Country fun

Recently, my town had a casserole night.

A casserole, according to Dictionary.com, is a vessel, not a style of cooking, so my idea that casserole consisted of stew cooked in the oven was highly erroneous. (This was just as well, since I made my "casserole" on the stove top.)

My town is small, yet the casserole night attracted maybe 40 adults and a clutch of screaming primary- and pre-schoolers.

We had everything from good old 1970's Chow Mein and Lasagne, to Vietnamese beef with star anise and Caribbean bean hotpot. Oh, and a roast vegetable salad with Tuscan kale and orange-infused oil, and Pastis, and tiramisu and truffles for dessert.

At casserole night I met new people, caught up with old people, offered clay to a neighbour who's a potter (I live on an old clay mine), was invited to the town's weekly personal training class, got tips for keeping birds off ripening fruit with tule (tule!), and organised a shared hen-and-duck-slaughter for the following morning.

I was also reminded that the country isn't crammed with rednecks and hicks, but is in fact populated by largely normal people who happen to love living in the country.

One of my favourite things about casserole night? The autumn leaves in vases on the tables. Nice touch, ladies.

Firsts

It was a weekend of firsts.

First ever pumpkin cut (despite having been gnawed by rabbits).

First ever Jerusalem artichoke harvest dug.

 First ever duck killed.

I celebrated the firsts by opening the last bottle of rhubarb wine, which I made in 2011, and which has finally mellowed to something sweet and drinkable. Hooray!

Waiting for water

This is a dry autumn.

The goats are on the verge, tethered in the blackberry, since the grass isn't growing. At the place where I go riding, they're getting worried about feed, since the farmer they usually buy hay from is keeping it this year for his own stock.

It was a hot summer. And a dry autumn usually means a dry winter.

When a friend from San Francisco stayed recently, I found I kept starting sentences with the words, "During the drought". Okay, so it wasn't exactly the Dust Bowl, but it did last ten years, and it was extremely dry.

All the talk was of water.

Even though I only moved out here toward the end of the drought, I remember too well the horror of parched paddocks empty of stock, the sun-scoured earth, and everyone waiting, waiting, waiting.

Dry years follow dry years. Cycles of three or so, they say.

When the drought finally broke, the relief was palpable. Weeds exploded out of the ground in thick regiments. There were different birds in the forest. I lost a cherry and a gage to a fungal infection during a wet, warm summer. Farmers began investing in animals again. True, it was a bad year for pumpkins, but that was a small price to pay.

This is probably nothing, I tell myself.

But I keep remembering the way the dirt turned to dust; the way the trees slowly failed in the eucalypt copse I watched die on my train journeys to work; the way the soil looked in the valley, blood red and battered.

The drought coincided with a shift in me.

It was by watching the brilliant, empty skies, seeing the shimmering hills go yellow, then brown, then grey, that I realised something was wrong in my own personal landscape. It was the drought that turned me out of myself, that started me along the road that brought me here, to the happiest place I've been.

But it was such a long, hard, dry road. And there was so little respite along the way. The ghost of that time will always be with me. Perhaps that's what makes even a little rain seem so good.

Ladies of the field

You'd think these little country towns would be crammed with families. Or maybe single men if you'd been watching Farmer Wants a Wife.

But there are four women I know in my town (and others I've heard of but don't know) who live singly. My town's not big, so that's a lot of ladies. Their men are away: in Japan; on a gas rig; in New South Wales; in the Navy. Only one has children.

There is solidarity here. We share food from our gardens and pantries. We lend tools. We shut each others' flocks in on the nights someone wants to go out. I'm set to show one neighbour how to pluck and clean one of her roosters when I kill my extra drake.

There are a few single men—farmers mainly, and older ones at that. But the ladies surprise me, perhaps because it's harder to live here without a strapping gentleman to chop the wood and haul the chicken food.

Yet each of us loves it. Maybe we're independent souls, or maybe we just love the comforts of the country. Who can say? Ultimately it doesn't matter.

What matters is that we're not alone.

The birds

People from the city who go country always seem to rave about birdlife. I always thought they were overdoing it until I moved here. Now I know they're overdoing it.

Yes, there are plenty of birds in the country, and yes, they are gorgeous. Yes. They are also noisy, particularly when they flock or have young. And worrisome—like the damaged kookaburra I found on the deck one morning, lacking his top beak, and with both feet broken.

But this week, when a goshawk (I think) took one of my chicks, the birdlife here finally jumped the shark. Really, I thought like a character from some terrible 1960's pulp novel, this is the limit.

A goshawk is better than a fox. First, it's native. Second, it doesn't kill everything within reach just for fun (or for still-warm seconds). Third, it's a rare sight around here. I'd heard strange calls in the days beforehand. Now I'm wondering if the goshawk made them.

As the yin to the goshawk's yang, the robins have arrived for the winter. They've come every year, a bright male and his female, and this year I've seen another one with them. His bit on the side? A daughter?

The curious robins like to watch me in the garden. They're happy to be near people, and if they're feeling intrigued, they come to play on the deck rail and look in the living room windows. They'll be here for the next few months, brightening the winter with their flashes of red and their flashy antics.

All this is to say nothing of the yellow-tailed black cockatoos, the rosellas, tree creepers, eagles, kites, wrens, magpies... Despite the attention and food lavished upon them, the hens and ducks really are the minority at Farmette.

Chair repair

I like to buy things that can be repaired. Including furniture. But what's more satisfying than having something repaired is repairing it yourself.

Last week I had to repair a part of my lounge suite, replacing broken rubber seat-straps with nice, new elastic ones.

The chair frame is as sturdy as they come, so the job was pretty easy.

The seat-straps are held in by metal clips with little teeth. I had a tough time getting them open far enough to get the old straps out, but, you know, if at first you don't succeed and all that...

Fortunately the motley collection of tools I own was sufficient.

Eventually the new straps were cut and the little silver clips bashed closed again.

And the finished chair is as comfy as it looks.

This was a pretty easy job. The next one—regluing a dining chair—is harder. It keeps slipping down my to-do list. I need a vice and some clamps, among other things. Like advice. Anyway. Let's think positive.

The first fire

The first fire of the year is always something of an occasion.

It's a moment to finally accept the end of summer and embrace what's to come: cosy nights, hot dinners, shockingly cold mornings, mist and mist and more mist.

I should have guessed tonight would be the night: when I woke up, clouds of fog were blowing past the tree outside my window, and my lunchtime run required a scarf and rain jacket. (No gloves, though!)

This will be my seventh winter here. Will it snow? I hope so. Will the seedlings I planted just yesterday grow to a point where I can eat them in, rather than after, the winter? I hope so. Will I have enough wood? I hope so. Will I get a sweep in before the chimney catches alight? God in heaven, I hope so.

To celebrate the first fire, I'm making pasta for dinner with a sauce of the last of my teardrop tomatoes and my neighbour's basil.

Farewell, sweet summer. See you next year.