A balcony in Subiaco, overlooking a road with clean lines and modern buildings. Little human activity. The sun is slowly sliding down the western horizon, oozing a warm orange over our reading forms.
The scene (at least in my head) is magestically poetic. And so fucking perfect my toes won't uncurl.
We are into day three of the Christmas madness and the wonder still hasn't ceased, or shown any sign of abating.
We are somehow brazenly, unstoppably happy.

On Christmas Eve, during the day, I pottered and cleaned and prepared food and had luxurious and wonderful thoughts. I went to Belmont to see Eamonn and Lisa and had my hair 'done'. For the pleasure I also had to endure the Bayswater/Belmont bus, but in the end it was worth it.
Back in Maylands I treated myself to a delicious and fresh raw tuna bento and walked home up the hill in a heat-haze of happy.

Everything about our first Christmas was perfect. Honestly. Yeah maybe we could have tried a different flavour on the bruschette, and maybe the duck would have fared better at a different temperature, but seriously, it was the happiest December 24th since I left Kolozsvar, and that was a bloody long time ago.
The gifts were giggle-making and thoughtful by turns and even the conversations with Dad (in the bath and minus Margo thank fuck) and Mum, Sandor, Tusi and Laci didn't lead to tearful renditions of Mennybol az Angyal and Pasztorok Pasztorok like I had occasionally feared.
It was especially good to hear Laci's warm rumble - of all my very few relatives, it is he who pops into my head the most, and how despite his big heart and endless reserves of love he is back living with his mother, aged fiftysomething and alone. It also makes me think about how Tusi feels, that both her children in a sense failed at married life - how much of that burden do parents carry?
But moving away from the maudlin, the conversations, while brief, were all entirely happy.
I think I am finally proving to myself that a family of two is indeed possible. Ed was a sourpuss all night, but he still gets to be our plus one :)

Christmas Day dawned with the same seared blue sky and clear light as the day before and we had lunch with Shannon and Paul and family to look forward to. I thought, for a very short few moments that it would be odd, us orphans and then the rest of them all family, but as it always is with Shannon, it was effortlessly warm and familiar, and we spent the next happy twelve hours drinking and eating and talking and splashing in the pool with the dog with the prettiest ears ever.

And today? After a bbq breakfast of leftover ham, apple and pork sausage, tomatoes dressed with fresh basil and Margs olive oil, eggs and toast we trundled home, to appease Ed, to drink coffee, to lazily plan the day, to marvel at our great good luck.

We lay for a while on City Beach (and how glorious to be there again, at 'my' beach), read our books, did some splashing (me very wussily just at the ankledepths) and returned to Subi before our hunger turned to hanger. Alas, almost nothing in the deserted streets seemed open, and when even our burrito dreams were dashed with Zambrero being closed, we settled for the market, and feasted on quite incredible chicken tagine with the most divine chilli paste, and some fresh Vietnamese rice paper rolls with zingy dressing.

And now here.
Dusk, and then sunset. Pipe smoking, beer drinking, slow reading afternoon. And absolutely nothing is missing. Birds alight randomly atop the building across the road, and their sharp silhouettes graze the sky. But otherwise there's a small breeze and nothing else. No hubbub, no stress, and certainly no seasonal fear.

I have just started to read Hemingway's biography by Carlos Baker and whilst I am only up to his first entry into the war, I already have that transporting feeling I always get whenever I read Hemingway, or Fitzgerald (both of them). It's lovely and a little sad to read of a time when letters were still written with intent, and objects were named because they weren't every day and pedestrian. When we gave weight to things and occasions and behaviour and appearance mattered.

Part of me wants to look back on the year past, and make promises for the year to come, but the past 34 have taught me that it is a pattern I keep repeating for no real good.
Recently I came across the three year diary I had bought at Kikki-K which requires a sentence a day and that I had started back in the Greenwood period- it was interesting to read back the things I was fleetingly thinking a year ago. It's good that I have moved on.
So essentially, I think I just want to go with it, and at the very least and very most do my best to be present.

I talked to Bud today- that head-shakingly impossible sensation of being so damn proud of her yet railing at the injustice of this latest move. It seems we really will have to wait till we're 85 to sit on a porch in the dying light and be bored together.

But this sitting in the dying light of day, doing not very much at all, and reflecting suits me well now. I have space and courage in my heart to just sit and think and that is a new thing, and a very wonderful thing. And there is jacaranda outside the window, and a gentle greying of the evening, and insulated in this bubble, which thankfully is porous enough to let the world in, I am ridiculously, retardedly hopeful.