And what of the world traveller, the woman who’s now lived in 5 different countries?

I am so very glad to regularly lay myself down in this, our most beautiful bed. It’s comfortably soft and firm at the same time and layered with a bedspread I bought from a tiny old lady in Sapa, Vietnam several years ago.

The map reminds me of the places I’ll be and the places I’ll go – but most days I’m very happy to be at home. I really like the small city feel of Linz and I’m beginning to reach out tendrils of personal growth into the opportunity of this place.

I’m slowly documenting my making and doing a little more, primarily to make myself feel more productive but also to prepare a portfolio. It’s strange, but in these days of craft and cooking blogs it can often feel like you’ve done nothing until it’s been documented publicly.

For example:

Cloning a Kombucha Scoby

I’m not much of a soft drink consumer, though I do love carbonated spring water and “gespritzte” juices. I have enjoyed Kombucha, but spending 3€ per bottle on fermented tea seems like a waste when I can follow a tutorial and make it myself.

I’m hoping that the Scoby mother will grow – so far there’s a pleasant cider vinegarish smell which is meant to be a good sign.  Apparently it’s also good to anthropomorphise your scoby “mother” and give it a name. Since I used Yorkshire Tea and raw Demerara sugar in the mix it seems that Mrs Rochester will be appropriate.

There’s something about cloning a mass of microbes (yeast and bacteria) which is strangely compelling.  I’m hoping that we’ll have a batch of Kombucha ready for the public mushroom growing workshop of Time’s Up‘s Non-Green Gardening residency.

Picking Wild Foods

Living in Berlin put a bit of a dampener on picking wild foods, something which I’d done in Finland, Adelaide and during my short time in Sheffield. Despite collecting some blackberries in Gorlitzer Park, the ubiquity of dogs and their waste meant I was reluctant to pick nettles.

So the presence of wild and urban food sources around Linz is quite lovely. There are more backyards for fruit trees to escape from and there’s a healthy continuing tradition of collecting wild foods. Many of my urban finds are being tracked in Boskoi and I’ve got a lovely book that I’m slowly learning to understand.

Bärlauch / wild garlic (Allium ursinum) is in season now and Vicy, Theresa, Lisa and I went picking a couple of weeks ago after a quick tutorial on how to recognised the leaves.  If nothing else the smell of garlic helps you identify the bärlauch from its poisonous and perfumed doppelgänger Maiglöckchen / lily of the valley.

I’ve frozen some chopped leaves and have several jars of pesto (with almonds and sunflower seeds) that are awaiting consumption.  Unfortunately the stored pesto coincides with me trying to manage my carbohydrate intake, so I’ve not been eating nearly as much pasta as I’d like. Nor are bärlauchsemmelknödel (wild garlic bread dumplings) especially low on the GI scale… Oh but they’re delicious!

Travelling on Handbuilt Boats

Recognising bärlauch came in handy just before Easter when we started the second journey* of the Control of the Commons (CoC) project and began travelling down the Danube on a Frankenboat. In short we only managed to camp for one night before our trip was halted due to being an unidentifiable watercraft.

We made our camp near Wallsee on an old section of the Danube that was bypassed when a hydroelectric weir was installed.   The highlight was being camped next to a forest of bärlauch and young nettles, both of which made it into that evening’s risotto.

As much as I love the CoC project, camping in Austria in early April is not such a good idea for the ill-prepared. We almost reached hypothermia as a result of being too tired to layer up properly in our sleeping bags on a -2°C night, so our camping experience was not amazing.

Yet another reason to be grateful to return to our lovely bed.

*See, I really should be blogging more – not only have I not mentioned our wedding at all I also neglected to talk about travelling down the Murray River for 3 weeks on another weird boat.  Another time… I promise.

It’s not that I’m like this all the time, and luckily it’s not scary depression. However it is the kind of depression that stops me from easily doing [new] things or finding much joy in anything. When you’re relatively freshly moved to a place and in the search for work, most things are new. Glory, it does seem easier to sleep and hide at home and knit rather than push through this layer of bleurgh to be more me than I’m letting myself be.

Rationally I can tell that there’s a layer of depression weighing down on me and it’s clouding my interpretation of the world and my relationship with the world. The world, I know, is weird, but generally fantastic and there are many good things in my life.

Tim for example is more than good and supports me in so many ways. I’m seeing a therapist who is interesting and helpful. I’m really glad to be finally living in Linz, and I enjoy the size of a smaller city (200,000) after the last years in Berlin. I’m meeting lovely new people here and take my knitting out to the local Stitch and Bitch.  And luckily on those hide at home days, there is knitting while watching Six Feet Under. And at least if I’m knitting I’m still doing something while I hide at home and Six Feet Under is a fitting accompaniment to both knitting and the blues.

In a couple of months Tim and I will be in Australia getting married and enjoying the summer and building boats. There is so much to be happy and joyful about, but it’s so incredibly frustrating that a forcefield of inertia is preventing me from actively engaging with my life to the full extent possible.

Anyway. More than writing about depression I wanted to share a detail photo of my grandmother’s wedding dress.

I think that modifying this dress will be the most intimidating thing about getting married to Tim – he’s great just the way he is and I’m so happy to have him in my life.

The dress is almost 80 years old and feels very vulnerable – I’m a little afraid to take it from being my grandmother’s wedding dress to mine and am thinking about having a second dress available to change into after the more formal bits of the ceremony.  I’m slowly working up the courage to tidy up the hem and shorten the sleeves in preparation for an Australian January wedding. Wish me luck!

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.

My weeding enemies - the unidentified climbing succulent plant, plus ivy and soursobs (oxalis)

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.

I’ve lived overseas (on and off) for about 5 years now and it has always been with the knowledge that distance makes it much harder to maintain contact with family and friends. Either you’re here or you’re there, and despite the best intentions and the latest in technology it’s almost impossible to maintain or grow a relationship in the same way that realtime and realspace allows. There’s something about biorhythms, a shared physical environment, eating and drinking together that will always be more valuable than endless Skype conversations and email lists.

It’s one of the reasons why, even today, organisations still spend huge amounts of money and burn fossil fuels to organise face-to-face meetings and why for the last two years Tim and I spent weeks of time on train trips between Berlin and Linz. Luckily of course, I’m finally living in Linz and the tension that resulted from never being quite at home has begun to ease.

Being in a long-distance [romantic] relationship within the confines of Europe has also obscured the many other long-distance relationships that have evolved: all the many across Australia, to those scattered in Finland and Brussels, Newcastle Upon Tyne, the Norwegian bits of the Arctic Circle, Biggleswade, Sheffield, Brighton, Dunedin, London and beyond. Of course, now with the move to Linz, those who made up my community in Berlin are now more people far afield. Within my head when I think of these friends I also think of the people I’ve met briefly, desired as friends but have never had a full chance to become friends with.

So lately, as annoyed emails have begun to arrive from those I’ve neglected I’m trying to work out how to maintain these relationships, how to provide intermittent meaningful connections that transcend Facebook messages and work for those who are far less digitally embedded than I am.

Letters and packages I guess. I managed to send one off to Berlin yesterday.

That’s what’s been bugging me for the last week or so. Today though my tyrannies of distance are familial. My father has finally asked for me to come back home and visit him, sooner rather than later. He turned 76 last week and he’s been ill for ages, so this isn’t such a surprise.

I can remember when he rang up to tell me he’d been diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis and that slowly, his lungs were scarring and being eaten away by a autoimmune response. I was in Helsinki at the time and even though my memory places me in the flat on Mechelininkatu I lived there in 2006. Somehow that timing feels wrong, maybe it was when I was back in 2008?

So for at least 3 years while I’ve been away there’s always been the knowledge that one day I’d have to go back home to hang out with Dad and not really know how long I’d be back in Adelaide for.

What’s amazing though is that for far longer than was expected, Dad’s lung capacity stayed strong. Based on advice from a doctor friend and responding to data from drug trials on rats, he started to take high levels of anti-oxidants and until recently his lungs were good. But at the end of last year he was hospitalised following a stomach flu and as seems to be the way, suddenly felt, I don’t know what. His age? Breathless?

Putting aside the fact that Dad is ill, I am looking forward to hanging out with him some more. As a child he preferred to teach me maths than play sports, but as I’ve grown older I realise how much he’s influenced me – to love science and to be more of an independent worker than an employee. Without a doubt, one of the reasons why I’m with Tim is that in many good ways he reminds me of my father.

So yeah, I don’t really know how to finish this post. I still need to work out the best tickets and how to fit this around work and how to manage being away from Linz  so soon after I arrived here.

Maybe it will give me more motivation to write postcards.

“On the ground” in Austria from battlecat on Vimeo.