Naomi Bulger: messages in bottles

Happy New Year! Are you excited? Renewed? Planning new adventures? I sure am, but it was rather therapeutic today to think through the year that was. (Hint: as you read this, you might even discover a special little surprise I've been keeping up my sleeve for a while now.)

_ Harvested a veritable vegetable bounty from our tiny back yard in Enmore, Sydney. An impressive feat given that only a couple of months earlier this was a black-plastic-and-gravel-covered parking space, and that even now it could boast only about half a foot of soil before the dense clay began.

Suffered through a heat-wave in our wonderful old Hogwarts house (twisting corridors, staircases that turn corners and go up and then down again for no reason, PLUS a genuine cupboard under the stairs). Though we loved this house, it was hot hot hot, about 10 degrees worse inside than out. (The picture is of the house as I had it made into a snowglobe. Oh, for snow!)

Married the funniest, smartest, kindest, most generous, most surprising man I have ever met, in the vegetable patch of the Hogwarts house (complete with a back door painted “Notting Hill blue” by my mother and father), in the presence of a small but wonderfully-loved group of family and friends.

Airmail came out. Suddenly had to discover social media: Facebook pages, Twitter, Goodreads, all kinds of groups and forums, and started a blog. Got excited about this new online world. Got annoyed that said new online world was taking over my life. Began to learn (still trying to learn) balance.

_ Packed house contents into storage. Bundled up dog, cat, office and a suitcase of clothes, and moved up to the Gold Coast. Stayed in a soulless one-bedroom apartment that overlooked the garbage bins. Em taught Oliver to swim. Airmail won “Rising Star” award and was featured on bn.com boutique.

Mr B went to America for work and, as well as missing him, it made me miss all my USA friends even more than I already did every day. Learned how to make really good cupcakes by using and adapting the Magnolia Bakery recipe. Got fat. Reconnected with a wonderful friend, who made the GC bearable.

New job for Mr B, in Adelaide = Packing. Organising removalists. Organising cleaners. House hunting. Thinking, “How did we accrue so much STUFF in Queensland after only 10 weeks?” Meanwhile editing a magazine on a very tight deadline. Joined Kristen Lamb’s brilliant #WANA711 blogging group.

Flew to the Blue Mountains to visit parents for Dad’s birthday. Flew alone to Adelaide to greet removalists at a house I’d never seen. Big relief! The house was lovely. Set up very own "dream study." Damaged back. Flew back to Qld. Joined Mr B, dog and cat for final two-day road-trip to our new home.

First royalty cheque arrived for Airmail! Not huge (not even slightly), but still special. Couldn’t bring self to cash it. To Paris for a glorious week with two friends I’d known and loved for 25 years. Cheese, wine, mussels, street art, galleries, parks, cobblestoned laneways, churches, love.

Took train to London to meet Mr B, Em, her cousin Maggie and Nanna. Unforgettable picnic in St James Park with dearly loved and greatly missed friends. Three weeks of explorations through London, Paris, Toulouse, Carcassonne, Nice, Venice. In Rome, the girls threw me a birthday party.

Back home in Australia, discovered a little stowaway who had been secretly riding with us since France. Baby Bulger is on the way! Spent the month embracing the questionable glories of utter exhaustion, morning sickness (all day and all night) and a body that was rapidly becoming not my own.

Learned how to cook vegetarian, egg-phobia and pregnant woman -related Christmas feasts. Baby Bulger passed the 12-week scan officially “low risk.” Christmas Day in Melbourne with friends, little cousins at Nanna's house, storms and floods. Nephew saved an old lady from her flooded car.

To be continued in 2012.

And a Happy New Year to you!

I am off to immerse myself in summer holidays. Another road trip. Christmas spent with friends and family. A home filled with children and laughter and most probably too much junk food than is strictly good for any of us.

We will walk with our feet in the Southern Ocean at sunset. We will joust one another on inflatable logs in the swimming pool. We will get sunscreen in our eyes, and salt water in our hair. We will play many rounds of Pictionary, all of which Mr B will lose. We will have picnics and play petanque in the park. We will take trips to strange country towns. We will bake and cook and eat, and eat more. We will spend whole days immersed in books. And we will make plans and promises and dreams for the coming year.

Wishing you a glorious holiday season, whatever and however you celebrate; and a refreshing, hope-filled, love-filled 2012. See you next year!

_
A mystery was not what Lucy expected to find at the bottom of the ocean.

It started on holidays: a dizzying dance of cocktails by the swimming pool overpriced resort food drunken nights at local bars salty sex in anonymous hotel rooms avenues of palm trees camel rides on acres of white sand rainforest walks and the world famous Great Barrier Reef.

This particular day started with clouds and two fat travel-sickness tablets, and whorled around her head as time stopped then spun and rain stung her cheeks while she leaned over the crashing boat and vomited the two useless tablets to the fish until suddenly, time became normal and they had reached the reef and the sun was out.

Busy throwing up, Lucy had missed the dive briefing and had to make do with some basic tips: breathe, kick your legs and look at fish. Clear your middle ear every few feet down. And never, not for a second, hold your breath. Lucy staggered, still sick-weak, the crushing weight of the cylinders on her shoulders threatening to pull her backwards, fumbling with the unfamiliar mask, cumbersome regulator and ridiculous fins, and changed her mind. This was not such a good idea, she would go back inside. Then the assistant let go of Lucy’s hand, gave her a push, and the ocean closed in.

Quiet.

Soft.

Still.

Slow.

Nothing but Lucy’s own breathing and the heartbeat of the ocean.

She could hear the regular thump of the ocean’s heart and felt it in her skin as though she was floating through the very ventricles of the sea. It was extraordinary that here, immersed in one of the natural wonders of the world, Lucy closed her eyes and felt she loved it without needing to see it and later when she surfaced, grieved the loss of that heartbeat like the tearing trauma of a second birth.

Lucy moon-walked through the thick water while the others swam, appearing on the tourist video later as a slim, sloping, laughable figure in black, always last in the group, ludicrous pink fins flailing, arms groping forward like a blind man but eyes wide open now, like dinner plates behind the mask, and red hair pouring upwards, the only part of Lucy at home in the sea.

Nobody knew that here inside the ocean, mixed in with her terror, her constant struggle to remember not to hold her breath and a consistent dread that her lungs would burst or collapse or both, Lucy felt truly happy.

She felt it because all she could hear was her own breathing and the heartbeat of the ocean. It was the most perfect music Lucy had ever known.

The catamaran carried them to a second part of the outer reef, and suddenly it was sea-sickness again. Half an hour of the nauseating rise and crash of the waves, petrol fumes, the stifling, constricting stomach and the familiar lean over the sides. Then the heavy cylinders, the clumsy fin-walk, the fear perspiring into her wetsuit, panic and regret, splash.

And the beautiful silence. Lucy’s own breathing and the heartbeat of the ocean.

On the second dive, Lucy made a conscious effort to look around. She wanted to see and remember the rainbow schools of fish, the ancient turtle, the bashful shark. Lucy put her hand inside a giant clam and stroked its rich velvet before it slowly closed. She floated softly still while a groper twice her width nudged around her hands for treats. The group of divers entered a sandy-floored coral room by a window, one by one, and a hundred thousand tiny blue fish covered them like brilliant pieces of sky. When Lucy moved her hand through the swarm, it parted then merged again in effortless mathematical precision.

Then the heartbeat stopped.

One moment Lucy was playing patterns with the sky-fish and in the next, the ocean held its breath. Lucy was so distressed she almost held hers, but remembered the warnings just in time. She waited, frantic. The others had swum on out of the coral room and around a corner, and Lucy was alone in the unbeating ocean. She spun in the water, searching behind herself and in front for the source of the silent ocean, but it was not until she looked up and saw the legs and goggles of the snorkellers close above her that she realised with relief that the heartbeat had not stopped, she had simply floated too close to the surface and lost its rhythm.

Urgently, Lucy swam deeper, easing air from her tanks to help her sink and forgetting to unblock her ears until she felt the pain. She stopped then, and clumsily swallowed through her regulator. She was still alone, but the heartbeat was back in her skin, her own breathing was a soothing sound, and Lucy was happy again. She followed after the rest of the group.

Lucy swam on quickly now, past another giant clam, a turtle resting under a rock, sweet, apricot anemones, nervous clown fish, a small child, forests of coral…

The child was maybe three or four years old, and it was building a sandcastle. It sat naked on the ocean floor, piling sticky wet sand on sticky wet sand and pressing rocks and shells and pieces of coral into the sides, while remnants of the blue-sky swarm shot in and out of the clumsy sand walls and stroked the child’s tight brown curls. When Lucy swam past, the child waved, and she waved back. She tried to smile but her cheekbones pushed her mask up and it flooded with water so she had to stop smiling or not see.

Then the group leader returned from around the next corner and beckoned to her and she nodded then pointed to the child but there was nobody there, just the remnants of the sloppy sandcastle, so she swam on.

Quite a mystery.

Can you believe this is the last weekend before Christmas? I don't know where the year went, I really don't. Remember when time used to stretch out forever? When the summer holidays were so long you could barely remember the beginning when you got to the end? Today, I sneeze and I miss a month.

I'm looking forward to this weekend, my parents are coming to visit. But before I dash off, I want to leave you with five favourite things to take you into the Christmas weekend-eve. No theme today, just five lovely finds. I hope you have a wonderful weekend, too. See you on Monday!

How badly do I want a pair of these? Let me count the ways. Found here via Honestly WTF. (Also loving the piggy-back ride in the background)

If I was rich, I would TOTALLY be signing myself and my friends up to receive amazing little surprise gifts in the mail, from Not Another Bill. Found via Rosalilium

...which cleverly combines my love of all things old-fashioned and cunningly made, with my bona fide iPhone addiction. Found here

I adore the gorgeous, hazy summer light captured in this beautiful fashion shoot by Spell and the Gypsy. Found via The Flowerchild Dwelling

I had planned to make Christmas versions of some of these, but I ran out of time (and energy). Still, I've bookmarked this page so that I can come back to it. Perhaps Em's next birthday party will be swathed in colour.

It was one of those lovely, lazy weekends.

On Friday, we had friends over for Christmas dinner. I used candles and gold-painted pine-cones to create a table centrepiece, alongside fresh pine needles I picked from a tree that afternoon. To cover the table, I pulled out a vivid, striped red cloth that, the last time it left the cupboard, Mr B wore while dancing with the Masai in Kenya.

The menu was challenging, rather. Among the six of us, we had a pescatarian, a vegetarian, someone with an egg phobia, and a pregnant woman. That pretty much cancelled out meat, and any eggy and most cheesy meat substitutes. Not great for the remaining omnivores in the group. And I don't know about you, but I'm not a fan of nut loaf.

_In the end, I opted for individual savoury strudels with wild mushrooms and artichokes, and added prosciutto to the meat-eaters' strudels. Then we had some shaved roast turkey and ham on the side for the carnivores; cranberry sauce; herbed baked potatoes, carrots and pumpkin; corn on the cob; and green beans and roasted garlic tomatoes topped with toasted almonds. It was a kind of Christmas-meets-Thanksgiving, almost-vegan dinner.

Dessert was cognac-and-plum Christmas pudding (of course) with custard and fresh cream, a big bowl of mixed berries, my old classic peaches-and-cream pie on an almond base, and the lemon snowdrop cookies I made last week.

We finished our Christmas shopping on Saturday, I am proud to say, then I set up my desk in the lounge room to watch Harry Potter DVDs and Antiques Roadshow on TV while I made Christmas cards.

To make the cards, I cut out photocopies of the little partridge-in-a-pear-tree painting I finished last week, and pasted them onto slightly larger cardboard cut-outs. Inside each card, I stuck a slip of paper with a lovely little Chinese proverb: "Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps a singing bird will come." Finally, I left a few fresh pine needles in the spine, in the hope that when the cards arrive in my friends' mailboxes, they will smell like Christmas.

I came very close to achieving my month-long goal of going cherry picking on Sunday, with a local orchard's promise of a sausage sizzle and homemade cherry ice cream almost winning Mr B over, but not quite. I'm still working on that. Instead, we we took the dog for a two-and-a-half hour walk around Adelaide, headed up to the pub for lunch, and had such a lazy afternoon at home that I honestly can't remember what else we did.

...is what I've been doing all weekend. I love Christmas: the smell of pine needles and jasmine, plum pudding, gift shopping, family holidays at home. So, this being the first weekend of December, I made a good start:

Trimming the tree. Still a little way to go before I'm satisfied.

Painting a partridge in a pear tree as a gift card for friends.

Gathering pinecones on a walk with Oliver and Mr B; painting them gold.

Making solid progress in wrapping all the Christmas presents.

Baking these chewy lemon snowdrop cookies for a sweet Christmas treat.