This article was originally published in The Australian newspaper.
I PUSH the stroller across the bumpy turf of the oval as the honeyed sun casts long shadows over the grass. I’m on my customary late afternoon walk, ostensibly to get Layla, my baby, to sleep – but really because I like to watch the sky darkening, to smell the air at the transition between day and evening.
As ever, I marvel at the intense greenness of the grass, at the expansiveness of the deep blue sky. You don’t get skies like these at home. There, fenced in by concrete, smothered by cloud, the sky is smaller, its colours muted. There’s a sense of enclosure, of containment, of ambitions thwarted and dreams unrealised.
We could not wait to get away, spent five years planning our escape: late nights poring over forms, maps, guidebooks, fuelled by a bottle of Aussie red, in our tiny flat on the farthest outreaches of the city. Our flat with its low ceilings, small windows, radiators pumping out dry heat. No outside space, so clothes hung up to dry in every room. And outside those grey skies always crowding us in, enclosing us.
As I push on, I wonder if the breadth of the sky, the intensity of its colours, can influence the way people think; affect a whole nation’s psyche, even. Here, under the big skies of my new home, set free from the daily grind of my former life, my mind is free to roam. On my daily stroll around these streets that still seem exotic a year on, I dream up big plans of stories I’ll write, people I’ll meet, places I’ll go.
But freedom comes at a cost. I tot up the price daily, in fragmented Skype calls with family back home, in emails sent to friends to whom I’m just a fading memory, in visits promised that we all know will never materialise.
As I push the stroller through the neighbourhood, people passing by smile at Layla, my little blonde Aussie, now 10 months old, born here soon after we arrived. She beams back at them, her eyes wide, blue as the sky. I wonder if those same eyes would be puzzled back home by the gazes averted, the newspapers raised, the ears muffled inside headphones, everyone locked inside their own little world, too busy to return a baby’s smile.
But with that thought the longing floods back. The daily commute, distorted through the lens of memory into something to be yearned for. Rush hour, late again. Hurtling down the precipitous escalators, cramming into the carriage as the doors hiss shut, avoiding the eyes of strangers, their faces grey in the sallow light.
The sluggish Thames, the colour of weak tea, glimpsed between broken-windowed warehouses as the train pulls out of Waterloo Station. How long will it be before this place becomes home?
I contemplate what that word really means. A collection of familiarities, perhaps, some so subtle they only become noticeable in their absence. The smells: rain on asphalt, sodden loam, soggy grass and wilted roses. A quality of daylight, a diffuse flat whiteness filtered through blankety cloud. The warm yeasty smell emanating from an open pub door, the first frothy sip of a freshly pulled pint. I feel tears sting my eyes. Enough. This is where we live now.
The sky over the oval has turned to streaky bacon as the sun begins to descend, lacy clouds edged with crimson and mauve. A warm breeze stirs the silver-leafed eucalypts. A flock of rainbow lorikeets startles me as they erupt from the branches overhead. This new life never fails to surprise me. I turn the stroller homeward.
Lena Jensen author 