Paddock and Sky
You can see the power poles on the horizon. That’s where the road is. To the left is Wyreema and the other way takes you to Southbrook. The road is bitumen now but in the old days it was just the black soil packed flat and smooth. The car’s tyres sang their pleasure and up ahead the mirage made water on the road – but always up ahead never to be reached. When it rained these black soil roads were all but impassable. Only the cream carrier’s truck could plough its way ahead. He collected the cream and delivered mail; huge tank loaves of bread; and massive parcels of meat, wrapped up in many layers of newspaper and tied up securely with binder twine. If the cream carrier couldn’t get through no one could. I saw him as a demigod, master of country roads.
The sky: because all the horizons were wide and flat, it was more massive than what I knew back home. It was hard to ignore. The grown-ups were always looking up into it: to tell the time Dad told me and I suppose to guess what the weather was going to do. On the farm the weather mattered.
Look to the heavens
if you must, but don’t forget
the black earth below.