Love

Feeling tired lately; the lifetime that's been packed in a few days did me in a little. There are the familiar waves of feeling a little lost, a little homesick, and my skin feels like little ants are crawling on it. I ate the wrong thing, easy to do in a new place. 

That's why it was so nice to have family come yesterday; to have two cousins, an aunt, and a second cousin come over to our house in Old Toongabbie was so great. Lynnette has lived here longer than she lived in the US; Jen has lived here for twelve years. They seem to have a little Aussie bleed; they have something that I've noticed as an Australian undercurrent, but I don't have a name for it yet. It is something like a cross between humor and gentleness of manner. 

They performed an act of mercy by visiting some more rental properties with us. I began to ask little questions that you're dying to ask but can't really ask non-family: "How much are taxes on this amount of income?" "Why do we feel this way?" "How can this be a good thing?" "Did this make you laugh when you first came?" etc. It is actually helpful to have a a second opinion, too, about a house. One my aunt didn't like at all; after the frights the other days, I was kind of accepting of it, trying to see the possibilities. Walking out with my cousins, I thought my aunt was just behind us; I said, "I think Aunt Mary would like to live here." I looked round for her, and found her small form pacing about 20 meters away, at the end of the driveway. She had run away.

I walked around the campus yesterday, after the family left, and looked at birds--top-knot pigeons (which I would have rather named after German WWII war helmets--they look like Shultz from Hogan's Heroes); unknown birds with a cry that sounds like a whining child; white-yellow cockatiels, which my cousin Jen told me are extremely intelligent and do all kinds of funny things. She used to watch them with her children, and the birds would knock each other off of branches, playing King of the Hill, until just one was left hanging upside down from the branch.

Jen lives on some property (like a hobby farm) in Queensland up north, which means it is more tropical than Sydney. They have a terrier that keeps the snakes from them. I asked if these were the 'bad' snakes. She nodded, and said, "That dog grabs the snakes and shakes them to bits--guts go flying everywhere. " 

For some reason, I'd never thought of snakes having any guts to fly about. I wish there had been an Aussie terrier in the Garden of Eden.

Lynnette lives here in Sydney, across towards the northern area beaches. She has six children, and her oldest, Hannah, is getting married in March. I will be Jen's flower assistant, which I am very excited about. I taught Jen how to do flowers many years ago, when we did a friend's wedding in Santa Barbara. She has taken off herself and done quite a few things, so it will be fun to be working under her this time.

What a blessing family is--if they saw me foaming at the mouth, they'd still love me--they would wish the best for me. 

Love, so many different presentations, but deep underneath, it is one thing. I was caught up in a scene of one of my favorite shows on British rural life: one of the characters was asking, "What is love?"--the kind of desperate asking that shows that this is rather a fear of not being loved, than of not knowing what it is. Each of the other characters tried to answer her, but could not form words well enough. She wasn't answered by conversation, but by Sonnet 116:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no; it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
   If this be error and upon me proved,
   I never writ, nor no man ever loved. 

Love is allowed to enter and thrive through trust, and I learned recently from St. Catherine of Siena that love is also patience...it is patience. That is why we must suffer each other, suffer each other's burdens, and my family has done that for me: my parents, my sister, my aunt, my cousins, my husband, my children. Love is the same in Australia as it is everywhere else.