Windswept

This weekend was very windy in Brisbane; the weather report contained warnings of gusts up to 90km per hour. While I decided to forgo my usual walk up to the supermarket for grocery shopping, catching the bus instead, I did risk doing my washing, figuring if the wind wasn’t good for walking in, it would be good for drying clothes.

One of my neighbours had also decided to do their laundry and the results were strewn across the backyard; towels had been ripped from the Hills Hoist; jeans and skirts hung drunkenly from the tenuous grasps of the pegs that still held; and t-shirts had flipped over, wrapping around the lines in frenzied knots. Even after seeing this carnage, I remained undeterred. The wardrobe situation was at a critical level. I was having to make recourse to the bloomers section of my underwear drawer, the place where those items devoid of functioning elastic lurk.

I overcame the problem of losing my washing to the wind flurries that would steal them over Suncorp Stadium by securing each and every item with between 3 to 5 pegs. Looking at the washing line, it would have been forgivable to think that some strange obsessive-compulsive girl was trying to make contact with another planet (that’s enough from the peanut gallery). I can, however, report only one instance of a singlet, which had done a couple of twirls around the line before hooking its straps over another item’s pegs. The rest of the washing, from socks to sheets, stayed in place and only benefited from the rollicking good shake of the wind and the pure, perfect sunshine that only spring in Brisbane delivers.

***

After the wind yesterday, today I decided to go for a walk to the local convenience store to get my favourite juice—alas the shop had run out—and saw that the streets were strewn with a multitude of leaves, twigs and small branches. The guy at the local pool was vacuuming up debris in what looked like a reverse leaf-blower. It seemed to me that the trees had finally shaken off the bedraggled and scarred foliage that they had sustained in the hail storm a few months back. That storm had dumped a good five inches of icy pellets on the inner west of Brisbane, and treated us to a vision of a European winter in the Sunshine State. The hail had snap frozen everything in its wake, thereby rendering the greenery freezer damaged in the rapid thaw that followed. As I returned home, I saw that the mango tree on the property next door was sprouting new shoots.