Simplification

Well.
Here I am.
Montréal.
Permanently.
Finally!

Actually, I've been here for three and a half weeks now, but I have been suffering transplant shock and have barely been able to bring myself to write emails, let alone a blog post. Don't get me wrong, I love it here. I love it more every day, and Charles is just the best darn husband a girl could wish for. But I did recently give up at least 90% of my possessions, my house, my car, and a job of eight years, not to mention again all the goodbyes I've said to loved ones in the last couple of months. I've been vacillating between being emotionally exhausted and like a kid in a lolly shop as I've been exploring my new home in far greater depth than I've had a chance to previously.

I also find my life refreshingly simplified.

I haven't got a job - haven't even started looking yet to be honest - but settlement did come through on the sale of my house so I could hold out for a year if I was willing to fritter away my life's savings. Without the job and the house I am also released from some of the more mundane financial facts of life: the mortgage, house repairs, home and contents insurance, income protection insurance, car insurance etc. etc. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz... And to be honest I am not missing the stresses of my old job one bit. The woman who two months ago was ranting and raving about government funding cuts, AWOL project partners, interminable grant reporting procedures and budget adherence is now spending her days on the swing at the park, dreaming up what she's going to cook for dinner while she waits for her stepson to finish making new friends. Or spending three and a half hours walking to the Mont-Royal, up it, down it and back again before lunch. Or stumbling across super-cheap Chinese/Portuguese supermarkets in unexpected places. Or potting out a balcony herb garden. The only ranting and raving that's been going on has been at the squirrels for digging up my rocket seeds twice.

I still don't think I'm down to a baseline heart rate after the last few months, but I'm getting there. I'm making the time to look after myself and relaxing, eating well, exercising and enjoying life with my beloved after three years of being in a long-distance relationship. It's not often in a First World life that you get to untangle yourself so much. It always takes something drastic like an international relocation, or a number of much less pleasant scenarios. That or a conscious drop out. I'd be lying if I said I didn't occasionally hear a desperate voice in the back of my brain screeching, "Stalled superannuation contributions!!!!" But it's early days yet, eventually I'll get a bit bored and start looking for a challenge, or a complication, or a bit of stress.

But not just yet.

Which word is the hardest to say?

Which word is the hardest word to say in the English language? Is it sorry? Or is it goodbye?

I have been having a few teary goodbyes in the last few weeks, three of them at airports (always especially tricky) but this evening was my official going away gathering in Cairns and there were so many goodbyes to be had at once. So many good people - good friends - such uncertainty as to when we would be together again. Tonight is also my last night in my house, dear Mavis Blue, and tomorrow I put my two cats on a plane, consigning them to stress and fear for four days until Charles collects them in Montreal. I have offset this all with the remembrance of how hard it has been the eight times Charles and I have had to say goodbye at the airport, unsure of when exactly we would see each other again.

The hardest goodbye so far, however, is still not even over. I have a very special friend. He is 11 years old. He is high functioning autistic. We spend a lot of time together and tonight, even though I will stay with him and his parents for the next two nights before I leave Cairns, he cried his heart out for 30 minutes at my going away party and it broke my heart. I have been so strong and excited until now, but this was quietly devastating. The most positive spin I can put on the experience was to rejoice that he was able to actually articulate his feelings, and rationalise about how he knew I would still love him from afar and how happy I was going to be when I got to be with Charles all the time. That is a major communication for him and he was so clear about it all. I was very proud of him, but at the same time I was gutted. Sorry may be hard to get out of your mouth, but the pain of goodbye can last long after the word is spoken.

A Farewell to Oz

Change is upon me so fast and furiously at the moment that - obviously - I am not having time to write about it. Not to worry, I am stockpiling stories in anticipation of a relaxing couple of Northern Summer months ahead in which I will play catch up, even though I suspect I will be laughing at my current naiveté by August.

At the moment I am in my hometown of Adelaide, South Australia, undertaking Phase 2 of the Farewell to Oz Tour ahead of my final decampment for Canada next week (Holy Crap!) The trip has been fantastic so far, made all the sweeter by the presence of one of my besties and former bridesmaid, Morgan, who flew over from Melbourne for her first proper experience of SA.

My parents, all four of them, live in the Adelaide Hills, so my trips here these days tend to be more semi-rural than urban, though Saturday involved the mandatory Central Market/Lucia's visit, and last night the mandatory Ying Chow meal. It would be fair to say that a large part of South Australian life revolves around good food and wine.

And this has had me thinking: did the place make the girl, or was the place perfect for her? Is my love of good food and wine nature or nurture? And was I, despite so many grass-is-greener, wanderlust tendencies, in fact born into just the perfect place for me? Ever since I brought Charles here in 2010 and he fell under South Australia's spell, I have viewed my hometown far more favourably than in previous years, and entertained more often the notion of - one day - maybe moving back.

Here, currently, as possibly in a number of other places, there is a mad craze for Yotam Ottolenghi and his food. My stepmother has just returned from a trip to London and Israel to visit relatives with her mother, and went to Ottolenghi's restaurant and stopped by a number of places in Israel that he featured in his cooking show. I was just reading the Introduction to the Jerusalem cookbook that he co-wrote with Sami Tamimi and found a passage on page 9 that summed up my present navel gazing:

"It is more than 20 years since we both left the city. This is a serious chunk of time, longer than the years we spent living there. Yet we still think of Jerusalem as our home. Not home in the sense of the place you conduct your daily life, or constantly return to. In fact, Jerusalem is our home almost against our wills. It is our home because it defines us, whether we like it or not."

There is a huge part of me that will always be defined by Adelaide's gastronomic obsessions, and its most particular sensibilities.

The pictures that accompany this post are of Sunday's trip to Port Willunga, my favourite beach near Adelaide, about 45-50 minutes drive south of the city. My parents, Morgan and I popped in there after visiting my grandmother in McLaren Vale for her 90th birthday and then having an entertaining family lunch and a drive around the Vale. There is certainly something about the clear Southern light, I think it is just beautiful.

Resistance is useless

Image: BBC

When I was young, Doctor Who was on the ABC every weeknight before the news. I loved it, but like so many other children, it scared the bejesus out of me. I probably saw more of the palms of my hands than the television screen and, yes, I did resort to the cliché of hiding behind the couch. Looking at the hyper-realistic costumes above it is clear why I would have been so terrified!

My segue here is fear. Fear and the bizarre effect it can have on us.

This week has been enormous. On the weekend I realised that a recent Australian interest rate cut meant that renting my house was a viable Plan B if it didn't sell in the near future. Ergo: I no longer have to wait for the house to sell before moving to Canada. Tuesday night and Wednesday morning I booked my flights. Today I resigned from my job. The really fun part was finding a flight that allows for a stopover in Tokyo. The hardest part was pressing the button to commit to buying the first flight; I must have sat there for nearly ten minutes, aware that that one action would push me past the point of no return. On the flipside I know from bitter experience that an international flight can increase by hundreds of dollars in the course of a couple of hours, so I was also nervous that if I didn't commit this week - that day - I'd lose the one reasonably priced combination I'd been able to find for the month-long window of departure dates I'd been searching. Up until then all the one way flight connections I'd seen were more than my entire return ticket to Montréal in February.

Yet there I was, a woman with a fully formed, timed and costed-out plan and a husband to get to, hesitating. A whole new, exciting world of experiences and opportunities lies before me, with a gorgeous man to lie beside me, and yet the chatter in my brain, the resistance to letting go of my current life, the sheer physical difficulty in pressing-the-goddam-button-already, was astounding. I was paralysed with fear in the face of enormous change, despite the fact that the change is something I want so very badly. In the end, obviously, I gave myself a mental slap across the face, came to, and just pressed the bloody button!

Today I drove into work knowing that, again, an irrevocable action was about to take place. I feel a deep sense of loyalty to my organisation and I love my co-workers dearly, I feel bad about leaving them at a difficult time in the face of sector funding cuts and a tough art market. Telling my boss, in fact, was nowhere near as bad as telling my co-workers, even though we've all known this day would come for quite a while. Still, I had heart palpitations when I made an office-wide announcement.

But why? Why, with the prospect of moving to a major international city full of art and culture and good food, and where they speak both French and English, to be with the man you love, could there ever be a hesitation? I get to reboot my life completely, transferring across only those files I choose (though no doubt there'll be a few lurking Trojans!) Every time I get a heart pang at the thought of leaving my house, every time I fear that I'll be unemployed for the rest of my life, every time I see a Ulysses butterfly and wonder if that will be the last one I ever see, should and will be a time to get excited about all the new things that are to come and that could never happen here, will never happen if I stay. I won't be too hard on myself if I catch myself grieving, but I will reprimand myself if I find I am getting resentful of the reasons Charles can't come back here, or if I am clinging too hard to things that are ultimately of lesser importance – tin foil and pipe cleaners all of it, just like the costumes in the image above. Because resistance to change, fear of change, can make you hide behind the couch even when you are a grown up.


P.S. Unlike a number of my friends, I haven't been able to get into the latest incarnations of Doctor Who and its offshoots. I haven't watched a full episode since the fifth Doctor.

Just because it's called Rainbow, doesn't mean it's a hippy commune!

Is there such a place as Paradise On Earth? I suspect one's options on this expand considerably in line with one's tolerance to mould. I love Cairns. No, I do...it's just that the first third of the year always brings with it a constant battle against the forces of evil. I mean, mould. Ahem.

As pre-empted a while ago, I just went to Northern New South Wales to visit some beloved friends and their munchkins as part of my grand Farewell to Oz Tour. I've only been to Northern New South Wales once before as an adult, in the mid-'90s, and I have a very Romantic view of it as one of the most beautiful places to live in Australia. It is also the hippy 'capital' of the country. I think I had been there less than 24 hours this time when Jane drew my attention to a jacket that she'd just pulled out of the wardrobe that was fluffy with subtropical mould. Cue needle dragging across a record...

But if you can get over that (or yourself, and Lord knows I need to do a bit more of that of late!), then gee willikers it's pretty. My friends live near The Channon. There's a creek at the bottom of their driveway and a waterfall at the end of their road. They live on a multiple occupancy intentional community, on which the husband grew up. And yes, it's called Rainbow. No social profiling, please! They are building their own solar-powered, composting toileted, hempcrete-lined, passive solar, recycled or reclaimed when possible, totally awesome home that looks straight out into rainforest. It's truly beautiful and very contemporary in design.

Chedy's mum still lives on the community. She's a ceramicist and a fanatical collector of vintage objects and textiles. I was lucky enough to sleep in an alcove of her studio and woke up each morning to total eye candy of old kitchenalia and a ceramicist's tools of the trade. Heaven for me! She had a very established orchard and veggie patch, and here's what's so great about this region: rosemary grew next to pineapples, roses grew next to pawpaws, Brazilian cherries grew alongside grapefruit, and both strawberries and bananas looked happy. For a gardener like me that's a pretty impressive interzone of domestic food crops! It wasn't long before I was emailing Charles to suggest that maybe Northern New South Wales could be a good  spot for us eventually, if we find our way back to Australia. The big, fat kookaburras and the mix of rainforest and eucalypts were giving me a pre-emptive strike of homesickness, too.

That's about it for the blabbing. I mostly wanted to get back in the writing saddle today, and I'll leave you with more pictures than words. Please find here some images of a very extended Anzac Day long weekend holiday: the 'Goldie' from Coolangatta; views from the Pinnacle looking out to Mt Warning; happy snaps from Rainbow; and the mandatory trip to Byron Bay, at the Tallow Beach end.

 

 

 The End

Happy Easter! Here's to celebrating (a) new life!

Things you might not have known about me, part 1: When I was a child I used to hoard my Easter eggs, whereas my brother had usually inhaled his by Easter Sunday evening. I would then slowly savour my stash over the following weeks, generally right in front of him to his great distress and my great amusement. I used to imagine that I was such a good girl, but really I was just as much of a little shit as the best of them!

I love Easter. It has always been my favourite of the seasonal holidays. It's much calmer and less loaded with expectation than the Christmas/New Year period. It's a good time to rest and recharge: for getting lost in a good book with a little pile of Easter eggs or buttered hot cross bun nearby; for going camping; or for doing what I'm up to this time around – pottering around the house doing some fix-its. Also, Charles and I started seeing each other over Easter three years ago, almost to the day, so that has further added to its charm.

Easter's metaphor of resurrection/rebirth/the-renewal-of-the-cycle-of-life gets a little confused here in the Southern Hemisphere, but I'm very happy to run with it this year because my Canadian permanent residency was approved this week.

Whoo.
Hoo!

It certainly feels very good to finally be able to put long-held plans into action. It's a little daunting, too, I'll admit. For the next few months I'll be sprucing up the house for a hopeful sale (yes, I made up my mind, here's hoping the market agrees with me), auditing all my possessions into keepers, sellers and those to be filed in the bin, squirreling cash, spending as much time as possible with friends, and winding up work, hopefully by the beginning of June. Phew!

I'm not much good at drawn out goodbyes, I prefer the Band-Aid method – walking out the gate and not looking back with absolutely no fuss or ceremony. But that's not necessarily fair on others, nor would it do justice to the incredibly curious time I have had in Cairns and all of the amazing things it has given me over the last nine years. This has been the most stable period of my life. I've worked for the same company for nearly eight years, worked in the same building for the entire nine years in fact, and I've only lived in two houses if you don't count the early months with the then-boyf's parents. Previously, I could look back every few years and the whole landscape had changed: different job, study, house, area, boyfriend, all completely changed every two to three years. Reminding myself that this kind of change used to be my norm is certainly helping in psyching myself up for the next few months. Before I go I'll find ways to honour all that has been and the natural beauty that is here, but I'll stave off sadness with the thought of all the potential lying in wait in Montréal, not to mention one rather dashing Québécois librarian.


P.S. For those of you who are curious about such things, I applied for Canadian permanent residency under the spouse category. My residency has been approved, but I still have to wait another couple of weeks to get the visa in my hot little hand. Canadian Immigration estimates that for Australians applying for this category from outside of Canada, processing should take nine months, but once my visa arrives it would have been about five months since we put in the application. Much faster than expected, but then, we are a very straightforward case ...

A little shameless bragging

Today, please allow me a little shameless bragging. A couple of things have happened lately that were the direct result of some good ole', old-fashioned hard work and I think they are worth noting here because they are a part of all the change. As soon as they'd happened too, as I was basking in my glory, life came roaring up the beach and dumped cold water on me again, so it is nice to revisit and acknowledge them.

Some of you (hi, Mum!) might have noticed that I was a little quiet here over the Christmas/New Year period, and maybe I haven't regained my momentum yet. There were two reasons for that, one of which was that I was head down, bum up trying to finish my Diploma of Editing (Publishing). After nearly three years of self-paced learning, the pace of which would have made a sloth scoff, I did three months' work in ten days, and I finished it! My Diploma arrived while I was in Montreal last month.

Last year I edited the biggest publication my organisation has published to date—a 96-page, hardcover book, part catalogue, part biography, about an artist with whom we have worked very closely. It is in my top three professional experiences in my nearly-eight years on the job. It just got reviewed in Imprint magazine, as did the exhibition it supported. The review was glowing. The reviewer even commented on how well-edited the catalogue was. I mean, when does that happen? No one ever notes the editing, it's always about the writing, as it should be, but still that was nice to read.

When I move to Canada I will be setting up my own freelance editing and proofreading business. I am really looking forward to a shift in focus. I've already got one client lined up; and armed with my qualification and buoyed by a good review, I am feeling pretty good about that right now.