I’ve been packing, all day.

The possessions, all the things, the stuff that made up our Purple Life, packed into boxes; to come to the New House, to go to the charity store, to be stored at relatives.

I cried, silent tears rolling down my cheeks to match the deluge of rain on my windscreen, after I dropped a load of baby goods off to be resold for a fraction of the price they were bought for. Clothes, a bouncer, walker, high chair.

Disappearing proof of life, the absence of which spells it out- no more babies for Tony and I, no more milky smelling newborns for me.

I find things, pieces of the past playing hide and seek. A pile of X-rays behind the bookcase. A framed movie poster in the cupboard under the stairs. A comic, carefully cut from the Sunday paper.

I’m surrounded by the whispers of ghosts. Fragments of laughter and conversation. Memories that seem to become more fresh, more vivid and colorful, as I pack them into an ever growing castle of boxes in my garage.

Some things, I pause over, run my fingers over, while my mind tortures me with the memory of my husband’s smile, my husband’s laugh.

I take pictures from the wall, pictures like this one…

…and I pack them, wrap them, deep in a box and tape it shut as tightly as I can. I’m not sure when I’ll open it again, whether I’ll have hooks on the walls for pictures, whether there will be room… whether I’ll ever want to open those (Pandora’s) boxes again.

Give it back, my Purple Life, and I’ll take it… the shit bits, the boring bits, the surbanness of it… I’ll take it back, trade it for this adventure, in a second. In a heartbeat.

As part of my ongoing quest to save the planet– or at least sustainify my own little patch of backyard– and become a bit more hippy and in tune with the earth, I went along to a herbal first aid course last weekend. (And thanks to Spinkles who MMSed the cut out from local paper).

I was expecting lavender, cannabis, thyme and camomile. And there was a little bit of that. But the email I got two days beforehand was a bit more descriptive than the ad had been– read ’herbal’ to mean ’weeds’.

Which, quite frankly, is even better– much less of a financial investment (not to mention a chicken security problem).

The course, held at the local community nursery (which I never even knew existed), was six hours and seventy bucks of awesome.

The woman teaching was fifty years old if she was a day, but the essence of glowing good health– she seemed to radiate sturdiness and sunshine. Perfect skin without a wrinkle or a smudge of make up, hair allowed to grey gracefully and cropped short to be maintained with ease. Her name was Pat, of course, because Nancy or Sarah or Rhonda or even Elizabeth wouldn’t suit her (but if she was one of the latter, she’d be a Beth, without doubt).

And she speaks with passion. Speak with passion about anything, I don’t care what it is, and I’m yours– I will sit, enthralled for hours, and when I release my fascination it’s with a ghost of yours still intact, and I’m lost in a half dream of your world for days.

Oxalis

Pat speaks of plants most people regard with distaste as if they were good friends– clover, dandelion, thistle and nettle are all raised from the caste of lowly weed to foodstuff, medicine, crop and harvest. Someone inquires as to what we should plant to begin our own native and natural apothecary patch, and she seems confused by the question. She views her garden differently to what most people do– my mind print involving rows and sections and order, immaculate shrubbery tagged each with their name; it would be totally lost on her, and she would see far too much effort in restraining something that doesn’t need to be kept in check.


”You don’t need to plant anything at all”, says Pat, seeming to remember how differently most in the course see greenery to her, “your garden is probably already growing you everything you need… anything else can be picked from somewhere.”

And she’s right– the basic herbs I need are, if not already in my lush green backyard, then sprouting proficiently in someone else’s.

I pick petty surge and native violet leaves from underneath my clothesline, and spot fat hen and chickweed growing in my neglected winter veggie patch– I’m tempted to fence them before Ethel and Lucy take feast, but, remembering it’s just beginning of winter and I’m soon to have two cold, hungry hens; I leave them be. I intrude into my grandmother’s beautiful cottage garden beds to find oxalis, seeded stinking roger and a stubborn mallow she has been weeding from amongst her geraniums for years, roots and all. My mum and stepfather’s farm has ample amounts of lantana since the last bushfire, veritable fields of tiny butter colored St Johns Wort, and like most farms, a riotous amount of spiky, thick blackberry bush. On the drive home through the local industrial area, I spot an unkempt factory frontage teeming with just–opened, bright yellow calendula; and I take home half a kilo, some to dry, some to steep in alcohol for an all–purpose, antibacterial tincture.

Pat discusses with us concepts that sing to the hippy in my heart– making do with what’s already there, allowing the earth to have it’s way with it’s own. We discuss farmers who plant apple trees in blackberry crops so their cows will act as groundsmen, the overuse of convenient mass produced medicines and the loss of traditional healing methods. I learn that so many of the weeds I’ve been helping my gran dismember since childhood, from dandelions to plantain, are useful for everything from anxiety to fevers to lip balm to salads and tea.

Calendula, tincturing in alcohol

I’m taught how to brew oils, elixirs and tinctures; make creams and ointments and fill capsules with ground ginger, garlic and slippery elm. The first aid kid we create contains dozens of tiny containers holding things such as Epsom salts to be mixed with water to treat burns and charcoal in capsules to treat food poisoning. I learn the simple magic of a poultice and that hypericum actually numbs nerve endings for a period of hours.

Something called ‘allostatic stress’ is discussed in detail, the herbs used to assist it’s alleviation produced. The symptoms are listed– fatigue, anxiety, exhaustion– I feel my muscles grow heavier. “Of course you’re not stressed”, says our healer teacher, speaking of the patients she treats at her clinic, “your body has adjusted to it. But the levels just keep building up.”

There’s no test, as such, for allostatic stress, which makes little difference to me, but I’m slightly distressed to hear the outright dismissal of psychiatric medication for the same reason. There’s no mention in the books I bring home– a weed identity book, and one filled with recipes for blends and brews– of ‘allergies’ or ‘welts’, and it takes me a moment to figure out why. Your skin is your third kidney, they say, and some people believe those conditions come from within, caused by emotional stress, overexposure or a build up nasty stuff in the bloodstream or the mind.

Again, I’m just not sure… but the memory of both my children suddenly developing a ridiculously inflammatory skin allergy to mosquito bites within a month or two of their father dying scuffs it’s foot guiltily at the edges of my mind.

I love all these natural medicine ideals, and you can scoff all you like– I’ve found as amber necklace as effective as Panadol for teething, a neti pot
and ivy leaf extract better than pseudoephedrine for clogged sinuses (and now I’ve discovered the wonders of ink plant root as well), and I try not to mess with my body’s natural rhythm (lest I become a deranged axe murderer).

The thought of urban exploring takes on the element of a harvest as well. My mundane view seems to have shifted again– the corridors of TinyTrainTown are filled with medicines and beauty products amongst the scrubland.

(Fill my mind with things, as many as I can, so there’s no room for thinking, no space for being lonely at all…)

As I know, well and truly– hobbies, interest, endeavors– they can be literal salvation from torture. A reader of mine named Sarah had her life struck by tragedy not long ago, and she’s found a way to keep the core of herself in tact, too. Where I blog, she takes amazing photos.


Sarah’s in the running for a $5000 small business grant. If you could help her out by voting– one click, I promise– both she and I would much appreciate it.


Cheers, jellybeans. Catch you tomorrow.

It’s tradition, amongst the generally non-devoutly religious people I know, to take all your Christmas decorations down before the end of the year, before January the first. It’s something I’ve adhered to as long as I can remember. I like it- the concept of pulling down the old year, vacuuming the tinsel from the carpet, beginning all over again.

I’ve never been more grateful for it, loved it more, than I do right now.

Christmas was over in the Purple House, by the time Tony’s birthday rolled around, by the time everything fell apart. Thank goodness. I remember thinking, maybe after he died, maybe while he was still in the ICU… “Christmas was only two weeks ago. How was Christmas only two weeks ago?” The toys Santa had bought my children, they looked old and faded already. Part of a life that was ending, closing, maybe already gone.

It’s good, though, a blessed relief. Christmas is seperate, a lead up but not a part of what happened. That’s good.

My husband has been in the ICU for 20 hours. It is the morning of the Day After, and everything is different. My mind is a screaming, jerking, sizzled pile of pain and trauma and disbelief. My body is coiled, pounced like a spring. My emotions are live wires. I jump at every sound. Tears flood my eyes every few minutes. I am unable to sit down, sit still.

I think this is how I end up at the police station; because I can’t do nothing. I am too electrified, too angry, too insane to sit next to my husbands bed. I can’t look at the rope burns on his neck. I can’t look at his eyes and wait for them to open.  And all I can think is THISISNOTMYLIFEANDITISNOTHAPPENINGTOMEANDITCAN’TBEANDIWANTTOWAKEUP.

I want to know what’s happening, what ramifications this will have for me, for my children. I want to know if the police really intend on charging my husband, the crime of attempted suicide, when by all accounts they will have nothing but a vegetable to press charges against. (They have to, they tell me later, but the officer I talk to you is all sympathy and I can see his pain for me in his eyes; and when he has nothing left to say he looks at me and holds open his hands and says “What a selfish bastard, hey?” and I think he’s trying to make things better and it only makes them worse.)

I walk in and they know who I am. One of the officers must have been at my house yesterday and he whispers to the officer behind the desk, and I sill explain, words tumbling from my mouth that I am that man’s wife; and I know they all know. I am not being paranoid… this story spreads far and wide around the emergency services in my area, and I know that as fact.

It takes them forever to get the right person to come and talk to me, and I pace and pace the tiny waiting room. People come and go, police and the public, and they take one look at me and then avert their eyes and I’m glad. I feel like I have lava boiling up in my legs and if I sit still to for too long it reaches my heart and it burns.

Hanging on the window in the police station is a green Christmas bauble, a decoration left over when all the others have been taken down. It infuriates me with every pass I make, I time I pace. It is not Christmas anymore, it is light years from Christmas,.. Christmas was a life time ago.

After 15 or so passes I can no longer take it and I reach out and the grab the ugly, stupid thing off the window and slam it down on the desk, expecting it to shatter and my hand to spurt festive blood. It doesn’t. The officer at the desk looks at me, eyes wide and face white. I can see him teetering behind telling me off and saying nothing. The crazy-lady look in my eyes must be enough to convince him to say nothing.

My next stop is the church across the road. And I pray.

I’ve been trying so fucking hard not to internalise this.

To keep some form of rational, sane thinking (not your fault, could have walked, divorce is always an option).

I think I give up.

This is all my fault.

Me. Solely me. I’m the reason he did this, I’m the reason he died. Because I am a very bad person. And, yep, a bit of a psycho. And I spent too much of his money, stressed him out, and I yelled at him. Called him names. Not the day this happened, but certainly previously.

I gave as good as I got.

I shouldn’t have.

All. My. Fault. Tony had been telling me that for months before this happened. Everything was All. My. Fault.

And I’m guessing he told everyone else that too.

After all, what is wrong with the truth?

OK? So here we go. I am responsible for my husband’s suicide. This happened because of me. Most of the people who knew Tony, for longer and better than what I do, they hold this belief.

And Tony, my husband, I’m sure he held this belief.

So, logically, that adds up..?

Lori’s fault.

Me. I’m fucked. I’m wrong and slightly insane and quite screwed up. Always have been. That’s just me. I don’t really try to pretend I’m normal.

So, where does that leave us?

A little family even more fractured than before. With their daddy dead, and mummy the cause. Forever wrapped in that knowledge.

Unfortunately, I don’t think suicide is an option here. I’ve seen the aftermath it leaves behind.

I wouldn’t do that to my kids, to the handful of people who truly love and care for me.

So… I keep living. Just. For those kids. Just so they have one parent, fucked up or not.

What else do you want me to do? Just stop acting like a good person? OK. Done. I’m a fuck up. Most people who knew Tony, knew that.

My. Fault.

Comments off again. I just don’t need them right now.

Hi all,
 I know, I know, two blog posts in one day cloggin’ up your Readers and all. Sorry ’bout dat. But, you see, the Lovely Lady B from MummyTime has started a brand new spanky meme, all about being happy and postive and squeeeee!!

She has done it just to make me jealous.

Because, as we all know, I don’t have an iPhone.

Herumph.

So, I defaced her button.

And that made me feel better.

So now I’ll play.

Some things that make me happy… (No, these weren’t all taken today. Obviously. I’m lazy like that).

This one’s not a guest post, it’s all mine. Although quite frankly, I should probably pretend it happened to someone else. So scrap that last sentence. An anonymous guest post!!!

Once upon a time, there was a young wench named Lori.

One Saturday morning, Lori and her devoted, loving betrothed, the Man, awoke at the peaceful hour of 8am, to find their children still sleeping.

In the land of the Purple House, this was indeed a unique and exciting occurrence.

“I doth think we should partake in a bit of nookie” intones the Man.

Lori retires to the powder room to grapple with her troublesome contraceptive, the Holy and Glorious Diaphragm. This Diaphragm has been the source of many a happy adventure. It lives in small, white plastic case in the bathroom drawer.

Whatever-oust. Nookie was had, and all was well in the land of the Purple House.

That is, until approximately two hours later, when the land of the Purple House was hit by the dreaded Gastro Monster. Lori and the Man realized, too late, that it was under the Gastro Monster’s spell the children had slept so peacefully.

Three days and three nights passed. The children, Lori and the Man had recovered well and continued about their daily business raising cows and harvesting crops on Farmville. On the nigh of the third day, The Man turned to Lori and said

“Does thou fancy a bit of nookie?”

“Indeed, my Lord, with your pork sword“, replies Lori.

And she skips up to turret stairs to grapple with her friend the Diaphragm.

Lori creeps down the hall, past one, two sleeping children. Tiptoes into the bathroom, and by the light of the lamp in the hallway, cracks open the drawer….

…. but when she got there, the diaphragm case, it was bare!!

Oh fuck.

Lori sent frantic message via carrier pigeon to her fairy godmother, the health line nurse, who attempted not to giggle whilst she reassured our heroine all was well, and to see the local surgeon and drink a brew of newt’s eyes and mugwort if signs of tepid infection became apparent.

Lori, fraught, came close to throwing the Holy and Glorious Diaphragm in the pig slop receptacle. Then, she remembered the tragic days of yonder Pill, when she wanted to stab her husband and run over random strangers with her car. And she decided to hang onto her hallowed contraceptive.

But she never forgot to remove her diaphragm ever, ever again.

*This asterisk doesn’t refer to anything in particular, this whole post needs a freaking asterisk. In my defense, diaphragms are supposed to be left in for six hours after… nookie…. and I normally just leave the plastic case out so I don’t forgot about it and an incident like this does not occur. But somewhere in my vomit and fever, I must have put the case away. Personally, I think it’s just a miracle I didn’t turn the Man’s second request for nookie down the way I usually do. Or things could have gotten really…. uncomfortable.

A couple of weeks back I attended the Kleenex Pin4Good event in the Sydney CBD; along with the likes of Kate Pickle, my beautiful Kristie, and Mr ProBlogger (I wish I was name dropping. Not. They were the only other people– apart from the amazingly tall Mel Doyle– that I recognized).

Mel and I- please do note my 100% re- or up-cycled outfit, especially thrown together for the day in the ten minutes before I left.

Despite the recognizable irony of a sustainability event being run by Kleenex, it was quite pleasant and enlightening. You can check out my woeful attempts at playing Pinterest for the first time here…. I still just don’t get it. But it was the discussion following the frenzied Pinning session got me all inspired.

I was expecting a lot of chatter about suburban chooks and recycled light globes. Don’t get wrong– I dig both those things. What I wasn’t expecting was for the talk to take an edge that I’ve been curious about but hasn’t really been made mainstream yet… and I’ve been too damn lazy to follow it up myself.

I’m a self confessed über geek and suburban hippy. I love my Kindle and my worm farm in equal measures. And I believe the two can skip blissfully through the meadows together, leaving as light a carbon footprint as they dare. So discussing whether two percent of iPower is better for the planet than hand written notes on two pages of A4; or the carbon offset of Skyping in a presenter versus flying them interstate… well. That just tickles my blog pickle in all the right places.

The concept of blogging sustainably was touched on very briefly; so I did what every good blogger does, and consulted the Google God just as soon as I got home (and got those screaming offspring of mine in bed). And I found something pretty damn awesome– and not least because the button comes in a lurid shade of pink, as well as blue or green; which works beautifully with the decor I’ve got going on here.

‘Mach Gruins’ is German for ’Make Green’. It’s incrediblyy simple, and, so far as I can tell, legit and currently active. You write a blog post (see exhibit A– what I’m doing right now), pop the button on your sidebar (exhibit B, to the right over there), and email the link through to the Mach Gruins people.

Who then plant a tree. Yes- a real, lives tree. Which works to offset the carbon emissions produced by your blog. For life. (Skeptics… Mach Gruins have done their research here. I’m taking their word for it. Somebody let me know if it’s all wrong, OK?)

And that’s pretty much it. RRSAHM is now a co2 neutral website.

My inner geek and hippy stroll off, hand in hand, to celebrate with copious amounts of Coca–Cola, Angus and Julia Stone and a game of Monopoly on the iPad.

And we all lived sustainably ever after.