Every time I walk past their box, the little quail call greedily. It didn’t take them long to learn I equated with food. Despite securing their home with chicken wire, wound taught so that I cut my hands as I wrapped it, there is still the occasional Houdini so that I’m suddenly aware of a shrill and louder chirping. I scoop the escapee up, astonishingly sooner that somnolent cats or dogs do, and replace it amongst the others where I imagine their clamouring questions, ‘what’s it like out there? Who did you meet? What did you do? Find anything more interesting go eat? Why don’t’ you blog about your adventures …?’
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Which is really why this blog started. When I come to think about it. The prospect of adventure. One that sustained for five years in the Outpost and culminated in two years of chaos where change, with some irony, became our constant. Another huge change looms now, a new adventure. I hope it will bring calm.
I need to drive south to find it.
I’m trying not to think about the journey, on my own, with two dogs, two cats, one a wild street rescue with killer instincts that match his gangstastyle beginnings, and those ten tiny quail. Indubitably somebody is going to get eaten …
Adventures. With Teeth.
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The last of my three children left yesterday to go back to her English University.
I walk into her room as soon as I return from the airport. Where I can still smell her. She wears Chloe and is such an aficionado of body spray that I feel anxiously certain she must be personally responsible for that hole in the ozone layer.
Last weekend I punished myself similarly by walking into her brother and her sister’s rooms just after they’d gone, and gathering discarded clothes from the floor, noticing rumpled sheets from their last night at home.
And I am struck by the familiar, tangible ache that accompanies my children’s departures: it sits somewhere between my heart and my navel. A sinking. A gap. A lump in your throat that’s got dislodged.
Arms full of clothes, heavy with the scent of children, I leave the room and close the door.
They’ll be home, I tell myself, even if I don’t know what that home looks like yet.
Reluctant Memsahib 