Stanton

It is Saturday morning. I wouldn’t say it is cold but warmth escapes me this day of light drizzling rain and lingering uncommitted fog. A minister once told me he delighted in finding the occasional wet Saturday so that he could relax and place words on paper, it made him more receptive to thought. Now that i’m doing it I get what he said a long time ago.

Time passing is what I’m thinking about now and I will write something about that on this, the remains of October. It seems easy to write about time at Stanton as the place drips in it. Not so much the sort of hurried schoolmother sort of progress through the day, more the passing of the seasons I’ve reflected on before.

It has now been nearly two years since Helen left Stanton to reside on the red hill above Bushy Park and her presence there is marked by a traditional stone piece, simple yet perfect made by master craftsmen, John McDiarmid & Sons of Sydney.

It is of Tasmanian sandstone and I’m sure it will look better as it ages. For almost a year only a bare Huon pine cross made by Stanton’s cabinet maker alerted any passing council worker to a nearby soul. There was no need to rush though, everything has unfolded as it should.

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I had been procrastinating for two years. The time had come and it was over in minutes when it did happen; the pine tree that had stood as a sentinel at the Stanton front fence was down.

Two pine trees grew up together after they were planted 70 metres from the house in 1919. An old man who once lived at Back River and walked past Stanton on his way to Back River school as a boy remembered seeing them as small trees. He is still alive, now in his early 90′s as when I last saw him he was the human equivalent of the other still standing pine; gnarled, solid, wizened and healthy. As things go around here both of them will follow the first tree into the next life, its inevitable but that’s ok.

The fallen tree as it turned out was senescent and a hazard to man and beast. At 27 metres it was making a big statement about its position here at Stanton and I am mildly smirkful (I like this strange word) when thinking about myself being a menace to the public at age 91. Still. I didn’t want him killing my neighbours in the night; one of whom is Nathan our cabinet maker. Another is new this month, freshly arrived from Kalgoorlie, WA. Do they have trees there?

My thoughts about the two old men of Stanton watching over its entrance are possibly incorrect but they make sense to me. Most of the trees here at Stanton are Macrocarpa but these two boys are Radiata, very different lads indeed. Moreover, the white cockatoos clamour about the Macrocarpa while the black cockatoos prefer to squark in the Radiata. Some things are perhaps black and white after all. I believe it would have been a great gesture if these two odd trees were planted here together during 1919 in remembrance of those men from the New Norfolk area who did not return from a war few people understood but clearly presented to all painful memories shared around a small country town. No one can explain why the trees are, or were together out in the open. I like my idea about it all.

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