Dahlings! I’m in Love! My whole world has been turned upside down! It’s delirious, delicious. His name is Rory. Rory the River Beacon. He’s everything a gal could ever want. Tall, handsome, virile, strong, but a Sensitive New Age Guy as well. I mean, he has ancient indigenous wisdoms and he’s into poetry! I’ve never met anyone into poetry before. It’s so exciting. Now, not only am I a woman with beautiful curves, but I’m developing Depth.
Rory, like many people around the Lakes, was living a happy and fulfilling life. He stood sentinel on his submerged mud bank, enjoying the sun and breezes and birds and giving warning to passing boats. In his spare time, he composed sonnets, and with his friends Sam and Seth and Sybil the Golden Perch and Jemaimah the Short-Necked Turtle, he discussed Life, Love, The Universe and Everything
Then one day out of the blue, the water began dropping and disappeared. Sam and Seth and Sybil swam away as the waters retreated. Jemaimah was rescued by local schoolchildren and given a new home. Rory, alone on his now dry mud bank, found himself without a job and bereft of Meaning in Life. He decided to set out on the Hero’s Journey to Discover the World.
And – well – the rest is history! In his wanderings, he discovered me!! I discovered him! We both discovered we are Twin Souls.
But, Life is a Serious Business. Even Love has to stand down in the Service of the Greater Cause. I am currently a “grass widow”. Rory is away, giving a “Show and Tell” in Strathalbyn’s Stationmaster’s Gallery about his journey. He has seen many things which he feels the world must know. He is steeped in Commitment, is Rory.
He has seen sheep sunbaking on a dry lake bed, where once there had been water and fish and frogs and birds. He has seen the land around the Lakes bare, stony, littered with salt pans. He has seen large white pipes being laid. And to his surprise, he has seen sudden seas of green vines to the horizon. And by the ocean, he has seen a dredge keeping open the mouth of his oncegreat river. A river mouth Sam and Seth and Sybil’s great-grandfather had said was wide and clear and so deep that you couldn’t see the bottom through the glass-green water, and the current was so strong that golden perch could be swept right out and find themselves swimming in surf.
Rory has just sent me the opening stanza of a poem by TS Eliot, which Di Bell read at the launch of his show. I’d love to quote it here, but apparently I’m not allowed to. Something legal to do with the TS Eliot estate. Such a waste really. Dahlings you’d be crying in the aisles if you could only see it. It’s called “The Dry Salvages” and refers to a river and coast in Massachusetts where TS Eliot lived as a child. Rory thinks it was written in the 1940s but it could have been written about the Murray today. It describes the river as a strong brown god with its rhythm and seasons, its rages and retreats. And how man treats him not as a god but as a frontier, untrustworthy, to be tamed, made useful for commerce, a problem to be solved by the builders of bridges. A once proud god, now unhonoured by the dwellers of cities. But he still watches and waits, keeping his seasons, waiting to remind men of what they have forgotten.
What with this poem and a song especially written for Rory by Di and sung by the Reed Warblers Collective to the tune of a “O’l Man River”, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.
I’m counting the days and weeks until Rory comes back. In the meanwhile, being a Sister with Attitude and Commitment, I cope.
Cheers M’dears
Po’
Continue reading Po’s diary here
