Dreaded Aunties

Dad has four sisters. They are the most embarrassing people I know, and one of my dreaded Aunties is visiting.

I love all of them. But...

Aunty Jenny is not capable of saying anything without referring to a bodily process and/or function and/or oriface. She says these things loudy. Usually in shopping centres. And always while I'm there. I end up spending all my time shushing her or making sure everyone knows She's Not With Me. Even going for a drive can end with me running off the road in fright. "Look at that mountain!" she'll say, pointing through the windscreen. "It looks like a big, floppy dick resting on the balls!" In the middle of Tasmania is a pair of mountains called The Thumbs. aunty Jen calls them The Nuts, because she can never remember the real name.

Aunty Colleen is a bogan who has velvet pictures of Elvis, fridge magnets that say No Bullshit ond so on, and one of those awful singing fish. She asks me questions like "Have you found a good woman yet Denny? Or would you prefer a bad woman?" to which I reply "Oh fer FUCKS sake, Col!" She laughs at that.

Aunty Lorrain isn't as much of a bogan as Aunty Col, but she enjoys telling me Things I'd Rather Not Know. She keeps telling me things until I hide under a bed.

I love Aunty Sue to death. She's visiting from Franklin and will be staying for a week. This afternoon she interrupted my essy writing to show me some turned huon pine. At first I thought it was a rolling pin, 12" long and about 2"thick. One end is opviously a handle but the other end is curiously rounded. Then she turned it around and I could see it in detail.

It's a big wooden dick.

I'm glad Aunty Sue is the quiet one. I'd die if she wasn't.

It's Autumn

Ode To Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'erbrimmed their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers;
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, -
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing, and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

John Keats