Hilary's birthday is always in September, and most years she hosts a picnic in the royal botanic gardens. Here she is with a pinata in the shape of a fly!
botanic gardens / homebodies
flemington to collingwood
A couple of months ago, with Lambros's yellow van and a borrowed trailer, we helped friends move house. Their old house was a rambling, double-storied castle with re-appearing doors and a staircase that turned back on itself and droopy plaster, and I tried to make cornbread in their broken oven with too little flour and too much milk. It ended up a pudding, but we were hungry and (in my case) bruised, so we ate it straight from the pan, with spoons. Carrying one of the last boxes out the front door, I tried to wedge my hip between the box and the banging fly-screen so the old cardboard box would not scrape and split. But its bottom fell out, and plates and glasses and pots and pans smashed on the tiles. I was too tired to be frightened by the noise, but the mess of ruined crockery was very sad. They were told their house would be torn down and replaced by an apartment block, but there are new tenants there now.
Aaron is an artist of the highest order. I have his illustrations and notes all over my walls. I am lucky.
We had tea and rearranged cut-out paper shapes on another sheet of paper representing their new bedroom, much smaller. Nothing seemed to fit.
L & me bundled up for a winter walk, and out-of-focus foliage.
Mint, and sage (which disappeared one night. I hope the sage thief knows what he has found.) My herb garden now includes thyme and oregano and marjoram and alpine strawberries and I am coaxing a decimated coriander stalk back to life. It is good to look after other things.
Mint, in a water bottle in North Melbourne.
mushrooms // clunes // talbot // autumn too many months ago to count
a basket of slippery jack mushrooms, collected in a pine forest near a town in central victoria called clunes. slippery jacks are pale yellow and sponge-like on the inside, and needles stick to their slippery brown surfaces. when they are cooked in oil and garlic your kitchen smells like a wet forest fire.
belgian waffles and maps in talbot, a slightly bigger town nearby. talbot is also home to an 1875 railway station that is now a museum and nursery. it was may and there were still figs on the trees.
books et cetera
these ugly duckling online poetry chapbooks are exactly what i need to curl up with on a night like this, especially after spending too long a few hours ago staring at walls of poetry books, unable to choose which would be mine. i ended up with h.d.'s 'trilogy' and the sound of breaking porcelain. osip mandelstam is particularly good.
one more story
streets in san francisco, noticeably less snow-encased than the other cities in america we visited. possibly related to this notebook entry? "11 january -- morning washing then through almost-raining streets to 16th and dolores to see the mision san francisco de asis. the oldest mission, unapologetic about its involvement in native american slave labor & conversion to christianity -- a description in the museum said their numbers would have decreased from 300,000 to 150,000 and then even lower anyway,without the presence of the spanish missionaries. the seven sorrows of mary, low coming sky, faded aqua hotel tropicana we did not find to stay in. all the irish and dead children in the cemetery and catholic fourth graders knowing more about father serra than i do."
the previous night we ate squash quesadillas and drank cheap mojitos and fit our limbs into the small bathtub in the acid green unwindowed bathroom and then, unheld by porcelain, into the bed. and i said things and closed my eyes which were antique eyes by that stage. we almost missed the flight from chicago to san francisco, noticing only on the blue line train to o'hare that our plane was scheduled to depart from midway airport, in another direction entirely to where we were headed. so we rushed out into the predawn brown air and hailed a cab. my last image of chicago before the tall walls of the highway swept us around unmappable corners, a chimney laughing black into the sky.
sfmoma. right before peter (a friend of matias) approached, recognising me from a photograph. "do you know anyone from denmark" he said. "yes." "would that be matias?" he wore a scarf around his neck and my voice disappeared, talking, and i said so and he said well i don't know what your voice is like normally so this could be it, the reason your breath is white though it's not very cold, a dragon is hatching eggs in your chest and needs the space, between lungs, to incubate them.other things in the museum worth noting: an exhibition on voyeurism, "camera concealed in walking cane, wood metal glass" -- the view of a lethal injection chamber from the family witness room, parchman state penitentiary. sophie calle's "the hotel, room 25". cartier-bresson "the modern century" -- fishnets drawn in at nazare, portugal like the beginnings of mourning threads woven by the red fingers of young men, madrid steam and combed stick hair and rosaries, camus with a short cigarette.
the botanic gardens at berkeley. 
by the roadside in santa cruz.
picnic in the arboretum at ucsc, because we could not find our way to the actual university campus. sunflower seed baguette, gouda, blueberries. 
that night, we drank wine and waited for our bus which left at 11.55 p.m. and heard sea lions barking in the distance. rode a 1911 carousel with real horse-hair for the ponies' tails and metal rings to throw at a painted clown mural, a scary wooden rollercoaster my backbone was thrown against, leaving bruises that made the long bus ride to los angeles even more uncomfortable. and when i ask how are we even going to pay for these drinks, he says, "easily".
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