Ten days ago I flew across the turning earth, sleeping over the Himalayas and the Indian Ocean, until I awoke just after sunset in the southern hemisphere and watched the four main stars of the Southern Cross out the starboard side of the plane until the lights of Sydney appeared in the darkness below.
Since then I've been enjoying winter all over again … the winter I had finally weathered in Italy and was so happy to leave behind.
Winter in Sydney is cold in unheated houses, but the crisp air and deep blue sky outside are as invigorating as the sights to be seen walking through the neighborhood of Glebe. Sometimes I feel I am in San Francisco, sometimes maybe in New Orleans.
The chimneys fascinate me. I suppose people used to have fireplaces, but it is as though they are now in some sort of limbo between heating with firewood and using solar panels.
The main street is lined with a repeating sequence of shops - the dry cleaners, the bar, the bookstore, the sweet shop, the Thai restaurant, the green grocer, the Italian coffee shop, the news stand. The fruits and vegetables for sale are an overwhelmingly rich assortment of familiar and unfamiliar.
Black Russian tomatoes next to Jerusalem artichokes. Red rhubarb stems next to silver beet - known in Italy as bietola. Orange pumpkin, white potatoes, purple sweet potatoes. Curly kale, English spinach, curly parsley, flat parsley. Yellow papayas, red papayas, strawberries, blueberries. Chia seeds, mung beans, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, buckwheat, quinoa, red rice, Basmati rice. I suppose it is this neighborhood near the university that offers such choice. I'm eating heartily while I have the chance and my granddaughter, Shiva, and her friends are such good cooks!
Days have been taken up with preparations for PNG. Preparing for the unknown is, I find, unnerving. Shiva asks me, since, of course, I'm the one who has been in PNG before, "Shall we take hiking boots?" I explain that fifty years ago we ended up using golf shoes with cleats to navigate slippery logs over streams. "What will the trails be like now?" How should I know the "now" of things? "If we bring tents, will people think us rude?" How should I know what people "now" will think? "I'll borrow my friend's fine backpack. You ought to have a backpack, too. How on earth do you expect to carry a dufflebag?" I report that last time I never carried more than a camera, since people were very eager to carry even a small shoulder bag in order to earn a few shillings. How else could they earn money when there are no jobs in the bush, yet they want to buy towels and kerosene at the trade store?
I'm disoriented in another way: Where is East? Where is North? People tell me the city center is over there to the East beyond the rooftops of Glebe. But that doesn't feel right.
We are in the Southern Hemisphere, so the sun shines at me from the North. Now that is really unnerving. But this evening I found a landmark, though I guess it can't really be called a "landmark" since it is in the sky: the crescent moon like a cat's whisker, its slender curve pointing down to where the sun had just set. That's IT! That's WEST - a signpost to directions among all the houses where no horizon is visible. And a signpost to the future - the time of the next full moon which we shall be seeing from the New Guinea Highlands!
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