RACHEL'S COLUMNS

These articles appeared in Rachel's column every Friday in the A3 section of The Age

Seeking winter solace with gorillas in the mist
9th July 2004

Winter is a difficult season, no doubt about it.  It's best to stay in the house and read every magazine you've collected since 1990 from front to back while eating all the tinned soups you've been hoarding in case of an atomic attack.  Winter is a hurdle that must be cleared so don't let it get you down.  Take out those romantic photos you've been meaning to sort out since your last holiday – unless that relationship has ended, in which case you don't need to sort them, just throw them into the fire still in their envelope, thereyago – one job finished already!  But the other way to conquer winter is to get out into it, especially around mid July because we're almost halfway to spring.  And how can you whine for too long once you've seen daffodils grinning at you from the seams of their bulbs like a hint of exposed lingerie?

I don't trust easily at the best of times and because we've had a lot of rain lately, I felt like I needed confirmation that spring would come again.  And where better to get that re-assurance than from nature – live and uncut.  I filled the tank and headed for the hills, down the Burwood Highway and up the Mt. Dandenong Tourist Road to beat the winter gloom and escape endless stocktaking sales.  I flashed past cars bursting with bored children and medicated parents.  The school holidays have taken their toll and everyone looked like they were sulking except the family dog, who alternatively licked the back window and barked at imaginary flying cats.

The hills were alive with Julie Andrews look-alikes – crisp and virginal.  They were there to inspect potential wedding reception locations – the Dandenong hills are littered with them.  Heavy thighed and full-breasted these soon-to-be brides scampered from hilltop to hilltop like gorillas in the mist seeking the perfect location to tie the knot.  The soon-to-be-husbands ran behind the women like puppies.  And whenever the two caught up with each other, they'd cavort and frolic without any provocation, their eyes glazed with love-chemicals and their mouths fixed open as if they'd swallow one another if that were possible.

Thinking that I may have to throw up, I hid behind a huge fern where the primitive smell of wet leaves and freshly baked scones wafted in on the breeze and quickly restored my faith and appetite.  Sherbrooke and the surrounding forest is sublime, everything is green and alive and like me, a little cautious.  I took a sneak preview at a couple of private gardens to discover that there are buds on the rhododendrons and magnolias but they're too shy and embarrassed to come out.  It's not quite the right time yet, perhaps another month or two, when the brides have disappeared from the woods to have their wedding dresses made.

There is nothing like a drive to the hills to bring out the latent bargain-hunter in us.  At the whiff of a country market I puff up like a venomous cobra snake and slink off speedily to purchase jams, seedlings, lavender-scented soaps and a trailer-load of bric-a-brac I'll probably never use.  Even the word doesn't make sense – bric-a-brac – it's just like the sound of my back cracking as I try to lift the pile of crap I bought on my last day trip.  At Kallista market I picked up some jams, hand-knitted ponchos and the inevitable muttering man who sat next to me as I tried to eat my lentil-burger and told me that he was a poultry-fancier.  I don't know what it is but I've got one of those faces that says, "speak to me if you're lost or an idiot."  That day, three people asked me directions and the woman who I bought the lentil-burger from told me she'd been celibate for twenty years.  The trouble with having an open face is that everyone wants to come in and play.

I'd headed out in search of peace with no entanglements but the poultry fancier had turned into barnacle-man and was proving hard to shake off.  He finally ran screaming down the hill after I told him that I had no interest in the razzle dazzle life of fowls other than as food for my three big black dogs.