Diary of A Witch Doctor, 10/July/2022
My rather wet backyard (c) A. Harrison
It began – and ended with rain.
I love lying in bed and listening to the rain thumming over the corrugated iron roof, but as the creek rises and my yard turns into mud it becomes too much. Once again the causeway flooded and for a few days access from my little road to the outside world lost.
Thumming. There is no such word, but that is the sound the falling rain made.
Flying to Brisbane for work, I barely made the plane as the Hunter River broke her banks and Newcastle was flooded. Brisbane, however, was a world of sunshine, and I managed to interrogate a few dinosaurs before flying back home to more rain.
I still struggle with my artistic life - always so tired, always so many practical things to do which seem to take precedence and drain my soul. Somehow I managed to find the time to cobble together photos I took while sailing the Cinque Terre and turn them into a video. Simple in theory, but it still takes me hours.
At least, with all the flying and lying in bed listening to the rain, I’ve done some reading. I’ve just started The Fossil Hunter, by Tea Cooper. As I’m only a few chapters in a review will follow later, but I ‘love part of it takes place in Wollombi, NSW, a five minute from our weekender. A wombat has a made a home in our backyard, and kangaroos are usually on the law as we drive in. In a gully nearby I’ve spotted lyre-birds, incredibly shy birds whose imitations of other bird calls are so perfect they leave other birds in the shade. they’ve even been known to imitate chainsaws and telephones.
A friend in the backyard, an Eastern Water Dragon © A. Harrison
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Some More of My Writing You May Enjoy:
An elderly matriarch walks through walks through her kitchen garden in the Tuscan hills, carrying her sketch book. The morning mists swirls around her, but soon they will fade and it will be time for the Spring Offering.
The mist muffled the day. It lay over the light, holding captive the cold air of dawn, until under the warmth of a late morning it would become nothing but a chill memory. Spring was still a few weeks away, and for a while longer winter would hold the hills captive. The valley below her was a world of grey. A tangible, moist grey, which flowed and ebbed with the centuries. It came with its own remembrances, damp with clinging. Of journeys to places where there was no winter, of the magic of coming home. Of lying warm abed with her beloved whilst the bells called. Of being young.
In another time, in a Venetian palazzo, a lord fumes on learning a priceless statuette, of an Etruscan goddess, has been stolen. He knows her worth, but remains ignorant of both her history and the power of her beauty over others.
Waves of cold anger flooded the room, spilling into halls where servants hid in the shadows, pretending not to hear. The wrath spiralled down the marble staircase and into the spacious receiving hall, made a few twirls under the candelabra then past the imposing tapestries hanging from the walls. It pushed through the heavy wooden doors and onto the chaos of the street outside. There it searched for a horse and rider who had fled through the night and continued now by day, splattered by the foam of exhaustion.
As the mists of the morning fade, the two times and places overlap, and the goddess returns to the light of the world.
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