in hospital and then rehab weren't all that difficult. At least, that's how it seems in hindsight. There were battles I had to fight - and I have written elsewhere in this blog about those and about the peculiar combination of brain-related problems that resulted in some of Allen's medical complications. But now, one year later, I realise that those first months of my new role as 'carer' were were just the introduction to a whole gamut of emotional and physical 'settling in'. True, I was living away from home during that time and that was a wrench, but I had our children every day offering care and support. I had a hot meal and cosy bed waiting every night at my daughter's home(unlike the wife of the man in the next ICU bay, who spent months in a motel during her husband's hospitalisation only to have him die on the day he was due to be discharged). I also had daily messages of support from family and friends, some of whom came from China, Sydney, Melbourne and Tasmania to be with us for Allen's 80th birthday celebrations at the hospital. There were even messages from people in Allen's past whom I didn't know. (The email message sticks spread far and wide.) I had almost no responsibilities other than spending seven or eight hours a day at Allen's bedside. And since that was in Intensive Care there was always a dedicated nurse with us, and many of them were a pleasure to get to know. From them I even learned a range of useful bedside skills, becoming proficient enough at some of them to be asked more than once if I had had nursing experience in my past.

The daily commute from my daughter's house to the hospital was a drag, but I could listen to books-on-tape and take time to compose myself before ringing the bell every morning for admission to Intensive Care. On the way home in the evening, when I needed it there was time to howl in anguish, and still compose myself before arriving at my daughter's for dinner. And since I refused to believe Allen wouldn't recover, I focused always on the small signs of progress (yesterday 20 minutes of breathing without the respirator, today 40 minutes; today Allen moves from eating only mashed-up food to taking some minced food; today he lifts his left leg 10cm off the bed, and does it while the physio is still there instead of one hour later etc.) And so those weeks slipped by until, miraculously, I arrived one morning to find Allen sitting up, awake and alert, and found out he'd just been wheeled into a proper shower for the first time in two months. It seemed to me then that the home stretch was in sight. At about Week 8, supported by a walking frame, nurse and attendant, he actually walked a whole circuit of the Intensive Care Unit. By this time we had become such fixtures in the ICU that the eight or nine nurses and other staff on duty that morning all turned to watch his progress and, when he completed the circuit, erupted in a round of applause.

After all that attention and what seemed like heroic efforts on Allen's part, being banished to an ordinary hospital room in week 10 and told, 'You'll never take your husband home, so get busy and find a high-care place in a nursing home" was a terrible wrench (the one truly awful day I referred to above)! Thankfully, with our surgeon's help we proved that wrong. And after two more weeks in a rehabilitation hospital, where Allen's main achievements were that he learned to walk using a conventional small frame on wheels and he began to shake off the effects of the cocktail of anti-depressant and anti-psychotic drugs he'd been given while in Intensive Care, we finally made it home. And that was where my carer odyssey really began.

Most of us have heard about the seven stages of grief. Maybe caregiving, when it occupies a large amount of your time and energy and ties you inexorably to being available to one person 24 hours a day, has stages that are not that dissimilar. First comes shock and denial, though in the case of a hospitalisation that should have been over in a week or two, the threat of possible loss went on hovering in the background for three months. I guess I kept denying it, and maybe that was my salvation. Anyway, I had experienced total shock a few years earlier, when my mother had her first stroke and I had to give up all hopes of getting her an Australian visa and accept that I would not be able to be near her in her final years. At that time, too, I remember too well going through the next stage of grieving - pain and guilt - fearing that I might have contributed somehow to my mother's trauma by putting her through the agony of having her visa application rejected. But in this case, with Allen, the guilt I experienced that was harder to shake off was the thought that maybe I had influenced Allen to have this operation, and had not sufficiently researched the risks.

Next stage, frustration and anger, typically includes the need to blame someone else for this aftermath. I suppose I directed most of my anger in the first few months at those doctors and administrators who tried to persuade me to give up – to stop the antibiotics, and later, to put Allen into a nursing home. That anger served me well, since it prompted me to defiance. Less useful, though, was the anger I sometimes felt after we got home toward Allen and his neediness. Inevitably, those feelings would take me back to guilt, especially if I got stuck into a bottle of red wine late at night, which was all too easy to do when the house went quiet after Allen went to bed.

So it was very easy to slide into the next stage of grieving: depression and loneliness. This was made easier by our relative isolation up here, more than an hour's drive from our children and not within walking distance of any services or shops. Admittedly, we live in a beautiful semi-rural environment, and we're only 20 minutes away from a first-class tourist destination with every shopping and other facility we might want. But especially in Allen's first months at home, taking him out was difficult and eating anywhere but home not an option. And with few old friends living nearby, I was no longer so sure I would manage physically or psychologically. This is when, say the grieving guidebooks, "you finally realize the true magnitude of your loss, and it depresses you".

In my worst moments, I felt I had lost two important pegs in my life: my independence and my best friend. Of course, I hadn't actually lost Allen, but I had lost (or so it seemed in those first months at home) much about him that I had come to rely on: intellectual companionship, a ready wit, a keen problem-solving attitude, initiative and enthusiasm in household maintenance, even someone with whom to share the cooking and cleaning, not to mention a shoulder to lean on now and then – in short, a husband.

The grief counsellors say that you eventually begin to adjust to life without your dear one – they call this the upward turn. I, however, just had to adjust to a different life with mine. After all, I still had a husband. I just had to get used to the different person he had become. Or rather, I had to learn that my husband was not a different person, even if there had to be some differences in how we lived. I also had to find ways to get back out into the garden, both because I needed to be able to do this if we were to go on living on this large block, and also because I knew the garden would be my best therapy. And since Allen couldn't do many things for himself in those early months and so couldn't be left alone in the house, I had to find a way to keep him safe while I got on with doing things I liked or that had to be done. Mostly, this meant learning to take things slower, not expecting to get everything done in a day and getting more pleasure from simple things. All in all, not a bad lesson to learn at the onset of retirement. It started simply enough with picking mulberries together, which I called Sharing the load when I wrote about it in this blog. But in fact, the load got a lot lighter as a result of my change of attitude.

Now, one year after Allen first went into hospital, I think I have finally arrived at the final two stages of grief: reconstruction and working through, and acceptance and hope. Of course, it helps enormously that Allen's physical stamina and general health have improved miraculously in the past six months. He has become something of a pin-up boy to the people who've worked with him. Our return visit to the ICU a few months ago, just to show him off, had doctors and nurses staring in disbelief. His geriatrician marvels that Allen's scores on all the standard psychological tests are almost the same as they were a year ago, even though brain scans show the 'holes' in his brain continue to expand. And from someone whose best efforts at drawing a face toward the end of his hospitalisation just nine months ago resembled those of a three-year-old (see picture on the left), Allen has progressed to writing brief letters to family and friends, he can operate a number of aphasia-specific therapy programs on computer, and he can read just about anything. Indeed, he is back to trawling the shelves on our weekly visits to the library, and recommending books he thinks I might enjoy.

We both know but don't dwell on the fact that sometimes Allen can't appreciate the complexity of a complicated plot or argument in a novel or current-affairs program. But it doesn't detract from the pleasure he gets from reading. In fact, one of the first independent things he did while still in the ICU was to pick up a newspaper I'd brought in and hold it up as if to read – upside down! He just needed to feel the comfort of that familiar act, and to believe that one day he would read and write again. As soon as we got home, he asked me to write out the alphabet on a strip of paper, which he kept on his table, practising letter by letter until he could again recognise and print all the letters, albeit in a shaky hand. He can no longer participate orally in lively dinner table discussion with friends and family, but that doesn't stop him enjoying being part of the scene. He can't remember more than a few steps in any sequence of activities and finds it difficult to execute relatively simple tasks that he once did by rote. He has trouble 'reading' a clock to tell time, for example. 'Half past' and 'quarter to' don't seem to make any sense to him, and he can't remember the different roles of the big hand and little hand, so he's as likely to say it's something after 6 when in fact it's 3.30. He knows that is wrong, but can't figure out why.

We have both accepted, it seems, that these things don't matter that much – to us, anyway. In fact, the range of things that don't matter to us is pretty astounding. Allen really has no idea at all about money, how much we have to live on, what bills I pay and what accounts I manage. If we're in a shopping centre, I might give him money and send him into a newsagency to buy a paper, where he will decide whether to get The Australian or The Sydney Morning Herald. Those are probably the only commercial transactions he has had in 12 months. Anything more than that would just confuse and upset him. But he is still better than me at selecting the best fruit to buy and making sure we get everything that's on the shopping list. And he can read and understand everything I've written here, even if it takes him a week of difficult effort to write as much as a paragraph himself.

We seem to have found "realistic solutions to our life-problems". We are "reconstructing ourselves and our lives and dealing with the reality of our situation: finding a way forward" – all things which the experts say characterise the final stages in grieving, too. People who don't know us that well still express concern for my or our 'fate'. Allen, after all, has a form of dementia! And I am stuck at home caring for him! That's what our situation looks like. We are moved by their anxiety on our behalf, but sometimes also amused. I want to tell them I feel just as bad for them, because they are still out there, part of the rat race. We, on the other hand, live quietly day to day, and do pretty much as we please, when we please. Allen is relearning how to swim. I have taken my sewing machine out again after years on the shelf. OK, the garden isn't quite up to scratch. But we have time to get pleasure from looking at it every day. We laugh an awful lot over Allen's 'category' errors. And here am I, doing what I never could find the time to do before caregiving became my way of life: WRITING.

I know in many ways we have been very lucky. But my message to carers is this: whenever you possibly can, try to enjoy some of it.

The dam is full

2010-03-14T17:10:00.000+10:00

Our water pump's intake valve is bobbing nicely out there in the deepest part of the dam at the bottom of our block, thanks to two weeks of rain totalling 630mm (about 25in). Water flows down to our valley from nearby Mt Panorama, feeding half a dozen or more dams before it reaches ours.

All of them must be overflowing by now because the often dry creekbed below our dam is not yet the raging torrent it can sometimes become, but it's flowed steadily for more than a week now.

Good to know my 2010 garden will be well watered, even if the price we are paying right now is murky-coloured water in the toilet! That's because we pump dam water up to a holding tank at the top of the block, from where it flows by gravity down to the cistern as required. This saves precious rainwater for more important uses. It also means the cistern doesn't lose its water supply if a power failure should shut down the pumps for a while. Fortunately, that doesn't happen very often any more. But it's something you must prepare for when you live in the countryside in a region where tropical storms can cause occasional havoc.

My pot plants don't smoke!

2010-03-14T15:49:00.008+10:00

Pot plants [US friends: read 'potted plants', not marijuana] are loving all this rain, even if we are sick to death of it ourselves! That thyme (above left) has tripled in size in about two weeks, and the lavender (above right) is finally getting going after doing nothing much in the pot for more than a year. Both are tricky to grow in this climate, where the summer weather is exactly opposite to what these Mediterranean natives would prefer: our rainy hot seasons have already drowned several of my earlier attempts at both types. So now I only grow them in pots that allow good drainage in wet weather, and which I can move around in the garden according to seasonal conditions.

The same applies to pelargonia (geraniums etc.), but the plant below, which I have no memory of ever buying or acquiring, has really exploded just lately. And now I'm not even sure it's a pelargonium.

With long white flower spikes, which have appeared for the first time this year, the plant really has the flowering habit of a begonia. And the leaves and stalks, too, are begonia-like. So I'm no longer sure what this is. But with its two-toned leaves and a sprawling habit, it has nestled in nicely alongside a red-leaved neighbour on top of our water-tank-cum-terrace. In the close-up of this plant's leaves, you can see a resemblance to the leaves of two of my begonias (below). And you can't see the plant's fleshy stalks, but they're also begonia-like.

It was probably a mistake to plant this 'cardboard palm' (actually a cycad rather than a true palm) in a container – even though the container is a large old concrete washing trough that I acquired I-don't-know-where. The cycad was only about 30cm wide when I planted it in the left half of the double-sink that sits in a corner of our gravelled parking area. At the time I thought that cycads were slow-growing! I planted a mini-variety of lilly pilly into the right half of the trough, thinking its vertical habit would balance out the cardboard palm's horizontal habit. I have since found out that these cycads can grow to 2m in diameter – and mine is well on its way to that. And pruning of the lilly pilly has resulted in its developing a horizontal habit too. Worse, the overhanging fronds hide from view that pointy corner of the concrete trough, which is a menace for unsuspecting visitors trying to execute a Y-turn in our cramped driveway. So this arrangement may well have to be reconsidered. (Good planning was never my forte!)

Here are two container plants that are no danger to anyone. On the left is the reliable old trooper, Moses-in-a-cradle – 'a fleshy rhizomatous herb native to Mexico'. I have hundreds of these scattered around the garden in various tough spots. They all derive from cuttings given to me or planted by a dear friend who used to care for the garden and house during our overseas assignments. (And some two dozen offspring went off recently to populate a difficult area in my daugher's Brisbane garden.) The little clutch below left, from cuttings put in no more than a year ago, is flourishing in a low broad pot near the edge of a covered verandah where nothing else has ever done well – though I don't remember seeing any of the white flowers that this Rhoeo spathacea is supposed to have on any of my plants as yet. The plant on the right is one of several bromeliads Julian and Teri gave me as Christmas gifts in 2008. I've kept all of them in pots, where they do best, but tucked them into various spots in the garden. I hope this year they may flower as they are obviously quite happy.

The arrangement at right is doubly pleasing – first, because the newly built cypress pergola and balustrade surrounding our tank-top terrace is still a joy to behold, and second, because the bougainvillea and agave growing together in a big pot are as happy here as they were in the out-of-sight part of the garden from which I moved them so that we'd be better able to enjoy the annual blooming riot. But who or what wouldn't be happy in this north-facing sunny spot with shadecloth overhead and big trees on the western side providing dappled shade as the sun moves across the sky on hot afternoons. Indeed, when friend Geoff came north to stay with us for ten days at Christmas-time, he spent a good part of every day reading in the chair at the left in this picture.

I've left my 'pot of the year' till last. This one's a passionfruit that has been in the same pot for several years, during which time a nearby jasmine vine dropped some tendrils into it and these took root there too. But even though I've fertilised regularly and topped up the potting mixture each year, until recently this pot had lingered in another part of the garden with limited access to the sun-filled northern sky in wintertime and inadequate supports on which the vine might lift its arms into the light. Four months ago, when the new balustrade around the water tank was finished, I moved this pot to a sheltered spot down alongside the tank's side wall (that's it at the bottom of this photo, partly hidden by the red leaves of that ubiquitous cover-up whose name I can never remember). Directly above the pot, one of the poles that support the balustrade rises up, providing access to plenty of wire netting at head-height so both the passionfruit and the jasmine can climb up to get as much sun as they want. The result has been astounding growth.

There are geranium leaves mixed in there in the photo at right. But can you see the passionfruit too? The vine is happily colonising the balustrade's netting for several metres in each direction. New flowers appear regularly and develop into fruit that are already good-sized. This is one happy pot plant! And that means: one happy gardener.

Mystery tree

2010-03-14T01:09:00.001+10:00

I'm trying to find out the proper name of this unusual tree that is growing alongside my studio. For years I referred to it as the 'monkey puzzle' tree – a name a visitor once gave it. But I know it's not a genuine monkey puzzle, which is a conifer native to South America with 'needles' much more like those of the bunya pine to which it's apparently related.

This tree is more tropical or maybe cactus-like, with long twiggy branchlets (rather than leaves) that are firm but fleshy and drip a sticky white liquid when damaged or broken off. It's growing in a rather difficult spot, partly shaded by several tall trees on its eastern and northern sides (a silky oak, a bunya pine, and several other good-sized trees). And whoever originally planted it placed it too near a pandanus and a mango, both of which get more light, but the three trees are all doing remarkably well even though their branches are intermingled. The mango bore prolifically this year (what mango didn't!) and the pandanus is setting down supporting 'feet' amongst the tangled growth of all three trees.

Here's a close-up of the little branchlets that cover the mystery tree, obviously doing the job of leaves. And the large branch below is actually growing horizontally, taking a direct route through the pandanus and mango toward the precious northern sun. I've never noticed any flowers or fruit of any kind on the tree. And something about it makes me think it might be related to a rubber tree.

Household tidbits for my sister!

2010-03-13T17:30:00.001+10:00

As noted this morning on Facebook (which my sister refuses to join!) I am about to begin making slipcovers for (or perhaps reupholster - I haven't yet decided which) our big living-room couch with a grey-on-grey damask-like print that should go well with the cushions I will make from some of the many Lao fabrics I am holding in hues of black and red. Maybe because I'm in this uphostering mood, I couldn't help but notice in today's Australian that an expensive couch featured in a full-page ad should have had the left and right seat cushions reversed, so that the vertically running stripes on each cushion front would match the stripes on the couch base. (After all, it was once my job to notice these things for magazine shoots!)

Here's the lightweight tapestry-like fabric I bought for my couch covers. The colour is grey-on-grey, with a sprig-like pattern in subtle tones of dusty-pink and a lighter grey – just enough of a print to help disguise future stains and spills, but still match up nicely with the beautiful patterns in the Lao woven fabrics I will use for cushions. This cloth is of indeterminate genesis (perhaps some cotton, some polyester, and/or something else), and was on a 'specials' table. I had intended to buy just a small sample to test for washability, but when I brought it up to the counter the ticket was scanned and the price quoted at one-third the marked ticket price – so I bought 13m on the spot. Since then I have washed and dried a swatch, and it's come up fine. I never could resist a bargain, but anyway it's exactly what I was looking for.

The expensive couch I referred to above (a copy of which is reproduced here – and it looks very much like my own much less expensive model, I just realised) was the focal point today in a full page advertisement for a high-end furniture salesroom, and even the sale price was in the thousands of dollars. But really, the advertising agency should have sent along someone who knows about soft furnishings when staging the shoot. Then maybe the left and right cushions would have been set down in the right place – so that each cushion's stripes would match up with the stripes on the couch base below. At this price, a woeful mismatch as shown here would be grounds for a refund, surely. Is it because I'm immersed in planning slipcovers that I notice such things? Or is it just a leftover from my days of supervising Women's Weekly photo shoots for fashion and food pages (where steam had somehow to be generated to accompany hot dishes, no matter how long the photographer took to get his shot)? Or is it just that I'm hopelessly addicted to petty details? (If so, that's probably what made me a good editor.) Now before I segue into even more diabolical non sequiturs, I shall return to my sewing machine.

Back to diddly-squatting!

2010-03-09T13:44:00.002+10:00

Here's a modest beginning, after too long without posts. On the windowsill near the kitchen sink, the last two gardenias of the season, though knocked about by days of rain, still valiantly bring us the lovely scent of summer evenings as we are cleaning up the dinner dishes. And this morning after almost two weeks of cloudy days and endless rain, we finally had enough fine weather to warrant taking our morning coffee and muffins out onto the terrace!

Autumn crocuses for all seasons

2010-02-07T09:14:00.005+10:00

I do mean to talk of weightier things – really I do! But somehow, my attention is always drawn back to my plants and garden, and the (to me) weighty enough things going on in my patch every day. Well, when it comes to 'weighty', how about a plant that contains a poison whose effects are as deadly as arsenic? That's what Wikipedia says, anyway, about the autumn crocus, Colchicum autumnale. The poison it contains is colchicine, an extract of which ('meadow saffron') was originally used to treat various rheumatic conditions!

My interest in the plant is purely aesthetic, though I believe colchicine is still used today in the treatment of gout, so as a long-time sufferer of rheumatoid arthritis, I should bear this in mind. These little patches of starry bright whiteness pop up in various spots in my garden each year, but not usually this early. After all, it's still midsummer here and autumn is a good month away. But about ten days ago – about the time of Mum's death, as it happens – after we were drenched with a welcome 90 mm of rain in 48 hours, the little clutches of soft green grasslike foliage suddenly erupted in the white star-shaped flowers. These half-close at night to resemble miniature tulips, but reopen again the next morning. I'm hoping they will last until D's arrival in a few days.

The crocuses have flowered nonstop since they first appeared and more rain over the past few days resulted in an even showier display this morning. However, just as I was about to go out and take a new photo, we were suddenly drenched by another downpour, and though the rain didn't last long, the force of it has really knocked around the delicate blooms of each bunch. So I wonder if they'll last much longer. Still, while they're here, they're a delight. There's something about white flowers – the way they respond to the changing patterns of light, they way they shine out like little beacons as the evening comes on. And today, wet and droopy, beaten down by the force of a driving rain, they keep trying to lift up their little faces to the light. Not a bad act to emulate. Thank you, whoever!

2010-02-02T22:39:00.003+10:00

I have just taken a walk around our rainsoaked paddock, down to the pleasingly full dam at the bottom of our property. One week ago I could almost see the muddy bottom on three-quarters of this dam. And that white float you can see in the photo below – which holds up the intake valve, the point at which our pump at the top of the hill sucks water up from the dam for irrigation purposes – that was almost sitting on the bottom of a nearly empty dam until the recent rains. Now, after 90 mm of rain in two days, the dam has just about filled – thanks to Panomara Creek which flows into this southern end of the dam, and a steep earth bank on the western side (opposite, in this photo) which directs all the rainwater run-off from an acre or so of land there down into the dam. The great mystery is: where did all those water lilies come from? They were not evident when the dam was nearly empty. But now, just a few days later, there they are! Not flowering yet, but they will be very soon.

I saw several turtle heads bobbing up and down on the water's surface, too – each of these a good dinner plate in size – so I hope I won't find any more shells of dead turtles such as the two we found on the shoreline a few weeks ago. And a great big lizard – probably a monitor – dropped down into the water from an overhanging branch just as I approached. At this northern end of the dam, the outflow creek off to the right (see photo below), which was dry for many months, is again flowing downhill in a northerly direction, into the Lake Macdonald catchment area.

This area down at the bottom of our 1.3 acres of land has always been a magical place for me. There you can find our most impressive trees –great big gums that were no doubt here before local farmers turned this area into a vegetable farm of some sort (we're not sure exactly what was farmed here, but the dam is a relic of that long-ago period). It makes living here a matter of great good luck, as we have never yet run out of water in even the driest of winters (our dry season).

There's a wealth of wildlife, too: blue kingfishers skimming over the water's surface, black cockatoos whenever it's about to rain, families of wild duck and moorhens, freshwater crayfish who come far up into the paddock to burrow down into the clay soil, those monitor lizards, dozens of the large turtles, and also now and then: snakes of various sorts making their way down to the water through the lush paddock grass.

It would be so sensible to leave it all and move to a nice little unit somewhere. But oh how I would miss it. So I'll labour on for a while, fighting the elements in various ways (collapsed rainwater gutters, septic problems, rotten fascia boards, all sorts of garden problems). It still seems worth it.

PS: Happy to report in March 2010 that gutters, septic blockage and fascia boards have all been fixed - thanks to numerous tradesmen and especially wonderful Nev (who also built the new balustrade and pergola). It takes so little to make me a happy woman these days!

Those gorgeous 'Benoit' girls – and one guy!

2010-02-01T19:11:00.000+10:00

Our mother, Hazel, with her five gorgeous granddaughters: Zoe (red cardigan), Anica (purple headband), and Letty, Raina and Ariel.

And here is the only pix I can find of Mum with we three daughters (Doreen, Carol and Nancy).

Does anyone have photos of Hazel with her great-granddaughters?

Here is the final photo taken of Hazel with Viola, the last of her six sisters still then living. The occasion was an afternoon tea at which the sisters enjoyed chocolates, cake and Aunty Vi's favourite Dunkin Donuts, just two days before Hazel's departure for Australia in March 2006. It was during Vi's visit that we received the special-delivery letter from the Australian Embassy, telling us that Hazel's one-year visa to Australia had been approved. Aunty Vi died while Mum was in Australia, so this was the last time the sisters saw each other. But it was a happy occasion, full of fun and laughter, only tinged with a bit of sadness during the last goodbye hugs.

OK, I have to admit: there should be one guy in the picture – our brother, Paul. And here he is, with Doreen (far left), farewelling Mum and me as we leave for Australia in March 2006.

Mum had been very ill for some months previously, and she was still a bit weak-looking here. But she soon gained a bit of weight and some good colour in the Aussie sun. One of her favourite pastimes while with us was feeding meat scraps to a family of butcher birds every day.

These are just a few of my favourite photos from the final years of Mum's long life.

Hazel Jessie B (1921 – 2010)

2010-01-25T18:10:00.012+10:00

My mother, Hazel Jessie, died Sunday, January 24, in our home town of Southbridge, Massachusetts (USA). She was 88 years old.

Hazel was the youngest of 12 siblings born to Alfred Benoit and Melina (Genard) Benoit of Webster, Massachusetts. She was born on a farm, and was fond of saying that her childhood included a lot of time spent climbing in (and eating from) a big cherry tree in the family's yard. She also had fond memories of time spent playing school under that tree with her six sisters, who remained her best friends throughout their lives.

Hazel enjoyed her work in various jobs during her married life, including at American Optical and several Southbridge stores. Her final job was at the jewelry counter in the former Ames Department Store in the Globe area. But most of her life was devoted to caring for her four children and husband Sam, whom she lovingly nursed through a long illness prior to his death in 2002.

An enthusiastic music lover, Hazel played mandolin and led family sing-alongs. She loved listening to radio, especially country music. In 2006, during a year living in Australia with her daughter, she won a national radio contest for her yodelling skills. In the 1960s Hazel enjoyed the Beatles as much as her teenage daughters did! Indeed, among her children’s friends, she was considered a very trendy Mom. As soon as she got her driving licence, she would take her children and their friends to drive-in movies. Once, she drove off with the speaker still hanging from the back window. She stopped the car, threw the speaker out, knocked out the broken glass and rolled down the window frame. Cars weren’t used every day then, so it was a while before her amused husband took the car out of the garage, rolled up the window and wondered why it had no glass!

Hazel was an accomplished seamstress, crafter, decorator, cook and baker. Until macular degeneration robbed her of vision, she was sewing and knitting for others. In 2002, she made dozens of warm hats to be distributed to Hmong students in Laos who were participating in an aid project managed by one of her daughters.

Hazel is predeceased by her husband Raoul (always know as "Sam"), six sisters (Florence, Viola, Eva, Pearl, Mildred and Edna) and four brothers (George, Edward, Louis, and Chester). She leaves one brother and his wife (Walter and Jenny), a son and daughter-in-law in Southbridge (Paul and Linda), two daughters and their partners in Australia (Carol and Allen; Nancy and Rodney), one daughter in Southbridge (Doreen), three granddaughters in Louisiana (Raina, Ariel and Letty); two granddaughters in Australia (Zoe and Anica), a step-granddaughter in Florida (Kim), three great-granddaughters in Louisiana (Skylar, Aldyn and Keely), a step-greatgrandson in Florida (Colton) and many nieces and nephews.

Hazel will be sadly missed by her extended family and by all who knew and loved her. A memorial service will take place in the Spring, when Hazel's ashes will be buried beside her husband’s in the new Notre Dame cemetery on Woodstock Rd, Southbridge MA. In lieu of flowers, friends and relatives are asked to donate to the Haiti Earthquake Response Fund at OXFAM International (PO Box 1211, Albert Lea, MN 56007-1211) or any other Haiti relief agency of their choice.

(March 2006: Hazel arrives for a year she spent with us in Australia)