Writing – Musings from the cold

The woman from yesterday

Posted on November 26, 2025November 26, 2025 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.

Life, Writing

The walk home

Posted on November 20, 2025November 20, 2025 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.

Life, Writing

Forgiving Light

Posted on November 7, 2025 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.

Life, Photography, Writing

Shaping what’s seen

Posted on November 3, 2025November 3, 2025 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.

Life, Writing

Protect your highlights

Posted on October 31, 2025October 31, 2025 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 50^th 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.

Life, Writing

While the kettle boils

Posted on October 16, 2025 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.

Mid-life blogger, Writing

Tea, music and memory

Posted on October 8, 2025October 8, 2025 by Sharon

She gets home from the gym, showers, has breakfast, makes tea.

Remembers, just as the kettle clicks off, that she hasn’t written in her journal for a few days. Three, maybe four? Not that she’s keeping score, but she promised herself that in these early days of retirement she would keep at it – not for productivity, or for output, but for the structure it gives her thoughts. And her days.

So she grabs her iPad, opens the journaling app, and sits at the kitchen table. The tea, hot, not too milky, not at all sweet, sits just to her right.

In the background, breathe. plays – a band she stumbled across a few weeks ago and was instantly addicted to. Two musicians from Sydney, and a variety of vocalists, creators of something described as ‘music for your darkest days’. As ‘late night emotion’. As ‘a mix of soul and electronic’. Whatever the label, it’s perfect for late nights, and, she’s found, for all day.

Their sound spills into the room, occasionally breaking into her awareness. When it does, she catches herself smiling. The music feels like a hug – warm, quiet, exultant.

She writes slowly, not really sure what she wants to say. She starts by recounting her morning: gym was good, though her knees are sore and her shoulders stiff. And then an image from the morning pushes forward. A woman she saw at the gym, older, in an old t-shirt and shorts, stretching by the wall with a kind of quiet grace.

She writes about that.

Then, somehow, she’s writing about the cool laundry under her grandmother’s high-set house up north. The old wringer-washer, enamel chipped, in the corner, edged on two sides by concrete wash tubs. Her grandmother’s hands, with their soft, paper-thin skin, feeding wet clothes through the rollers, careful not to catch a finger.

She writes about the smell of Sunlight soap flakes and wet fabric. About the way her grandmother would tell stories, and the comfort of her silences. Not heavy or cold, but the kind that said, you’re safe here.

She likes the way memory loops like this – from a stranger’s gesture to forgotten wash days in the heat of a northern summer.

Outside, the shadows have shifted across the garden. Inside, her tea has gone cold. Completely untouched.

She notices it only when she lifts the mug and realises it’s room temperature.

The music is warm and deliciously comforting. Unlike her tea.

She sighs and gets up to make a fresh pot.

Flowers, Photography, Writing

The single sock

Posted on September 29, 2025 by Sharon

There’s been a single sock sitting on the chest of drawers for months. I check each load of washing carefully for its partner, but no luck. The sock has stayed single.

Another lone sock joined it for a while, and for a brief moment it looked like they’d make an unlikely pair. I mean, who says socks need to match? But soon enough, that second sock’s partner showed up, leaving the first sock on its own again.

And then yesterday, while putting other socks away, there it was, the missing partner. It had been in the drawer all along. Two single socks became a pair again.

I thought about that sock. How it wasn’t doing any harm, sitting there. How it was never really lost. And how, when I wasn’t actively looking for its partner, it just turned up. Almost like magic.

This week’s word for our photography challenge is flower, so I opened my photo album to see if I had any decent flower photos. Scrolling through, I came across images from years ago I’d forgotten. Photos I’d dismissed because I couldn’t see anything of value in them. This time, looking again, I noticed a similarity running through them – dare I say, a style. It had been there all along apparently.

Like the sock in the drawer, these photos weren’t lost. They just needed me to realise that sometimes what we’re looking for isn’t found by looking, but by recognising.

Images from 2007

Images from gardens

Lillies from 2017

Images from today

Learning, Photography, Writing

Play

Posted on September 28, 2025 by Sharon

For four years, some members of my family have been involved in a weekly photo challenge. This challenge morphed from previous photo challenges we’ve done over the years, but in its current form, this one has been going for four years. Each week we have a word as our focus and we take photos of a representation of that word, share it in a private Facebook group and each Sunday night we Zoom, have a chat about our week, and talk about the photos.

This week just gone, the word was ‘play’.

It got me thinking.

This blog ‘Musings from the cold’ has a subtitle: playing with ideas and images. It’s something I enjoy – to look at a subject from different angles and see what stories emerge. I’m not always successful of course, but that’s what playing is all about – experimenting, seeing differently, trying out other voices and seeing what feels weird and whether I can sit with the weirdness.

I play photographically, but I realised I don’t often play with my writing. Not here anyway, on the pages of this blog. Over the years I have written many different sorts of things – journal articles, conference papers, book chapters for academic books, textbooks, newletters for parents and staff when I was teaching, interview questions and intros when I worked in radio and scripts for an Arts program I used to produce and present, poems on the fridge. Different audiences, different purposes, different styles.

But I realised through the week, that I only write in first person on this blog and so I decided to play, to experiment, to try a different voice. It felt weird, but I chose to sit with it, to keep writing in that style to see what I could learn from it, determined to push through the distance it gave my writing from myself until I found something new – well, new for me at least.

I wanted to play, and through that play to develop as a writer. It was never meant to be an endpoint, a final stop in my learning about writing – it was to help me go on a journey from one voice to another, one style to others (many, multiple) – to begin opening up the possibilities for my own writing.

When my youngest daughter was in Grade 3, the teacher asked them to write a story about their weekend every Monday. At a parent-teacher interview, the teacher commented that we lived the most interesting life. I knew this not to be true and asked her how she came to that conclusion. Apparently Emma’s Monday journal writing embellished our weekends to a point where they didn’t reflect our reality at all.

The teacher told her to only write what was true.

Emma stopped writing. Boring weekends didn’t interest her, and if the rule was to report only the facts rather than invent stories and worlds and interesting characters we met along the way, then there was no play left in it. And without play, the writing lost its spark.

It’s a reminder for my own practice. Play matters. It keeps my writing alive. So I’ll keep playing – with words, with voices, with styles that don’t quite fit until maybe they do. I don’t know yet where that will lead, but I suspect the detours matter as much as the destinations. If you find me writing strangely now and then, think of it as an experiment. You’re welcome to play along.

Flowers, Photography, Writing

On recognising your style

Posted on September 27, 2025October 6, 2025 by Sharon

When I was first given a camera, sometime around 2007, I had no idea how it worked or what I would photograph. But I did know something about light from my time at university and so I experimented. A halogen lamp. An oven tray wrapped in aluminium foil. Windows with lace curtains. I bought flowers from the local florist – single stems arranged in whatever came to hand (a vase, a jar, a glass) – and set them up in areas of the lounge room. And then I played with the light … and learnt how to use the camera.

One wall of the lounge room was painted green, and it became my backdrop. The flowers stood out against it, classical and beautiful. I started to take the camera further afield – to the botanical gardens in Hobart, City Park in Launceston, the rhododendron gardens in Burnie. I photographed red hot pokers and made them redder, the daffodils that popped up unexpectedly under the rose bush in the backyard, and the insides of camellias.

Over time, I started photographing people – people I passed in the Bourke Street mall, those lingering near the steps of H&M listening to the buskers, those waiting at the lights on King Street, or outside Flinders St station. Sometimes I asked permission, sometimes I simply asked by lifting my camera, but always there was a burst of courage required in the approach. Most said yes. Some said no. I learned not to take refusals personally. And not to ask women of a particular age – they always said no. I loved the small exchanges: the older women who wanted to chat, the stories shared in passing, the faces that lingered in my memory – Jiggy, Brabh, Junior, Lisa, Samyrah, Belle, George. I gathered these portraits into a book, Faces of Melbourne – and printed one copy only. It’s one of my favourites.

My practice developed. I hired studios, booked models, attended workshops. I learned posing mostly from the models themselves, and more about lighting from every shoot – how to use a beauty dish, umbrella, softbox, and how to make the most of window light. As the gear expanded so did my knowledge. I’d moved a long way from the days of the halogen lamp and the oven tray wrapped in foil.

One house we lived in had a white brick wall to use as a backdrop, two storeys high and east-facing. It was a space filled with light, and the tulips, hydrangeas, sunflowers, and poppies looked luminous against it.

Then life got in the way …

Eventually, another move, another house. I had a ‘studio’ in this new house, and I painted the walls a neutral colour to use as a backdrop. I kept out some of the lighting gear, thinking I’d get around to using it. But two years passed with only a handful of photographs, none of which excited me. They were just the same, but worse technically. I set up the lights, but couldn’t create anything new. Photography no longer satisfied me in the way it had and I began to wonder if I had anything left to say.

I thought the issue might have been one of space and explored the idea of building a studio in the backyard. But in a moment of clarity, I realised that I hadn’t learnt to use the light in this new house. Shortly after, at a photography workshop in Ballarat, Kris, the facilitator, spoke about recognising your own style – how good it was when someone recognises one of your images as yours because it has a certain style. That struck me and the two ideas became a spark.

I looked around the house again – so many windows, so much light. Different walls, each with its own character/colour/shadows. I realised that what I’d thought was sameness was actually my style, something I’d been building since 2007.

I felt excited again. I made so many different choices, and remembered what a photography teacher had once told me: photography is problem-solving. Given all the problems I was solving (how to hold the reflector in just the right position, how much to open or close the shutters, what to hold the flower with, how close or far away from the background to put the flower), I felt the truth of it. I also knew that the solutions could be simple: a halogen lamp and an oven tray wrapped in foil, a window and a square of black card, a green wall and shutters to shape the light.

And so each morning I reach for my camera and some flowers, and go in search of the light. I fall into a rhythm – one which absorbs and excites me. I feels my style re-emerging, and with it, the outline of a new self.