Change is in the air.
I can feel it trickling like sap through tree roots into the grass verges of the driveway and fuelling the mad explosion of marigolds in the backyard.
It flows through the lemon yellows of oxalis flowers and wattle trees on the riverbanks, and it prickles my thinning bones like gentle electricity.
Eventually, it switches on the flighty swallows in my carport.
They come back every year, darting and pooing everywhere.
To most people they would be a nuisance and their mess an unhealthy eyesore.
But I tolerate them, up to a point, because they seem so energetic in their pursuit of life, building nests and nurturing their young, fearless in the face of change and noise and now that annoying little white dog that leaps into the air in a futile attempt at capture whenever they fly low.
I keep the carport door open so they can come and go in their busy service of the next generation.
I cover up the important stuff like the lawnmower and the blower, and the mitre saw for my painting frames.
But the hand tools and the firewood are left out to become targets for their droppings.
I convince myself a bit of guano is good for the garden and the fire.
We have lived with them so long now our swallow families have become part of our family, and I can remember our kids standing on the concrete floor to watch the nervous flitting of the little birds through the wooden beams of the tin roof, heads back and twirling in circles to catch their dives and swoops.
Now my grandchildren do the same.
We have two nests that have been used to raise what must be 20 generations of swallows by now, with new young birds returning ever few years to their childhood home to raise their own family and this makes me happy.
It’s a small thing, but I feel we’ve allowed a safe, messy space for wildness to exist in our convenient and sculpted corner of the world.
I think a bit of chaos and mess are healthy signs of creation and wildness.
But there comes a point where the mess just becomes intolerable to the point of not being able to find anything simple like a saw or a hammer without clambering over old bikes; reminders of forgotten holidays now reduced to dusty mice-eaten tents and bent poles; dusty paint tins sealed with rust; half-empty bags of dried soil and potting mix; garden chairs made dangerous by decades of exposure to sun and rain; and boxes of the inevitable bathroom tiles saved in case of breakages which are now broken anyway.
So this year after 30 years of accumulating the pointless and ugly stuff of life, I decided it all had to be scraped away like dead skin.
It took three station wagon loads and about $70 to throw our carport junk into council tip containers and then presumably into a big hole in the ground somewhere far away and out of sight.
Every time I go to the tip I feel like a guilty dung beetle finally getting rid of its ball of crap which has been weighing it down for years.
Along with the guilt comes a moment of elation and lightness.
I feel like swooping like a swallow. I’m free at last.
All my useless possessions are someone else’s problem now.
I may have added to humanity’s giant sinkhole of capitalist waste that continues to grow and spread across the earth to unimaginable depths, but I have been kind to the swallows.
I really have been very kind to the swallows.
John Lewis is a former reporter at The News.
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