This afternoon

This afternoon I heard Poetica on the radio, a tractor reversing through lines of broccoli, a magpie impersonating a kookaburra, Dave the farmer yelling at his dog, who barked at the cows, and Mick using a grinder to fashion a washer from a length of steel scrap to fix the mower.
(Poetica, on a good day, makes me feel like my neck is being kissed. The smell of a grinder cutting steel takes me back to tin sheds and strange machines and the work of men.)
A still, chilled afternoon: the big, white clouds of autumn always threaten rain and sounds ring clear through the air.
As I hang out my washing, the neighbour shouts over the electric fence, "It must be about to rain, Sarah!" My clothesline habits, it seems, are his storm barometer.

Tis a breaking of the seal, of sorts. Perhaps that is too juicy a metaphor for my situation. Tom Stephenson has posted his recipe to draw out a dried up blogger, when he worried that his mates in other worlds were either dead, buried or walking the Valley of Shit. You can read his recipe here (the comments are v.funny if I may say so myself.)
The only reason I've stopped writing over the last week or so is that I've stepped off my red wine highway. Red wine tends to be my amphetamine or blue meanie when it comes to creativity. It can feed me in more ways than mere alcoholic sustenance, so giving it up for a week means that I am flailing just a bit. I wake up in the mornings feeling brilliantly (or at least vaguely) cognitive, and free of that nasty guilty thing called a hangover. But the rage ... the beauty ... the landscape ... the story ... all these elements have been obscured by a bewilderment, a numbness and the lack of drive to say anything at all. This is confusing for me because I always thought it was supposed to be the other way around.

So please bear with me. There is plenty banked up that I would like to write about: Helen Garner on literary prizes and writing non fiction in the Weekend Australian, google street view and the paranoid collective, a breath of sunlight outside the gaol for my ex, dancing to my 'own' band C U Next Tuesday in a garage in Lockyer, a visceral lesson in kangaroo tick management, Japan's potential leader's response to the demands of the Comfort Women, my grand daughter's amazing, open mouthed smile when she hears me say 'Hey Tilly, Tilly! It's Nana Sarah!'