Category: Life

Posted in Life, Writing

The woman from yesterday

Posted on by Sharon

She wasn’t even in the door before her grandmother said, “Well? How was your day? And where,” she added, narrowing her eyes, “is my scarf?”

The scarf. The soft cashmere scarf she was only ever allowed to wear on special occasions, or occasionally when her grandmother is feeling indulgent. She put her bag down and braced herself.

“I think,” she said, “I might have misplaced it.”

Grandma sat back as though she’d confessed to robbing a bank. “Lucy Grace. Not my cashmere scarf.”

“I know, I know,” Lucy said, sitting at the table. “I’m sure it’ll turn up somewhere.”

Grandma poured tea in that serious way she has, as though a warm cup might steady the world.

“Right,” she said. “Talk me through your day. Start from the beginning. Memory needs a path to follow.”

Lucy took a breath and tried to rewind. “Okay… well, I went into the city mid-morning. Took photos. Tried to keep my mind busy.”

It was day four of the colour-hunting challenge. Grandma chose the colour at breakfast each morning; Lucy went out and chased it. It was the right kind of distraction this week; something bright and ordered to hold her attention given other uncertainties.

Grandma sipped her tea. “Was yellow a good choice?”

“It was,” Lucy said. “I thought it would be impossible in the city, but it kept showing up. Made the day feel brighter than it really was.”

She opened the photos on her phone.

A woman in a pale gold jumper eating a slice of sponge at Caffé E Torta. Yellow-labelled champagne bottles hiding her feet. The bright yellow arrows leading into the parking station off Flinders Lane. The warm yellow light spilling from the doorway of Caterina’s – the sort of glow you can feel on your face even though you’re standing outside.

“Looks more mustard than yellow,” Grandma said, squinting. “What did you do for lunch?”

“I went to that Greek place on the corner of Russell and Lonsdale.” Lucy saw the look on her grandmother’s face. “Yes, I was very careful not to drop souvlaki on the scarf.”

“Well, I’m relieved to hear that. Did you take the scarf with you when you left?”

“Yes,” Lucy said. “I definitely did. A woman at the lights admired it. Said it looked like something a poet would wear. I told her it belonged to my grandmother. She said you had excellent taste.”

Grandma sniffed. “Quite right.”

“After lunch I kept wandering. Yellow kept popping up everywhere. Eventually it got too cold, so I stopped in at a café to warm up and finish my book.”

“And that’s when you took the scarf off?”

“Yes, I hung it over the back of the chair, and I even said, out loud, ‘Don’t forget this.’”

Grandma’s eyebrows rose. “And yet?”

“Well, I didn’t really forget it. I got distracted.”

“Go on.”

“I finished the book and just sat there,” Lucy paused, “crying. It’s such a sad book – a bit too close to home at the moment. When I looked up, there was a woman outside, taking a photo of me. Through the window.”

Grandma blinked. “Of you? When you were crying?”

“Yes.”

“Why on earth?”

“I don’t know,” Lucy said. “She gave me a funny look, then came into the café and sat at the next table.”

Grandma sat back. “What?”

Lucy explained how the woman bought Portuguese tarts, and how she made her laugh about crying over a book, which she’d thought was humiliating but turned out not to be.

“She was nice?” Grandma asked carefully.

“She was… interesting,” Lucy said. “Kind. Odd in a good way. And she made me look beautiful in the photo.”

Grandma’s voice softened. “You always look beautiful, darling. You just don’t always feel it.”

“I’ll go back in the morning. Ask if they’ve seen the scarf.”

***

Lucy pushes open the café door, hoping to see the scarf on the counter. The bell does its half-hearted little ting, and stepping in, Lucy sees the woman from yesterday.

Hair escaping from its band again, the same well-worn cardigan hanging like a tired curtain, and sensible shoes that look as though they’ve walked a thousand careful miles. She seems older than Lucy remembered – solid, practical, the kind of woman who might keep spare buttons in a jar – but there’s something else too: a glint in her eyes, as if she’s just thought of a secret joke, and a faint smudge of ink on her thumb, like someone who still writes things by hand.

Two Portuguese tarts in front of her.

And Grandma’s scarf, folded neatly on the table, waiting for her.

Posted in Life, Writing

The walk home

Posted on by Sharon

Eleanor walks slowly, the scarf folded over her arm, no longer clenched in her fist like something rescued. It still carries the faint warmth of the café, the echo of laughter that surprised her, and the shimmer of tears she hadn’t expected. The street is bright in that late-afternoon way that makes colours strangely theatrical. Even the footpath seems to glow, as though it’s been polished in her brief absence. She can’t see the woman but decides to take the long way home just in case.

At the edge of the small park, she pauses. Children run in chaotic lines around the climbing frame, their shrieks bright and unselfconscious. A mother crouches in the mulch, hands gentle on a toddler’s shoulders. The scene is completely ordinary and yet Eleanor feels herself tense, just slightly, as if bracing for a sound she can already hear forming.

At the lights a young father stands rocking a baby against his chest. The rhythm is familiar – unconscious, instinctive, the universal movement of comfort. The baby’s head lays against the man’s shoulder; a small fist curled around the strap of his backpack.

She looks away quickly. It’s fine. It’s nothing. Just noise.

She tucks the scarf into her bag and keeps walking.

It occurs to her – absurdly, unhelpfully – that she should not have taken that photo in the café. Photography complicates things. It makes her pay attention, and paying attention is rarely simple. It means she notices the way people look when they think no one is looking. The way sorrow sits on a person like a second, ill-fitting coat. The way joy is usually much quieter than anyone realises.

About to cross the road she hesitates, though she’s not sure why. There’s nothing unusual about the street: a row of almost identical houses, each one with a neat white fence and garden beds full of roses and lavender. A woman unloads groceries from the back of her car, her dog watching from the porch with solemn concentration. A magpie hops along the power line, considering its prospects. The squealing laughter of young children hangs in the air.

Still, Eleanor stands there longer than she needs to, as though she’s forgotten where she’s going.

It happens sometimes, this pause, this gap between thought and movement, as if her mind needs a moment to catch up.

When it does, she crosses the road and turns left. Past the old stone wall where vines have started their slow, inevitable conquest. Past the primary school with its mural of cheerful stick figures holding hands. Past the house with the yellow door she has always admired. She takes it all in without thinking about it. Light touching the roses, the windows, the silver of the mailbox slots. Everything catches her eye for a moment, then slips back into ordinary.

At her own gate, she stops again. She can see through the front window: the soft shadow of the dining table, the curl of the fern she has somehow kept alive, the familiar slant of afternoon sun across the coloured rugs.

The house has that particular stillness of late day, the sense that everything has paused in anticipation of evening. She fills the kettle, not because she wants tea, but because the sound of it boiling feels like proof that everything’s under control.

She wanders to the window, laying the scarf on the table beside her. The sky is shifting, the light thinning, blue deepening at the edges. She can see her own face faintly superimposed over the street outside. It’s always a jolt, that moment where she looks almost like someone else. Slightly older, slightly softer, the glass revealing more of her than she wants to know.

The kettle clicks off.

She makes tea, then lowers herself into the chair. The scarf lies on the table, folded loosely, looking almost like a small sleeping thing.

‘That’s ridiculous,’ she mutters, pushing the thought away and turning to the window.

She doesn’t want to think about the café woman anymore. Or toddlers at the park. Or the father’s rocking motion – a motion that has lived in her body for decades.

She picks up her camera. To test the light. To reassure herself she can still see clearly.

She frames the shot and presses the shutter button.

The image appears on the screen: the scarf, the chair, the soft dimming light behind it. Ordinary things. And yet, something about the frame unsettles her. She can’t put her finger on it, just a sense that the picture feels heavier than it should. Like it’s holding more than fabric and light.

She lowers the camera.

Her breathing has gone shallow again. She forces it deeper. Steadier.

It’s nothing, she tells herself. You’re tired. You’re being foolish. It’s only a scarf. Only a photograph. Only a woman you barely know. Only a moment you read too much into.

She sips her tea in the growing quiet, aware of something she can’t quite name sitting just out of reach.

She lifts the scarf, folds it once, folds it again, her hands moving with the same slow care she once used to settle a restless infant. She places it carefully in the drawer of the sideboard. For safekeeping, she tells herself. For later. For something.

She closes the drawer and stands there, her hand still resting lightly on the wood, her reflection fading in the darkening glass.

She can’t explain it. She doesn’t try.

But something in her has shifted.

Posted in Life, Writing

Forgiving Light

Posted on by Sharon

Eleanor lifts her camera just as the woman raises her head. Her face is streaked with tears, the light catching them, so it seems they shimmer rather than fall.

She quickly takes in a half-finished coffee, scarf draped over the back of the chair, and a book open on the table. Something in the woman’s stillness suggests she hasn’t turned the page in a while.

Her finger hovers over the shutter button. The woman meets her eyes; a fragile thread of connection stretches between them.

Eleanor’s mind, unhelpfully, begins to invent possible stories about the woman. Grieving, she thinks. Recently divorced. Terminally ill. Bereaved daughter. Job loss. A pigeon-related incident. Endless possibilities spinning through her mind like a carousel.

She could walk away, let the woman have her sadness in peace, but something in the woman’s faint smile sees Eleanor push the door open and step inside.

The bell gives its half-hearted ting. ‘Just the usual, thanks Matt,’ she calls. ‘Oh, and one of your Portuguese tarts.’ She turns toward the woman. ‘Would you like one as well? They’re dangerously good.’

The woman shakes her head, then mid-shake says, ‘Yes, why not.’

Eleanor smiles. ‘Excellent decision.’

‘Is it all right if I sit here?’ she asks, pointing to the table next to where the woman is sitting. ‘I promise not to talk unless it seems vital.’

‘That sounds perfect,’ the woman says, wiping her face. Eleanor, pretending not to notice, stirs her coffee as though it requires medical precision.

They sit in silence. Eleanor wrestles with the tart’s flaky pastry and warm, wobbly custard, while across from her the woman breaks hers cleanly, long fingers steady and assured. Eleanor’s own fingers feel clumsy – her sister once called them ‘sausage rolls,’ and she has to admit the description isn’t entirely unfair.

She guesses the woman is in her late thirties, graceful in that effortless way some younger women are. “Well put-together,” Eleanor’s mother would say, “considered”.

‘When I first saw you,’ Eleanor breaks the silence, ‘my imagination went into overdrive. I kept inventing reasons for the tears. Little scenarios, death, divorce, job.’

The woman glances at her, curious. ‘None of the above,’ she smiles, licking crumbs from her fingers.

‘You’re a photographer?’ she asks, nodding at the camera on the table.

‘Sometimes. Depends who you ask. My grandson says I’m a breakfast-face photographer.’

The woman laughs. ‘Breakfast-face?’

‘Yes. He thinks he’s my muse. I take photos of him eating breakfast.’ Eleanor chuckles, shaking her head. ‘Don’t ask.’

‘Can I see?’

Eleanor flicks through the images on the camera until she finds yesterday’s – Garry mid-spoon, mouth wide, eyes half closed. The light falling on him like a benediction.

‘He’s wonderful,’ the woman says. ‘And clearly plotting something.’

‘Always,’ Eleanor says. ‘It keeps the mornings interesting.’

The woman traces a fingertip along her cup. ‘You took my photo earlier,’ she says, not accusingly, just a fact laid gently on the table.

Eleanor blushes. ‘I did. I’m sorry – it was the light. It does that to me sometimes.’

‘Can I see?’

Eleanor turns the screen toward her. The woman’s face is luminous against the dark interior, the tears faintly catching the light.

The woman studies it for a long moment. ‘You’ve made me look… beautiful. Not sad at all, even with those tears.’

‘You are beautiful,’ Eleanor says simply, then wonders if that’s too much. ‘It’s mostly the light,’ she adds, flustered. ‘It’s very forgiving this time of day. Like a kindly aunt.’

That earns another laugh.

‘I wasn’t sad, you know,’ the woman says finally. She closes the book, letting Eleanor see the cover. A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness. ‘It just caught me off-guard. That ending.’

‘So,’ Eleanor says lightly, ‘you were crying over fiction, not a break-up?’ She leans back slightly, watching the shift in the woman’s expression.

‘Mortifying, isn’t it?’

‘Not at all,’ Eleanor says. ‘I once wept in a tram over a poem about a cabbage. People gave me space, though, which was nice.’

The woman laughs, a bright, sudden sound that makes Eleanor laugh too. Matt glances over, shakes his head with a faint smile, and goes back to his orders.

When the laughter subsides, they sit smiling at each other, the moment oddly companionable.

‘Thank you,’ the woman says at last.

‘For what?’

‘For seeing me. Even if you got the story wrong.’

‘Oh, I usually do,’ Eleanor says. ‘But I enjoy the practice.’

The woman slips the book inside her bag and stands. ‘You should call that photo Forgiving Light.’

‘I just might,’ Eleanor says.

When the door closes behind her, Eleanor’s eyes settle on the table where the woman was sitting.

She lifts her camera and frames the scene – the empty cup, the wrapper, a few stray bits of pastry scattered across the plate. Caught in a narrow shaft of fading golden light, the woman’s scarf draped over the chair.

She presses the shutter, then scoops up the scarf and rushes out after the woman.

Posted in Life, Photography, Writing

Shaping what’s seen

Posted on by Sharon

“It is Chanel No. 5, you’re right,” Miriam says, her voice calm. “I just didn’t expect to read something about myself. I wasn’t aware I was being watched so closely.”

She smiles, guarded but curious.

Eleanor shifts in her seat. “You read it?”

“It popped up in my Substack feed,” Miriam replies. “I wasn’t expecting to see myself there.”

Eleanor hesitates, unsure whether to apologise or defend herself. “It wasn’t really about you,” she says finally. “I just used small things I remembered from my last visit.”

Miriam nods. “It made me think about the way you see people.” She leans back into the leather chair. “Do you feel, as a photographer, that you’re always watching? That you see things others overlook?”

Eleanor smiles. She likes people who ask good questions. “When my husband was alive, we used to go on photography trips into the city or to gardens. He’d come home with hundreds of photos of things I hadn’t noticed. I’d look at them and think, was I even there? It was like I was blind.”

She glances out the window. Light glints off the building across the street, a curtain flutters and a figure moves behind it. “I need a starting point – for both photography and writing. But I don’t think I get starting points from watching.”

“What do you mean by starting points?” Miriam asks.

“Once we drew colours from a hat before heading into the city – his was blue, mine was red. That gave me something to look for. And that was great. I actually came home with some images I liked.” She smiles at the memory.

“So you don’t think you’re always watching?”

“No, I don’t think I’m observant at all.” Eleanor pauses. “Someone once called me a bowerbird. They said I collect things – stories, words, ideas – and I use them to create something. Like the story you read. I guess it came from things I’ve collected.”

“When I read what you wrote,” Miriam says, “I felt you’d taken pieces of me – my wonky left eye, my unmatched suit, my perfume. Seeing them was … confronting.”

Eleanor resists defending herself. That’s not why she’s here.

Miriam lets the silence stretch. “When you take a portrait, or write a story,” she says finally, “do you think about how the people you’ve collected from might feel? About how collecting can reveal more than you intend?”

Eleanor meets her gaze. Calm, but piercing.

“I watch, I listen, I interpret too,” Miriam continues. “But the difference is, you collect, and then you show your work to the world.”

Eleanor smiles wryly. “I wish I could show the world, but my audience is very small.” Her smile falters. “Sorry, that was inappropriate.”

A bus pulls into the stop one floor below, its mechanical sigh heavy in the air. Eleanor rubs the back of her neck, the muscles tight from holding herself still too long. The bus moves on, leaving the room too quiet.

“Are you saying I’m unethical?” she asks.

“I’m saying you’re powerful,” Miriam replies. “And that power carries responsibility. You decide how someone’s captured … and you also decide how they’re presented to the world.”

Eleanor looks down at her hands. “I always thought of it as seeing, not shaping what’s seen.” A bird lands on the railing and shakes itself, feathers settling. She sits back, something in her easing. “I never thought of it as power.”

“When you think about your portraits – your Faces of Melbourne, for instance – do you see that power there?”

A face springs from Eleanor’s memory: an older woman near the State Library, bent under the weight of her shopping bags. She had helped her to the tram stop, and as they walked, the woman shared stories of her early life in Melbourne. She stopped to show Eleanor grainy black and white photos of her son who had taken his own life many years before. The grief was still raw, as if time had barely touched it.

“When I asked if I could photograph her,” Eleanor says, “she nodded straight away. I chose a spot where just her face was lit. It’s such a beautiful portrait. She gave me something real and I wanted to honour that.”

Miriam studies her for a moment. “You were moved by her story,” she says. “You wanted to see her, and to let others see her too. That’s empathy – but it’s also exposure. Maybe that’s the tension you live with as an artist.”

Eleanor squirms. The word artist sits uncomfortably.

They sit in the stillness, neither reaching for resolution. A soft chime breaks the silence. Their hour has ended.

Outside, the late afternoon light is soft and luminous, the kind photographers dream about. Eleanor walks home, stepping around puddles and cracks, her thoughts running faster than her feet ever could.

As she passes the café on the corner of her street, she notices a woman in the window, alone. A half-finished coffee, a book open on the table, shoulders slumped. Something in her stillness suggests she hasn’t turned the page in a while.

Eleanor lifts her camera just as the woman lifts her head. Her face is streaked with tears. Eleanor is again captivated by the way light touches faces and the stories faces tell.

Her finger hovers over the shutter button. The woman smiles, a fragile thread of connection.

Eleanor lowers the camera, pushes the door open and steps inside.

Posted in Life, Writing

Protect your highlights

Posted on by Sharon

Eleanor rehearses the line in her head while she waits.

My default thinking is that no one likes me.

It sounds both dramatic and true, overly self-indulgent and that annoys her. She considers softening it – I sometimes feel people don’t like me – but that sounds evasive. She wants to be honest.

Across the waiting room, a framed print of a misty forest hangs slightly crooked. She wants to straighten it, but tells herself to sit still. There’s a low table stacked with mindfulness magazines she has no inclination to flick through and a box of tissues that looks too deliberately placed. On the door opposite her chair, neat lettering reads: Dr Miriam Clarke, Psychologist.

Eleanor wonders if it’s called an office. It feels too intimate to be a room, too small to be a practice. Office sounds right, though sterile. Her thoughts drift – as they do – and she has to remind herself why she’s here. Then, because she can’t help herself, she wonders why am I here?

Before she can answer herself, the door opens.

‘Eleanor?’

She stands, grabs her bag, and out pops the line she’s been practising.

‘My default thinking is that no one likes me.’ Her heart double beats as the words leave her mouth. She stops abruptly. Too soon! At least get into her office first. Absurd and self-indulgent is not the look she was going for. She wonders if her face has already frozen into permanent cringe. Should she tilt her head slightly? Smile? Nod like a normal human?

Dr Miriam Clarke, a woman in her early 40s with silver-rimmed glasses and a calm voice that Eleanor suspects is not the one she uses with her children, gestures toward the chair. Eleanor tells herself it’s fine, though her mind argues otherwise. Maybe I should have started with something neutral. Weather. Shoes. Hers are nice. Mine look a bit worn. She puts her bag down, sighs, and sits.

‘What makes you think that?’ Miriam asks, calm and measured.

Good question, though not one I was expecting. She realises she’s talking internally, and Miriam’s slightly raised left eyebrow suggests that’s not useful. Eleanor flattens a crease in her pants and says out loud, ‘I’m too blunt, or too much, or not enough, or something … I don’t know. I ask questions that aren’t polite, say things that don’t sound as gentle as I mean them. I think I’m being honest, but apparently honesty needs padding. I never did learn how to pad.’ She stops abruplty, embarrassed by her burbling.

Outside the window, a bird lands on the railing and gives itself a shake. Eleanor focuses on its movements, letting the silence lengthen. The city noise is faint beyond the glass – traffic, sirens, the mechanical sigh of a bus pulling in to the stop a floor below.

When she’d first arrived in the city, she’d taken a long time to settle in. The city disoriented her – it was too loud, too fast, too much. It hadn’t helped that she’d spent too long finding a proper place to live. She’d spent months house sitting, staying with friends of people she knew, renting a room above a garage that had a bathroom but no kitchen. She felt disconnected and she so desperately wanted to connect.

She’d gone to a women’s book group in Toorak for a few months. Nice enough women, though she sometimes wondered if any of them actually liked to read. They talked more about retreats in Provence, how the Amalfi coast ‘just isn’t the same these days’, about having to ski in Denver this year because they just couldn’t make Switzerland work. Eleanor had wanted to talk about books – not the cover art or the author’s holiday house, but the writing itself: how they were written, what made them work or fall apart, the sentences that stayed with you for weeks, and the ones that stopped you in your tracks.

Then there was the writer’s group, which had a meet-up one Sunday a month in a pub in Fitzroy. She was determined to go, to meet people, to talk writing, to hear about what others were writing, to share stories of the struggle of writing good sentences, to learn how others cope with rejection. Outside the pub door, she felt the familiar flutter – the one that comes before entering a room full of people who could dislike you. She’d pushed through the door anyway, spotted twenty people talking in tight little circles, walked closer and waited for someone to notice her. She’d stood there for what felt like ten full minutes, waiting for just one person to look up … no one did.

‘I thought it best to just leave,’ she tells Miriam, and instantly recognises how it wasn’t best to just leave.

Miriam says something measured about connection taking time, about shared interests and patience, but Eleanor is lost in her thoughts and only half hears her.

Later that afternoon, at home, she makes tea and sits at her kitchen table. A shaft of light catches the rim of her mug, turning the steam gold. She’s been trying to photograph light again – the way it illuminates the flowers she’s stuck in a vase, how it changes what you see – and grabs her camera. The light is still strong, creating bright edges that lose all detail.

It made her think of a photographer she follows on Instagram who once said something about “protecting your highlights.” She searches his YouTube channel till she finds the video and watches it again. He means it technically – exposing correctly so the brightest parts of the image don’t blow out – but then he gets philosophical. Protect your highlights in life too, he says. Those moments of brightness that remind you who you are.

‘Interesting’, she says aloud.

On a whim, she goes into her room and pulls a box down from the top of the wardrobe. Inside are things she’s kept without understanding why, things she hasn’t looked at in years: scrawled feedback on an old piece of writing: Your analysis is thoughtful and original. Beautifully expressed. A card from a former student: Thank you for helping me see what I could do. A note from a friend on her 50th birthday: Visiting you today was more like visiting a sister. A reference she’d kept from her first workplace, the paper yellowed at the edges, the letters slightly uneven, unmistakably typewritten: Miss Eleanor Hardy is a highly competent and diligent employee. She approaches her duties with professionalism and care, and would be an asset to any organisation.

She lays them all out on the bed, one by one. Evidence, small, steady reminders of her highlights.

It is clear, not everyone has disliked her. Some people, it seems, have clearly liked her.

Eleanor goes back to the table, and writes herself a note:

Protect your highlights.

She props it against the vase of mini gerberas she’d been photographing earlier.

The following week, Eleanor is back in the psychologist’s office, still unsure about her motivation for being there.

Same chair, same muted city noise beyond the window. She flattens the same crease in her pants, then looks up.

“I’ve had a thought,” she says slowly, pleased with herself for waiting till she’d sat down before speaking. “Maybe the problem isn’t that people don’t like me. Maybe it’s that I don’t believe them when they do”

Miriam’s left eyebrow lifts slightly. “That’s a powerful thought.”

That afternoon, at home, Eleanor takes another photograph of the late light spilling across the table. This time, she adjusts the exposure, careful not to lose the detail in the bright edge of the mug.

She saves the image to a new folder: Highlights.

Posted in Life, Photography

Faces of Breakfast

Posted on by Sharon

Eleanor is plagued by a dream of herself that she has not yet managed to actualise.

It visits her most mornings, while the kettle boils, the version of herself she keeps coming back to, the one who moves through the streets with a camera at the ready, collecting quiet moments. That woman is captivated by the way light touches faces and the stories a face tells. She lives in a house smelling faintly of cedar and tea, with shelves of photography books she browses intermittently. Her portraits don’t hang on her own walls, but they do hang on other people’s – portraits others have described as intimate and assured and quietly transcendant.

Eleanor, on the other hand, mostly photographs flowers these days though she’s not exactly sure why. She thinks it’s something to do with their fragility, their complexity – how each flower seems to have a personality of its own. Photographing them feels like a small experiment in seeing differently: shifting focus, playing with light, adjusting angles until some kind of story emerges. At home, she works deliberately, arranging light and background, the process almost meditative. In gardens, she responds to what’s there – wind, shadow, a sudden burst of colour. She’s exhibited her work a few times – small shows where people have bought pieces and said kind things – and members of her U3A photography group often tell her she has a real eye. She thanks them, smiles, but inside she thinks they’re just being kind … or polite … or wrong.

She finds, in a box of prints tucked under the bed, photographs she took six years ago while she was going through cancer treatment. That time still lives in her skin, the memory of so many hands touching her, adjusting her, ensuring her position is just right. It had made her uneasy, and that unease became the focus of a project – hands as both comfort and intrusion. In one image, Sonia, the model, stands in a shaft of late afternoon light, her body half-covered by her own hands, the gesture both protective and exposing. Eleanor studies the image for a long time – the narrow beam of light, the rawness in the posture, the quiet, potent vulnerability of it. This, she thinks, is the kind of work she wants to return to.

She reaches for the book of portraits she printed when she’d finished her Faces of Melbourne project and flicks through it. She remembers where each shot was taken, her subjects’ names, and the stories the older women told as she photographed them. She was deliberate about her practice – the light, the framing, the angle – she’d known what she was doing. Looking through those pages again, she feels the quiet certainty of that work, the joy it gave her, yet something in her still resists believing it was assured.

Eleanor hears the scrape of a chair behind her and looks up. Her grandson has wandered in from the garden, a piece of toast in one hand, his current favourite dinosaur in the other.

‘Who’s that?’ he asks, pointing to a photo in the open book.

‘That’s Josette,’ Eleanor says. ‘She was walking through Myer when I saw her.’

‘Did she tell you stories?’

‘She sure did,’ she says. ‘Stories about her son who grew up and got married – and she showed me pictures of him too.’

He studies the page, eyes wide. ‘Who’s that? I think she’s pretty.’

‘That’s Bella. Her name means beautiful. And that’s Brabh. He was my first face of Melbourne. I was standing at the traffic lights and I saw him across the road. His face was so interesting I just had to take his photo.’

He looks up at her. ‘You should take my photo too. Every morning when I come here. You could make a book about me – Garry’s Faces of Breakfast.’

She laughs, surprised by the small flicker of excitement that rises in her chest. ‘Maybe I could,’ she says.

At 7:10 the next morning, Garry arrives, sleep still in his eyes, hair sticking up, a dinosaur in each hand. She gets him a bowl of Coco Pops and sits with him at the table. The light from the window falls across his face. Eleanor lifts her camera, adjusts the focus, and presses the shutter.

The image on the camera screen is a little soft, a little crooked. His spoon is halfway to his mouth, milk dripping onto the table.

She makes tea, sits across from him, and listens to a story about a dinosaur that can fly and also do karate. She nods solemnly. “Sounds plausible.”

Later, she opens her laptop and creates a folder: Breakfasts with Garry. She’ll add one photo a day until he gets bored, or until she does.

While she doesn’t feel actualised … or even assured … she does feel like someone who knows how to begin.

And that, frankly, is more than she expected.

I have used the same first line as my previous story While the kettle boils. I wanted to see if I could take it in a different direction.

Posted in Life

The art of deciding – or not

Posted on by Sharon

Emma and I set out this morning to choose tapware, tiles, and a vanity/sink combo for the ensuite renovation. A simple task, you might think. Just a few decisions, a bit of browsing, perhaps a cup of tea afterwards. We had decided on the paint colour for the walls before we left the house so we felt we had a strong starting point. How hard could it be to pick taps and tiles to match my style?

“What style would that be Sharon?”

Yeah, not sure.

At the tile shop, the sales assistant showed us around and eventually led us to the back of the store where the wall tiles were. We figured we may as well start there. One tile jumped out at us immediately. Pistachio in colour, glossy, square. Gorgeous. We didn’t bother looking at others. We liked them … decision made. Plus the grandkids were with us and, at four minutes in, were already beginning to show signs that this wasn’t their idea of a good time.

But we’d made a decisive start. It boded well for the next half hour of decision-making.

Okay … two hours.

With the wall tiles sorted, we made our way, via the vanities, to tapware.

“Do you want a mixer or quarter turn?” Emma asked, standing in front of a wall of options.

“I just want enough water to come out of it to rinse the shampoo out of my hair,” I said.

“Not helpful, Sharon.”

The sales assistant approached, all optimism and obsequiousness. “What style are you going for?”

We looked at each other, knowing she meant overall style, but as we hadn’t yet decided on an overall style, we answered a slightly different question.

“Not black,” I said.

“Not matte,” said Emma.

“Not too shiny.”

“Warm but not formal.”

“Modern but not cold.”

“Classic but not old-fashioned.”

The sales assistant nodded once, sighed, and went back to her desk.

We did our best to meet somewhere between “that’ll do” and “actually, I quite like that one” … and ended up with matte black.

Every choice – sink, vanity, hooks, style of tap, towel rail – seemed certain for about three minutes. We’d decide on something, think we were done, then spot another option that made us question our decision.

In the end, I think we’ve landed on glossy pistachio shower tiles, dark grey floor, a Tasmanian oak vanity, and matte black tapware.

Our only firm decision – the paint colour – is now not at all firm. And, in fact, the gorgeous pistachio tiles might also be a tad tentative. At lunch we looked them up and discovered they’re three times over our allocated tile budget.

Ouch.

Ah, what the heck. I think I might get them anyway.

Posted in Life, Writing

While the kettle boils

Posted on by Sharon

Eleanor is plagued by a dream of herself that she has not yet managed to actualise.

It visits her most mornings, while the kettle boils, the version of herself she keeps coming back to, the one who writes before dawn, sitting at a wooden desk while a mug of tea cools beside her and words spread across the page. That woman lives in a house smelling faintly of cedar and old books, where quiet work happens. Her own novels fill a shelf – novels the reviewers call assured and luminous.

Eleanor, on the other hand, lives in a house that smells of toast and tea, where crumbs, spilled juice, and scattered blocks demand her attention. Her desk is the kitchen table, her laptop fighting for space amongst the mail, the Aldi catalogues, and her grandson’s Elsa costume. Drafts are stacked in manila folders, marked up by people who, she has to believe, mean well in their critique. Lovely imagery. This doesn’t work. Show, don’t tell. You don’t need this section. Two pats, then the slaps. Or more often, multiple slaps with few pats. 

The stings linger.

Her agent says the publishers see “promise”, but not enough to take a risk on her. The competitions reply with polite variations on no: “You have a distinct voice … there are moments of real beauty here … we received many excellent entries, unfortunately your submission did not stand out in the current field … we wish you success placing it elsewhere … we hope you’ll consider submitting again next year.” Eleanor is familiar with the rhythm of rejection, the preamble as softener, then the stinging dismissal. She imagines the editors, judges, unseen decision-makers standing behind an iron gate, steadfastly refusing to hand over their giant key. Instead, she pushes her work through the bars and listens intently for the sound of approval.

Silence.

Yesterday, she found a story she wrote when she was twenty-three, tucked deep into one of the folders. She read it and winced, then told herself to be kind – it was from forty years ago, after all. She’d lived a life since then, worked, raised children, lost people she loved. She’d written through work and play dates and trips to the beach, through illness and recovery, through poor decisions, through countless rejections.

She thinks of that thing Sylvia Plath said: I love my rejection slips. They show me I try and recognises the rawness of that statement. Feels the strength of it. Sits up a little straighter.

She looks outside, to her grandson building a house near the garden beds she’s been developing. He’s starting simple, laying one block carefully next to the other. She sees the clear line from front to back, a foundation solid enough to hold the next storey. She watches him for a long moment. 

When the kettle clicks off, Eleanor makes tea, and thinks about foundations, clear lines from start to finish, starting simple.

She settles back at the table, picks up her pen – and hears a yell from the garden.

A catastrophe, by the sound of it. Possibly involving Lego.

Eleanor takes a sip of tea, then pushes herself up.

The quiet work will have to wait.

While the first line of this story came from a text message I received from a friend recently, this is a work of fiction. I felt it was such a strong line that I wanted to see if I could write a story around it.

Posted in Life, Writing

On seeking an identity

Posted on by Sharon

When she started teaching, she dressed more like an English teacher, although preferred to call herself a Drama teacher. She taught both, but she wanted the stereotype of a Drama teacher to suit her more – creative, exploratory, suggesting invention and movement.

Later, as a PhD student, she carried her lunch into the staff lounge and walked past the big table where the academics sat. She sat instead in the corner, with her sandwich and a journal article or two. She enjoyed the thinking and the stretch of ideas, but she couldn’t yet picture herself wearing the identity that the big table represented.

In time she did, and the academic identity settled more deeply than she expected. In fact, it was the hardest one to let go of. Not because it had ever been easy – it was never that – but because it felt true. It matched her need to make sense of things, to learn, to question, to seek alternatives. And it gave her a title that needed no explanation.

When that identity fell away, she felt a bit lost. Eventually, she became a Senior Consultant Associate. When she was asked what she did, people would invariably say, “What does that entail?” and in the 18 months she was in the role, she never got to the point of being able to easily explain it. So instead, she often told people she was a ‘researcher’ – an identity more closely aligned with ‘academic’.

She had tried retirement before but hadn’t found an identity within it. This time though, with more certainty that it would stick, she knew she needed to work out what her new identity might be.

The question that pushed her in this direction was: “How did you fill your day today?”. She disliked the language of that question, the sense that life without paid work was only marking time, of ‘filling’ time. It’s not a question people asked of those who head off to jobs every morning. And so she bristled at it.

She wasn’t retired from living, or from creating, or from learning. Her life, even her retired life, was made up of more than ‘filling’ time.

And so each morning, she took photos. An anthurium. A sunflower on a black tile. Flannel flowers in a brown vase. Each afternoon she sat at her desk and wrote blog posts, exploring a different style in a different voice to see how it felt.

When she saw the images and words on the screen, she felt a flicker of something that she wasn’t quite ready to face.

But the question lingered: “How did you fill your day today?”. She had no tidy answer yet, but she could feel that she was reaching for something. She’s crafting her ideas into words and images, taking notice, taking her time.

She’s trying on a new identity, one that’s not dependent on a role, or a job, or an income. It’s an identity dependent on what she creates.

She’s not sure she can even say it out loud yet … so she whispers it to herself, to see if it fits.

…

Not yet … but it’s early days and she knows there’s no rush.

Posted in Life, Photography, Writing

The art of letting go

Posted on by Sharon

She sets up carefully: a sheet of black card for the backdrop, the shutters angled to shape the light, the plamp ready to hold the anthurium steady or pull leaves out of the frame. She likes to get the shot right in camera so thinks about the composition, what’s in and what’s out, where the focus hits, how the light falls.

And yet, in this meticulously constructed scene, the unexpected happens. A petal drops. A cloud crosses the sun. The reflector topples just as the light was perfect.

She clicks anyway. The flower leans awkwardly, the shadows fall in unexpected ways, the vase looks crooked. The image isn’t like the one she imagined, but it carries something she hadn’t planned for.

Photography, she remembers, isn’t only about getting it right in camera. It’s also about letting go – allowing the scene, the light, and the unexpected to have a say … the blur, the shadow, the crooked vase.

When she clicks the shutter again, she does so with curiosity. The image is imperfect, but it has something the more carefully crafted ones don’t – a sliver of truth.

A gentle reminder that sometimes more interesting things happen when you let go.

And then she opens the files on her computer. Out of focus, shadowy, crooked. She sighs. All very well to wax lyrical about imperfection, she thinks, but she still doesn’t like them.

Not yet, anyway.