The jonquils, this year, are just beautiful!

I’ve just come in from hanging some clothes on the line and the slight breeze wafted their scent all the way over to where I was standing. What a joy something like that can bring to such a mundane task!

When we first moved to this house, I spent hours weeding and cleaning up the garden. It hadn’t been lived in for some time and the outside resembled a jungle – a nice one though, because the kids loved making a cubby under the trees or playing hide and seek among the tall grasses (that was fine until we worked out how many snakes were here!)

But as autumn turned to winter, suddenly all the barren ground I had ear-marked for annuals or new plants erupted with flowering bulbs! It was like discovering a chest of treasure – you never knew what was going to pop out of the ground next!

It was a lovely discovery and I certainly appreciated the hard work someone before me has put into this unloved garden of mine!

There are some days that it’s a pleasure to get out of bed at 5am. Today was one of those days!

We were carting lambs in between the farms, so we were up early with a very busy day in front of us.

Once we’d loaded the lambs and Anthony had trundled off in the truck, I stopped and looked around. A fog was beginning to roll in to one side of the farm and there was some misty rain on the other. The sun was trying to break through some heavy clouds on eastern side and his rays were streamers of red.

The birds were enjoying coolness, singing their hearts out and across the stillness, I could hear the calls of the new-born calves and snorting of the rams in the paddock next to where I was standing.

As I climbed up to the top of the yards to enjoy the view, the dew that had formed in silver droplets along the rails soaked into my jeans. A cold feeling, but welcome nonetheless.

The soil is moist from the rain we had over the Easter weekend and I could almost feel the germination of clovers and grasses pushing their way out of the earth, looking for the sun.

The rain has given us an optimism and some hope for the coming year and this morning only fuelled the desire for a good season. Through rain we can be kind to our land and our stock.

Yesterday we had a heap of cows in the yards. We were preg-testing and giving them their booster needles.

On the way back to the paddock with them I stopped at a line of trees, interested in why the bark was falling off one of them. It didn’t seem to be sick in anyway.

I was intrigued by the colour and pattern under the bark. So this funny photo of the tree trunk, looking towards the sky!

Many of these trees are over fifty years old and were planted along fence lines to mark boundaries and to offer shelter for stock. Sugar Gums and Tuarts (the main ones that have been planted) often lose their limbs in big winds and as annoying that can be, if they fall on a fence, they make lovely fire wood in winter!

Summer has taken its toll of a lot of the people and animals this year. I’m sure ours hasn’t been has hot as the top half of Australia, but it’s been a stinker compared to what we are used to. Our hottest day was 48 degrees.

We had about six catastrophic fire dangers issued and the sea breeze, which is usually a certain in Esperance, has been quite non-existent! When I first moved here we would use a doona every night, but not this year. The fan has become a permanent fixture in our room.

Last Saturday there were quite a few thunderstorms around. I sat outside and watched the lightening hit the ground while Anthony was in his ute with the fire cart hooked on, waiting and watching. It was only a matter of time.

The long, hot, dry six months has made the bush tinder dry. The feed in the paddocks is a sun-bleached white, we have dry dams for the third year in a row and we’re feeding hay to the cattle every second day. It’s time consuming and, after a while, disheartening. After two very dry years, we are hoping this year is going a really wet one.

The fire that started in the bush near the coast burnt for a week and the farmers, along with FESA, were put on a roster-system to keep an eye on it. The graders and dozers worked overtime, pushing fire breaks around the edge of the bush to protect the farming land, while the fire-fighters back burnt trying to make it safe.

The fire that was to the north of us is still burning, a week later.

As you can see from this photo, there is still a fair bit of smoke hanging around, which has done nothing except help increase the washing in my laundry because I can’t hang it out! Anthony’s clothes, three washes later, still have a smoky smell to them!

We have a bushfire radio in house, and listening to that over the past week has been like listening to a movie you couldn’t see. The urgency behind the voices, the directions – I could picture these guys doing what they needed to do.

The professionalism of all our volunteer fire-fighters is amazing and they are all to be commended and thanked from the bottoms of our hearts.