Author: Hilary Burden

For my friend Andrea the first signs of Spring start not with the first wattle or jonquil but when the scent of daphne is in the air.  Not one to tease or intrigue, in Australia’s southern states she will puncture the air like an exclamation mark at precisely that time of the year when everything else seems unsure of itself: when it’s not quite winter and not yet spring.  The power of daphne’s perfume is at odds with her mini-me flower clusters and those in between days where two seasons overlap. Despite an old-fashioned name, daphne will coax you into life like a snake charmer would lure a curled-up copperhead from its dull winter slumber. From September the washing might now be hung out to dry properly, instead of being dizzied in a dryer.  But if you welcome Spring simply because of the promise of Summer and warmer temperatures that it brings you will miss the point of September.  Which is to hold joy and sadness in the palm of one hand. Because the more you appreciate the beauty of daphne, the more you will miss her essence when she’s gone, making way, as she must, for more show-pony blooms like magnolia and rhododendron.  For centuries the Japanese have learnt this empathetic twist: in the northern Spring families will picnic under clouds of flowering cherry trees not just because they’re pretty but because they are transient. We can learn from their ability to sit under the cherry blossom, appreciate beauty, and feel sad at its passing.  I will know when it’s Spring when I visit my elderly mother and she presses a handful of daphne cuttings from her garden into my hand. I will put them on the dashboard and drive home to The Nuns’ House sick and happy with their scent.

Published in Country Style, September 2013

Image: Spring in Japan by Masako

Whether at home, or in the bush, tending an open fire is an antidote to modernity. For convenience sake, turning on a switch to pump hot air is handy but you know that it’s heat for cheats and just not the same. It’s not the sort of heat your skin can absorb and that warms you from the inside like a bowl of hot porridge or mug of soup. Lighting a fire is like a ceremony that honors a more natural pace of life. You can’t click your fingers at a fireplace: fire on demand! You must be mindful of your own comfort and that of your family or guests.

There are needs, too, that prevent you from taking a fire for granted. You must have a full wood basket, a well-stacked woodpile, and dry sticks at hand. It’s a bonus to know how to lay a fire for optimum warmth. And you will also need patience enough to wait until the room is warmed before taking off your coat when you get home from work. And, yes, a wood fire is messy, but this will serve to remind you that few good things in life come with minimal effort from you. A central fireplace can vie with the telly or computer for spatial attention. And if it wins over the batteries and the electric cords of entertainment, you will find that conversations are made or books are read in front of fires.

 Published in Country Style August, 2013

On the day of Baroness Thatcher’s funeral, I remember her by remembering my favourite image of her. Well, not her exactly, but designer Vivienne Westwood impersonating the then British Prime Minister on the cover of Tatler in April 1989. It reminds me of the days when women’s magazines bravely celebrated ideas as well as celebrities. How seamless it seemed – and was it really 25 years ago? – turning a left wing punk into the right wing icon. The editor was sacked a few days later but she had made her point. For me this image was a reminder that fashion and politics seemed to play the same game.

I received the proof of my book today. Proof of my book. I saw the red and yellow stripes of the Express Post package poking out of the letterbox at the end of my driveway and ran down to fetch it. You could tell it was going to be a beautiful midwinter’s day because Tom the postman hadn’t tried to squeeze it inside the letterbox out of the rain. Proof of my book. I sat on the front steps in warm sunshine and purred like a cat before ripping open the package and seeing the first page: A Story of Seven Summers, “Proof Only”.  Proof exactly. Proof that it really was being published and that it was too late to re-write anything. “We can only make essential corrections now,” confirmed the enclosed note from the editorial manager.

It had 274 numbered pages and weighed 1384 grams.  And when the book is finally published on September 1st this year, it will be exactly two years to the day that I first received the email from the publisher at Allen & Unwin inviting me to write it. I thought it would take six months to write but in fact it was three times as long. Actually, if you were to include all the journal notes that were really only written for me, it took seven years.

As I sat on the concrete steps I liked how the book weighed in my lap and the sound of the pages as I flicked through them, stopping only for the slightest moment at a photograph or chapter heading. Stop now, I thought to myself. Don’t pick at it. Save the read for later, to savour it all at once. I had wondered, the whole way through writing, why anyone would be interested in reading what I had to say about my life. But I still sat for hours, weeks, months on end, to finally reach this point, today. Here, not printed yet, but a proof in my hands: 1384 grams. And with it comes a weightlessness. In the air, an intangible faith that someone else will want to feel the weight of this book in their lap and sit in the sun and know that they too can take a chance if they want to.