Fighting Tiger

I was most recently in Adelaide at the beginning of this year with T as we traveled across the country meeting and greeting family and loved ones. T is possibly a better child to his parents than I am and had visited his family twice over the last 18 months, but I hadn’t returned home to Adelaide in the two years since I moved to Berlin.

Those three weeks earlier this year were exhausting and in many ways I didn’t feel very settled during my time back here. Perhaps it was the excitement of introducing T to my favourite people and things of A-Town or the energy that pervades the city in the lead-up to Fringe and the festival. And the previous visit home was for a frantic month as I packed up, sold my things and rather rudely told Adelaide that things were over between us.   Luckily, despite the fact that my Dad is getting older and frailer due to his lung disease, I feel suprisingly relaxed and happy on this return trip.

A lot of my current feelings towards Adelaide have a lot to do with maturity and finally beginning to feel at home in Linz with T.  So despite missing T like the blazes and really wanting to have him around to support me as I help my family, it feels good to be back here and to begin to assess my old home with the eyes of someone older (remember, this is the town you settle down and have kids with).

Another big reasons for loving my hometown this time around is that it’s winter. I’m missing the summer in Linz, but in some ways the chill of a hibernating Adelaide is so satisfying. It’s tea and toast time, eating soup and good bread with friends weather rather than all-out party season.

It’s actually been raining here, so for the first time in almost four years I’m seeing Adelaide (and my old garden) with green growth, both good and unwanted. There’s something wonderful about a cool weather garden and the smell of soil and decaying leaves as you pull up weeds. As much as I love being able to container garden and finally have a balcony to fill with plants I have missed the mindfulness that comes from weeding an actual garden bed.

The other day I battled, pulled and dug against one of my favoured old enemies for a half hour while my father rested in the living room.  Looking after Dad is a very slow, sometimes sad and frustrating business and I needed some active destruction to balance me out. Besides the stress relief of weeding and the satisfaction of dirt under your nails and a visible change to the space, I love weeding as it lets me observe the techniques that plants use to spread themselves around.

On Friday the plants I attacked were ivy and some weird succulent climbing thing that I don’t know the name of, but would love to identify so I can accurately curse it.  The plant is growing up and around an overgrown shrub and despite intermittent and zealous attacks over previous years it persists and spreads around.

This plant just makes me get all awe-full and think about evolution. It is incredibly cleverly constructed and seems to propagate itself as you weed it. The leaves and sections of this plant fall off far too easily and forgetting pieces on the ground gives them a chance to take root and spread themeselves around.

This kind of promiscuous growth demands action and despite only being back in Adelaide temporarily I started down the dangerous path of Significant Garden Plans for the family home. Obviously the leggy shrub would go, but the winter weather calls for replanting the front beds with fruit trees, which leads to reading plant catalogues and considering just where a pizza oven could go.

At some point I looked up and realised that it felt like I’d never gone away from here. Tim, Linz, Berlin, working on School of Webcraft and all of those things seemed light years and lifetimes away.

Oh, it is a weird feeling to be here and to feel so very comfortable and to feel the pull of this place pulling me back. At the same time Tim and the actual everyday life I’ve chosen is in Linz and as I fall asleep I’ll be wanting to wake up back in our bed and go for a run along the Danube.