1st January 2021

It is nearly the end of the first day. The meteorological low which painted the skies and our hearts grey from the day the kids left is now shifting, and I awake with a burst of energy which tidied rooms, cleaned bathrooms and put order in the house. I was left wanting more which weeding and swimming did not dissipate and so I venture out. 

It occurs to me that for weeks now my forays have been strictly from home to the supermarket, the fishmonger, butcher, baker and if there was a candlestick maker ... So it was with a sense of renewal and yet familiarity that I took a long walk today. 

This time without Dougall as he is too demanding of my attention. This is the time to take stock, stroll leisurely and think back on the year and forward to the next.  Next week awaits that joy with him.

 As I walk the sun is dipping in and out of the clouds and rainbows come and go in the sky. I see three. The parks are full of families and kids playing cricket. 

I walk along a familiar route but which yields the blushing colours of undressing gums and the lusciousness of layered greens in the sub tropics after the rain. The atmosphere was clear and each leaf caught the fading light and painted such vistas and backdrops that I knew that it was absolutely the right way to spend the remaining hours of this first day. 

I walk along and see kookaburras with bats, new leaves which blind you with their intensity, poinciana flowers, delicate fruit on trees that looked bronzed and golden, which bird could resist them ?  New shoots on hoop pines contrasting with the old spines that had fallen which are such helter skelter of helix formations.

The year has been full of covid and we have all been shaken by its reach, but nature is the one place where you will not find it. So this will be my haven for 2021 in my effort to get closer to it and preserve it as best I can. Greta and her messages should not be far from our thoughts this New Year's Day.