On Sunday we sat in the rambling Murchison garden of our three grandchildren under a giant sycamore with yellowing leaves to wait for our supper of home-made pumpkin and chilli soup, focaccia and ginger beer made from the mysterious alchemy of water, sugar, yeast and ginger.
The boys fidgeted, knocking over plastic cups, threw helicopter seeds around and eventually went off to coax the chickens back to their coop. When you’re three, six and seven years old there’s just too much waiting around for stuff to happen.
My old mum always said, “all good things come to those who wait” whenever I became impatient.
Then I would take myself off to sit under our sycamore tree in my Welsh backyard – and I too tossed the seeds up in the air to watch the diaphanous wings spin back to earth. For a while, the boredom of waiting for life to begin was relieved.
I suppose children have always done this because sycamores have been around longer than children.
I remember a family holiday visit to the village of Tolpuddle in Dorset and seeing a giant sycamore tree where the Tolpuddle Martyrs used to meet before being transported to Australia in 1834 for having the impudence to organise the first trade union.
The whole thing was a bit confronting for my quietly conservative parents living through Britain’s winter of discontent brought about by the legacy of those Tolpuddle tree huggers. I checked, and the Tolpuddle sycamore still stands, scattering its fluttering seeds as it has for nearly 340 autumns.
Trees can be like giant cupboards packed with jars of memories.
This year, March really does feel like a good time to stock up the cupboard and make new memories.
Things are opening up, and our corner of the world at least, is returning to something like normal.
The 26th Shepparton Festival opens tonight with a celebratory gathering at the Botanic Gardens, and without sounding self-congratulatory or smug — we do have a lot to celebrate.
We got through the brambles of the pandemic without too many scratches — just a needle or two. We survived a summer with no devastating fires or floods. We have a three-cornered federal election fight looming, which has the potential to plant new seeds of fruitful change across the Goulburn Valley.
The Shepparton Festival always provides a chance to get out and meet friends and perhaps make new ones.
The 2022 program may not be as packed or as spectacular as in previous years, but there are still nearly 30 events to attend — enough to light plenty of people’s creative fire — and I congratulate the committee on pulling it all together in just over six months.
Art may not be everyone’s spark, but art is not really the big point of these two weeks. Art is just the catalyst for the smaller things — a conversation here, a hug there, or a wave of recognition saying here we are, we’re still standing and we’re waving not drowning.
The American poet Louise Glück said: “We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.”
So get out in March and make new memories. If you have kids, take them too and sit under a tree — they will remember the experience, because it’s the stuff of life.
For a full program of festival events, go to www.sheppartonfestival.org.au
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