It's so lovely to be in the garden & to feel a surge of energy, after mostly lying around sick for a few days. My first passionfruit! The rain-loving snails did their best to decimate the vine during Winter, but it persisted & there is a profusion of blossoms at the top along the fence line, chasing the sun. The new grapevine is also doing well- a couple of years I reckon, before it looks like a vine & bears fruit, but there's lots of healthy new growth on a plant which started out as a bare twig eight weeks ago. And I now also have some umbrella shade to sit in as I type, to enjoy it all: a red, oriental-style umbrella for the bigger outdoor table & green for shade on the north sun, until the grapevine matures...
Day or night, if I lie in my elevated bedroom, I find myself immersed in a soundscape that is variously soothing and disturbing. Today, as I did yesterday and the day before again, I lie here with a flu-riddled body, perhaps more sensitized and attuned to these and other sounds.
Always, although I must strain a little to hear it, and cannot see it, there is the constant daytime evidence of human activity and the built landscape. The hum of distant traffic forms the chorus, punctuated with cameos by soloing 747s- all those happy Perthites winging their way to Bali and beyond. The determined purring of the community mulcher turning twigs and bark into something reusable, a short way away on the verge. My neighbours on all sides engage in outdoor, early morning, over-the-fence conversation, at variable volumes: The high school teacher, used to addressing distracted youth; the ex-model whose finishing school elocution lessons still serve her well in the voice projection department; the woman with the uninhibited laugh .
Several nights back, a strange thooking sound halfway between bright and dull assailed my ears and woke me at roughly two minute intervals just before and just after midnight. Some sleuthing revealed two teenage boys engaging in a nocturnal ping pong match, seemingly unaware of the hour and the passage of time in their euphoric state of recent liberation from the routine of high school.The intense but usually short-lived Death Metal blasts from my easterly neighbour's vegan teenage daughter have replaced the incessant drum kit drumming from my northern neighbour, now that Number One Son has moved out. They move like wraiths about the place, the teenagers, here but not here. Furtive conversational boy-girl games and persistent doorknocking at front doors, that they think cannot be overheard!
There are also visitations from The Troubled One, a blustering Rapper of a prodigal young man in his early twenties, who has been showing up noisily most days with his wounds exposed. He arrives suddenly, his moods and insecurities most likely invoked by sultry or stormy weather. Lately, if he rages and rails for too long against my neighbour, his beleaguered Mother, a platoon of vigilant bouncers emerges to calmly and sternly have the last word, at which chastisement he skulks off again into the night.
The most intrusive human noise by far though is the police search helicopter, which arrives without warning late on Summer weekends, in its 2am pursuit of a fleeing vehicle, or with its beam trained on our gardens in search of a pedestrian fugitive. I groan at the indignity of being woken at such a time, and wonder exactly how the police are Keeping the Peace, when an entire innocent town is woken from its slumber, in the pursuit of a single felon.
The sounds that give me the most joy are those of the natural and animal world. Little dusky doves cooing sleepily in the eaves outside my room, and the high pitched, gentle chirpings of New Holland Honeyeaters whose home is my garden. This includes the smaller two-footed critters, spending many hours together in a boyish tumble of trampolining.
Sometimes, as the Summer approaches, the hot easterly off the desert sticks its obscene tongue into the open orifices of the house, exhaling its hot breath and whining irritably. More welcome are the reassuring mutterings and soothing massage of the breeze coming off the ocean in the afternoons, known affectionately as The Doctor. Unless or until it reaches fever pitch like a screaming dervish, whistling up the staircase and rattling the cowering windows in their befuddled frames. At such times, the tin panels of my roof pop and groan warily against The Doctor's doggedness to liberate them. When the breezes are subtle, the faint tinkles of Balinese mini-gamelan chimes can be heard. When the wind is fierce, they clang together like harbingers of doom.
This morning, lying here in an ailing sweat and celebrating 'the calm after the coughing fit', I became aware of another sound that signals Summer: chirruping cicadas somewhere among the shrubs and the passionfruit vine. The soundscape dropped back to the quiet traffic hum and The Doctors early mutterings, when suddenly a squadron of a dozen and a half noisy ravens alighted in a tall eucalypt not fifty metres north, on the next property. They squawked noisily for perhaps five minutes, sharing news of where to find the juiciest spoils. They split into two groups, one of which circled a few times, before returning to the tree and flying off noisily together.
Perhaps they got wind along the crow grapevine of the ponds full of motorbike frogs here. Over the last fortnight, I've heard the mating calls of the frogs getting closer and closer- starting out in my neighbour's garden. Apparently, after a particularly wet winter, we've had an unusual spawning of tadpoles who, even more unusually, made it to maturity this season. The young froglets conversed for a while in the open expanse of garden between our houses, and eventually made their presence felt in my own garden where they can take refuge among the burst of pond reeds without fear of predation .
And now, they cavort each night, fat and horny, close to my bedroom window, like a bunch of rowdy youths on two-stroke trail bikes, showing off to an audience of girls. One even made its way into the house, where it was accosted by our Jack Russell Terrier, who remembers how disgusting they taste and no longer tries to eat them, but won't give up the thrill of the chase. The high-pitched squealing sound of a terrified, cornered frog is a disquieting one. In concert with excited dog barking, it has woken me and propelled me into wee-hours rescuing (frog) and quarantining (dog) mode, a few times already this year.
The frog song is both reassuring and irritating. A sign of a happy garden ecosystem, which will presumably keep mosquito numbers down this Summer...but it keeps me awake at night if I indulge my preference for open windows at night to allow the sea breeze to apply its cooling balm to the interior of the house. With the result that I'm not getting enough night sleep and have ended up with a cold...
The motorbike frogs' song reminds me of, but is nothing like, an animated Rupert the Bear video, Rupert and The Frog Song, featuring a marvellous froggy chorus written and sung by Paul McCartney, who is also the voice of Rupert. I'm nostalgically fond of the song (which we have on a hand-me-down, dinosauric VHS video). As is my son, who knows all the words by heart. Rupert's frogs, the stereotypical top hat-toting, politely ribbeting froggies of the verdant English countryside, who apparently sing in exquisite harmony, are perhaps to their two-wheeler-impersonating Antipodean bikie gang cousins what the sweet-voiced English robin red breast is to the uncouth raven rabble of our rugged Western Australian landscape?!
Although I've been mostly resting in my bed, when I can I venture out into the garden to be among it all. I can see but not hear the frogs at close range and, ah what's that? A passionfruit, the first of the season, emerging from a profusion of blossoms that has burst into bloom with the advent of hotter days. The lone fruit is fully formed, still green, shiny and not yet wrinkled, promising more Summer delights ahead.
