'Tis Which Season?

I have made a couple attempts at a new post recently without success. I am struggling to find the voice with which to say goodbye to this magical stay in Oz. I looked at the calendar last night and I could feel my throat tighten. We leave in two weeks. We are selling the car and the bikes, my gym membership expired, Lucy's music class is coming to an end and Jake's teachers want to know when his last day will be so they can send him off properly. We are readying ourselves to leave but we are emotionally unready. A couple months into our stay here Matt and I were happy but unhooked. Somewhere along the line we got hooked. So all I can offer at this point is a breathless, superficial recital of the last two hectic weeks as I continue to muster the courage for the next two.

After a very sweet springtime Thanksgiving with Kim, Llewellyn and Jarrah (we had fresh asparagus because you can't eat root vegetables in this weather), we went off for four days in Sydney. It is a beautiful city which sits spectacularly on its bay in much the way San Francisco does. We ate and drank at innumerable outdoor cafes. We listened to street musicians. We soaked up the water, light and warmth. Jake and I took a speedboat cruise around Sydney Harbor. We took a train ride through the botanical gardens and chased Lucy through the aquarium. We spent a great day at the beach with Kim Rubenstein (my Australian patroness and friend) and her family, who were also in town for the weekend. I got to see some barristers leaving court in their hilarious horsehair wigs. We said goodbye to Josh, who went back to the States. We wandered around the Circular Quay and Darling Harbor; we admired the Christmas decorations. The first night there we were having dinner outside when the wreaths on the lampposts lit up and Jake exclaimed: "Oh look, Christmas lights. It must be Hanukkah!" Along with the locals we used ferries as public transportation and watched a lot of cricket. The first of a series of test matches between Australia and England (this longstanding and famous rivalry is called the Ashes Series) began while we were there and all of Sydney was watching television. Because cricket is so important and the weather so exquisite in these days of early summer, there were a number of parks full of people sitting on the grass watching cricket on giant screens. This startling innovation of outdoor public television makes slightly more sense when you appreciate both the passion for and duration of the game. Each one of these serious cricket matches are played 8-10 hours a day for 5 days. There are, of course, tea breaks, when play stops abruptly for refreshments. Matt and I love watching it because it looks sort of familiar but we have no idea what is going on. The plain white uniforms and the bright green grass also make it beautiful to watch. Once we stopped trying to understand it through the lens of baseball and consulted any number of helpful websites, it became slightly less mystifying, but only slightly.

We celebrated Matt's birthday in Melbourne by all of us taking the day off and going to our favorite places. We woke up and biked to the Tin Pot Cafe for breakfast. Jenni took Tyler & Jake to the beach, I took Lucy and Matt went on a bike ride and had a massage. Then we all met up at Melbourne's famous Italian bakery Brunetti's to have a coffee and pick out an enormous birthday cake for Matt. We had cake with the kids and then Matt & I went out to dinner at our favorite restaurant. It was a beautiful, balmy evening and we ate outside and walked home in a happy, tipsy, sleepy stupor. Matt was practically giddy about getting to celebrate his birthday in the summer.

This last weekend we spent at a cottage on a raspberry farm a few miles from the beach. An hour outside Melbourne, down the Mornington Penninsula, are farms, vineyards and long stretches of beach. It is beautiful countryside, the weather was mostly warm and the berries were ripe. We must have eaten 5 pounds of raspberries this weekend, as well as big heaps of cherries from the local Red Hill outdoor market. Our friends Peter and Alison, and their daughter Sophie, joined us on Saturday and we had a lovely, leisurely day with them. They tormented us by showing us the house they have just purchased in Red Hill. Jake is crazy about mazes these days, so we went to the hedge maze in the area and got lost in the shrubbery. It felt a bit like a scene out of Jane Austen. We did some wine tasting and food eating at a local winery, Tuck Ridge, which is a parental paradise. It has a Napa-style view, a sandbox you can see from the tables on the patio, and good wine. We saw our first koala roadsigns, and we had mild, cloudless nights which allowed us a great view of the stars and unfamiliar constellations of the Southern Hemisphere.

As a Californian, warm Decembers don't seem odd, but it throws me off to see the rituals of summer and the rituals of Christmas rub up against each other. After gorging ourselves on berries and running around on the beach, we headed back to Melbourne for a Christmas party. That's just weird.