Best wishes to all for the festive season!
I am on my first day of leave for the annual break and I have commenced to read, as one will, this time of year. During breaks in the cricket test of course.
I stumbled across some poetry there that somehow intersected with the time of year for me. We are urban people (by any account) but always at this time of year we travel to the coastal areas away far from Sydney. We meet friends there and do all the usual things golf, seafood, fishing, boating, swimming.
The one common factor though that always accompanies this is that we travel through a lot of country towns on the way there and back ...and always spend far too little time thereabouts for breaks/lunches.
I say this as it got me to thinking that it is of itself a 'bit of therapy'. In that it slows you down and helps your 'clock' to acclimatise to this the 'very necessary' holiday period. Sometimes the service in the shops immediately puts you in touch with another time zone. But hey ...that is part of it all.
There is also a touch of sentimentality about it too, although most times it doesn't even occur to you at the time. This comes about as the heritage items that you always see there, it could be an old building, furniture,a wagon wheel or even old wares, all set your mind into another time zone.
In doing so it can put us very much in touch with our roots and hopefully makes us a little more appreciative of what we do have as well (subconsciously at least). Something that often gets lost in the 'hurly burly' of the working year in the city.
Perhaps sentimentality is good for the soul. Most times we don't get to go there too often.
The poem I touched on was 'Country Towns'. So I thought I might share the poem with you.
Kenneth Slessor is an Australian poet who lived from 1901 to 1971. He was born in the Australian country town of Orange in New South Wales.
Country Towns
Country towns, with your willows and squares,
And farmers bouncing on barrel mares
To public houses of yellow wood
With '1860' over their doors,
And that mysterious race of Hogans
Which always keeps the General Stores….
At the School of Arts, a broadsheet lies
Sprayed with the sarcasm of flies:
'The Great Golightly Family
Of Entertainers Here To-night'–
Dated a year and a half ago,
But left there, less from carelessness
Than from a wish to seem polite.
Verandas baked with musky sleep,
Mulberry faces dozing deep,
And dogs that lick the sunlight up
Like paste of gold – or, roused in vain
By far, mysterious buggy-wheels,
Lower their ears, and drowse again….
Country towns with your schooner bees,
And locusts burnt in the pepper-trees,
Drown me with syrups, arch your boughs,
Find me a bench, and let me snore,
Till, charged with ale and unconcern,
I'll think it's noon at half-past four!
