Having turned tail on the lush back-garden,
it's seeking lusher Lebensraum in the front.
Only our dry roofed boxes, bathroom
excepted, foil the transition.
- or so I wrote in my slug poem for snapshot 30.
I now think the slug may have had foreknowledge of the flood which had
Melbourne on the tv news round the world a few days later, and which
prevented me writing and sending a snapshot the next day.
Apple have now got me from Sydney a power link which will survive till the
next power surge; I feel on the way to getting back in touch.
The back garden which slopes down towards the house took a mighty bucketing
and edged towards the back door without quite invading, except at one point
where the wall-length glass of the master bedroom meets the old wall to wall
carpet. We always did want to get rid of it, and when the insurance assessor
came, promptly too, perhaps because as the storm was moving on at 3am my
wife sensibly phoned the insurance company, so our claim was well up in the
big queue ('inundated with calls' said the voice on the phone).
Our inundation was mostly in the wardrobe crammed with Marilyn's clothes.
Off to your drycleaner with them, said the nice assessor, Mr Lopez.
He also wrote down the names of the three water-damaged books.
Only three, whereas I had spent a desperate half-hour about 2am shifting
piles of them from the wall adjacent to that wardrobe.
The so-called guest-bedroom seemed about to fill with water but allowed
itself to be mopped up.
The little piano by the window in the front room lost its varnished beauty,
and that too struck Mr Lopez.
I caused a crisis at the drycleaner with my carload of ladies' garments. 128
they counted.
The smell of disintegrating carpet and underlay has to be toxic. The
carpet-restorer advised we sleep elsewhere.
Footwear and other gear litter the entire house.
A nearby motel gave us a key, we shuddered at the room, went home and slept
in the tolerable guest-bed. Which, however, is smaller than I like (being
over 6 ft). Diagonal sleeping is resented by one's partner. Think of me as
the square on the hypotenuse.
I would doze off while pondering phrases for the unwritten snapshot poem,
and now I'm reconnected am feeling almost aphasic.
The wonders of an electrical storm, the grandeur of the prolonged intense
rainstorm, the excitement of the freeway rescues, all passed me by.
I resent the perfect roofs of my neighbours.
We can't bear to look at the garden.
Max Richards, Cooee, North Balwyn, Melbourne
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