TIME FLYING

In Hobart it’s now 2:p.m., Tuesday, December 15, and the sun is shining brightly. I took my lunch outside to eat and let the heat pour down on me. Sunlight does feel more intense here than at home. I don’t think it’s brighter, but the air is so much clearer than in Toronto that it seems so.

I have roughly 3 more days here. On Friday I fly to Melbourne, and that evening the rest of the family arrive. We’ll settle into a flat there for a few days (while they attempt to get over the flight) before heading along the Great Ocean Road to Adelaide where we’ll spend Christmas. Then we drive back to Melbourne on an inland highway and fly to Sydney for New Year’s. Peter and Jessica return to Toronto on Jan. 4, while Katharine and I go to Cairns (the Great Barrier Reef), Atherton (where we’re volunteering in the bat hospital and possibly doing a walk to see nocturnal animals), and then to Hobart for four busy days that will include a Tasman Sea cruise, a walk on the mountain, and various meals and visits. On Jan. 13 we’ll fly to Melbourne and have a tour of the ballet school there. On the 14th we return to Toronto—though on separate flights.

A month from today I’ll be trying to collect myself in Toronto. I suppose there will be an accumulation of papers for me to sort through—though probably nothing to the accumulation from here that will make its stately way by sea and arrive perhaps by mid-March. By then I hope to have cleared space for them, and for the books that will be their travelling companions.

But in the meantime—I’ve been organizing poems and prose bits for a reading that I’ll give later today. I was invited to be part of The Literary Lark, the final Writers’ Centre Lark reading for the year. I’m reading with David Owen, who has just published a nonfiction book on the shark, and with contributors to an anthology of poems published by the local branch of FAW—the Federation of Australian Writers. The flyer announces flamenco guitarist Ralph Forehead as part of the evening, and since the Lark is a distillery, there’ll be Scotch for those who fancy it, as well as beer and wine. I’m pleased to have a chance to read, and look forward to seeing several of the writers I’ve met here. Not so much looking forward to saying good-bye to people, but it is a nice way to end my stay.

I have many moments and events and thoughts I haven’t yet “blogged” … I hope to get to some of them tomorrow and Thursday.