As I walk down the hill to our local strip of shops, I stop to marvel at the garden of one of our neighbours. Since when have their plants grown so tall? Have I been blind? I’ve been walking past every other day and not noticed. Recent rain has obviously kick-started an anticipation of spring. This particular garden has a row of trees that now, as they’ve gotten taller, have obviously been planted with goal of becoming a thick hedge. As their branches stretch, as their leaves have gotten larger, I suddenly realise I know what kind of tree it is. Me, who knows very little about anything. I know as soon as I see the berries. I pick off several and rub them between my fingers.
Another neighbour, not the one who the garden belongs to, approaches from the other direction with a bag of groceries in her hand. She stops, we chat for a while, as we normally do, then she notices I’ve got something in my hand. The berries have left a faint purple stain on my fingertips.
“What kind of tree are these?” she asks.
“Lilly Pillys,” I say authoritatively.
She nods, curiosity sated, and then says goodbye.
I stay to contemplate the tree.
***
A Lilly Pilly tree grew in front of the home of my childhood, on the border with our right neighbour. As I grew up in the sub-tropics, I think now I was accustomed to the way the plants always seemed to be either in flower or in fruit. This Lilly Pilly was planted close to the curb and its branches reached a little way over the bitumen. It was a healthy tree, wonderful, full of those purple berries that begged for picking. Sometimes I would stand underneath it and pick them, and rub the berries between my fingers.
“You can eat those, you know,” my mother would say, almost as a dare.
And I did try, but it was bitter. I could detect a faint sweetness, yes, but it was the kind of taste a more developed palate could chase down and identify; whereas for a child (like me, at least) it was a step beyond my patience to be bothered doing. It was a sweetness more suited for jellies and jams to exploit.
What I remember most about the tree, though, is how, because no-one really paid it any attention, that is of course why it was so productive. It’s berries would drop and carpet the grass and road, attracting flies. Cars would drive past, smash the fruit, and their tyres would track lines of juice up and down the road. For some reason I found this reddish-purplish signature of Nature’s Way depressing. I grew up in a household that, as soon as it began to rain, we would take every single pot plant out from under the verandah to sit in the garden and get watered. If we prized water so much, why didn’t we do the same with the Lilly Pillys, that dropped season after season only to be neglected.
I’ve not thought about that tree in years. All it took to bring it back was a moment’s reflection.
***
August is not a great month. It is the month of dad’s birthday, which brings a sadness. Besides this, I normally write my way in (and out of) a blogging funk. Last year I wrote The Blog of My Enemy Is Failing to combat this feeling of listlessness and indecision. In that poem, at the time, I said I didn’t write it about anyone in particular, but that wasn’t quite true.
It was about me.
It was my way of telling myself to keep things in perspective, in balance. Since then, I’ve achieved this in various ways.
And then, at others, I haven’t.
I love blogging, I love talking about it, and I love listening to people talk about it. But there are times I need recalibrating.
And August is usually the month it happens.
I suppose it’s because I don’t want to be like the fruit on the road, squashed and wasted.
