walking

The JRT and I take our walk in the late afternoon. He’s been cooped. Two days of splashing rain has washed his world of old scents and every fresh scent must be examined. He stops to read the messages of other dogs, then races past me to the next place of interest.

We right-angle from our road into the side street that takes us to the park. Just around the corner stands a bloke with a tripod, camera with a big lens attached. I rarely speak to strangers but I’ve been cooped up too. I step across and align my sights with the camera, trained on nothing much.

“What are you photographing?” The bloke’s maybe my age, slicked back hair over a mostly bare scalp, stained and missing smoker’s teeth, gentle voice, slight impediment, gentle smile.

“Trees,” he says. I line myself up with the camera again. The JRT occupies himself with lamp-posts, fences and hard garbage.

“Which one?” It’s a plain Jane box on the other side of the street. “Why?”

“I photograph trees for demonstrations,” he says; no elaboration.

“Do you know it’s Latin name?” He doesn’t; he knew them once, he tells me, but tends to forget them. He says he likes the natives: their flowers “thump” the exotics. I concur, tell him my mother has been a native plant grower for 50 years, member of the Society for Growing Australian Plants. The JRT is keen to move on.

The park is empty, the paths puddled, the grass soggy. We cross the railway tracks to walk along the back fences of the units where many Burmese refugees live. A log is hypotenused against the fence where the young men scale it, cross the line, and erect their volleyball net among the trees in the park’s rough end. They keep to themselves, don’t bother anyone.

I place my eye where a paling is nicked at the top. A group of brown Burmese kids surge this way and that in the driveway between the units. A smaller boy, three or four, toddles down the sloping concrete, trying to slow down. The other kids turn and head back. The small boy squats, alone, examines something in his hand, his attention concentrated.

A cement frog, front legs broken, lies at the edge of the tangled couch grass along the fence line. I prop it on a piece of railway furniture. Some commuter will see it there, as a train passes, and wonder if it’s real.

We press on along the line, cross where the tracks and road curve up toward the station half a click away, then slog along a grassed alley, windowless factory walls on our left, backyard paling fences on our right. The JRT attacks any fence with a dog on the other side: a greyhound in a coat, a yappy fluffball.

It’s dead still, the grey clouds static, no wind, refrigerated air air.

 

Rock on.