Tasmania

A throwback to Tasmania. From Camden.

Visited Get Shucked on Bruny Island. Was too cheap to buy all the oysters. No regrets.

Cheese in all its glory. It’s a terrible photo and I had already started eating. But that’s how food should be presented. To me.

I’m thinking of all of this as I sit in my little dorm room sipping hot chocolate. I can’t take a photo now. It’s almost gone and the lighting in my room is terrible. As always.

There are parts of me that miss Tasmania. True, I did beat the sun to its rising every morning to feed the farm.

But this was the farm

Do you see those piglets? They’re adorable. Poor mama is super skinny. We worked really hard to get her weight back up. By that, I mean we soaked her bread in oil and chased the ducks away.

She wasn’t too happy about the oil.

And these were the alpacas. Lordy. That face. So adorable.

So, so adorable.

I can still feel the sequence of the day, a month after. Wake up. Feed the chickens. Feed the rabbits. Feed the ducks. Clean the horse’s yard. Feed the horses. Make food for the pigs. Feed the pigs. Feed the sheep. Feed the alpacas (and one long-haired goat). Let the chickens out.

The 60-odd geese are fed in between.

This is just the beginning.

If anything, I’m reminded of how good and bad are hand in glove. The weariness is sometimes inescapable. Despite how happy you know you are, there’s a sense of dread because it is all futile in the end.

Everything we fight for, everything we work for – hauled to the landfill during our lifetime, left to the dust at our last breath.

So, all you have is the in-between of life and death. The middling part where you only get to lead one life once.

You do the best you can. Eat the food you can. Make merry while you can.

I, being simultaneously too old and too young for my age, do nothing.

But I cuddled a wombat. It was part of my job.