The oak and hazel marching up the hill with frosted limbs. It is miserably cold: damp drips from the eaves and a pall of grey smokes over the valley. The sun will rise, of that she is certain, but it is always an inspid globule that brings no detail to the day, only a lightening of sorts before being lost to dark again. Today it hardly seemed to make itself known at all. It was a fakery of a sun, dreamed up by smoking men to keep the island cloaked in hope, though everyone could see right through it.
She reaches for the hot water bottle, which gives a an unenthusiastic warmth to the cave she has made underneath her mother in law's quilt. It is a pathetic attempt to warm toes, legs, belly. Her whole body vibrates with cold.
She has given up imagining that they will open up the flight paths again. Most mornings she gets up quickly and tries to think of anything else but flying homeward, the curve of the earth underneath the white underbelly of an aeroplane, the chiming of seatbelt warnings in the midnight turbulance, the smell of Melbourne when the first steps over the threshold are done. So she thinks of the whorls in fallen oak trees. Moss. Icicles. Fog. Endless grey sky, the road serpentining blackly out of the valley and over the the other side of the hill. Squirrel, acorn, rabbit, deer. Kettle, coffee, oats, milk. Observation of nouns the key to freezing out the hot pain of homesickness.
Sometimes she rises early and walks into the pale light of England. She marches past hedgerows, frightening rabbits in her determination, slides in mud and cowshit and sits on the hill to photograph the details that help her survive. Dandelion, cow, nettle, wrinkled rosehips well past their use by, hawthorn, birch, holly.
But today she pulls the covers over her head and holds the warmth of her screen close. She knows it is not good for her, but she does it anyway. Aching is sometimes better than numbness. She watches the morning sun rising over the southern oceans. The orange smear of warmth rubs sensually against the horizon. The vast ocean submits, opening up to the burning, fierce sun.
They shut the borders years ago. Her applications to leave languish on any number of desks, refused for reasons no one really fathoms. When the chips are down, there is no such thing as a nation protecting it's own. Every country had closed in on itself.
The webcams know no boundaries, laws, bureaucracy or viral madness, however. They cheerfully forget she is missing from the landscape they capture, and happily feed her a rather ineffectual vaccine for homesickness that must be injected often. Their single eyed gaze pans over the coast she longs for, jerkily moving left to right. Salt air smeared, they give her real time dawn as she slips into the sadness of dusk.
Surfers slide off the warm swell of waves. On the rocky turret of the point a cormorant airs it's wings, an avian surya namaskar. Sometimes, she imagines her nephews waving to her from the rocks. They are young and not conscious that she might see them dive into the water and slip into the crevasses looking for abalone and Australian salmon, emerging triumpantly like little gods of the sea.
She must remember to tell them to wave.
This post was written in response to the prompt 'morning sun'. This morning I watched the sunrise on the web cam when I checked the surf. What a wonder the modern world is! However, I thought about being in lockdown last March, when I worried I'd never get back from England to Australia and my family. Of course, I did. But what if the borders were shut forever? What if I had been truly stuck, like many Australians still are? Homesickness hurts. Whilst I set the clock initially for five minutes, I ended up extending it into a longer piece of writing to try to capture the feeling of being alone on the other side of the world - not a foreign feeling at all.
Images by me - free to share as long as you credit me. Small beneficiaries welcomed.
This is my first post in the new Writing Club community on HIVE. You can join the community here.