Yesterday I sort of oozed out of bed, made Claire’s lunch, kissed everyone and drove down to the barn for a fairly amazing lesson with Erika on Scottie. We did have a couple of moments in the flatwork where I was riding him off my leg and he chewed the bit thoughtfully and then collected himself into a lovely frame. As soon as we jumped, though, I couldn’t stop hanging on the reins, so he kept running through the line, which was frustrating; what’s awesome, though, is how Erika corrects faults in riders that I can’t even see, until the horse suddenly relaxes and moves forward freely. As we were riding back to the barn Toni came out to intercept me and asked if I would ride Scottie a little longer to show him off for a potential buyer! I said “Don’t you want to ride him?” and she said “You’ll be fine.”

Toni McIntosh is not horribly ashamed of my riding! I was so thrilled I rode Scottie through the line on a loose rein and he jumped it perfectly.

Zoomed back up to the city, went to work, brought the research calendar up to date, met with colleagues to go over the numbers, started a piece of research. Got crossish mail from someone who is offering us field trips, so zoomed over early to Monroe and walked from classroom to classroom getting said field trips scheduled. Made it to Claire’s class just in time for the Valentine’s Day exchange. Zoomed to the Community Music Center for her piano lesson. Had tacos and avocado and chocolat at Los Jarritos. Picked Claire up, came home, made dinner, went to taiji, came home and kissed Jeremy on the stairs as he went to wushu. I don’t know why I don’t taijiblog as much as I horseblog; stay tuned. Got the kids to bed, had a bath. Jeremy came home and we hung out.

I would like to say that it was an anomalous day, but today suggests otherwise. We slept in and had to teleport Claire to her wushu class. Salome and I dumped the kids on Jeremy and went to the farmer’s market and the garden store and talked nineteen to the dozen, as is our wont. Now that Ritual and Great Harvest are both at Alemany, it’s sort of a food black hole, with me well inside its Schwarzschild radius, never to escape. Back to Salome’s apartment to mind the kids and work on the novel and bake eggs for lunch while the kids drew characters from Lord of the Rings and Salome and Jack went to see Avatar. Off to swim class, where both girls are coming along in dives and sprints. Home to roast the butternut squash and soup it up with the homemade chicken stock. While I ate, I linked accounts to my new financial advisor’s web site, sent mail about the field trips and more mail about an upcoming dinner. And now I blog.

And I’m leaving out the bits where I was plotting the novels, or reading, or just staring into space and thinking about you and how great you are and how lucky I am to have you in my life.

I had two lessons this weekend, both on tall dark handsome Scottie. Here’s a video of him jumping at Woodside a couple of years ago. Note that lovely cadenced canter. Note also his serene confidence and unruffled calm. The rockinghorse canter is still in place and a big part of the delight that is the riding-Scottie experience. The confidence and calm? Not so much. Something scared him last year and now he rushes his fences and worries. Colin, the top trainer and resident genius, says Scottie is (and I quote) “chickenshit.” Michelle and I, because we like him very much indeed, prefer to say that he is anxious. We mean that he’s chickenshit.

A year after starting again, I’m still a pretty sucky rider, but I suck at harder things on better horses. Scottie has to be one of the nicest horses I’ve ridden in my entire life – even Colin says he is super-nice – and that hypnotic canter is easily, far and away, the best canter I ever sat. The trick is to learn to give him confidence, which gets harder as we try harder things and jump bigger fences. Yes! I am actually jumping him at last, over teenytiny rails it is true, but high enough that he transmits clear mental images of falling poles and pain and fear. As well as staying on and keeping my position absolutely correct and relaxed and soft, I have to reassure him of my competence and his ability. When he gets too fast I have to slow him, not with the reins, but with the rhythm, making the footfalls slower and more sure by asking for it with my abdominal core.

It’s a miracle to me that I can even try (and mostly fail at) this. A year ago I had never asked for a flying change! Now I am riding this glorious made hunter and I mean really trying to ride him, awake every stride, trying to unlock my arms, keeping my leg on but soft and quiet, doing my utmost to lull him into that beautiful rhythmic canter so he is in a cadenced trance over fences, so he forgets the fear and the falling poles, so all he thinks about is the music of his footfalls. What joy.

(If you like how I write about riding, you should go read Hannah, who says very precisely what I am always struggling to get at.)

Yesterday I rode for the first time in five weeks. Low expectations are my friend! I assumed that I would fall off and be crushed to death beneath Scottie’s iron-shod hooves, so I was quite pleased when instead I managed to more or less keep up with the-other-Erin and Sarah, who are very good, and only make two or three terrible mistakes. Scottie’s in a new bit: a jointed rubber pelham with a curb chain. He was in a slow twist eggbutt snaffle, or something like that. How awesomely English and perverse are the old horse bit names? The rubber mouthpiece makes the pelham a gentler bit, and gives him something to chew, which he loves. The curb chain supplies the emergency brakes.

I was slow to adapt to the change. Scottie’s carrying himself better, because he’s more comfortable in this hardware and happier generally. Just as Bella did last year, he’s spent a few months settling into the barn and putting on weight, and now he’s a mellower and more cheerful horse. You can feel the muscles of his back relaxed and loose and warm. I guess that means I am sitting better, too? I get some undeserved credit for my riding improving on the sale horses when it is the horses themselves that are filling out and calming down in the kind and wise McIntosh program. But that’s quite okay with me!

Anyway, slow to adapt, yes: we were warming up in the dressage arena and I was fussing with his head, when I should have been just getting him to move forward. Bad Rach! I must not fuss with heads! As soon as I kept my hands still he did move forward. A lovely thing about Scottie is that he isn’t lazy, as all my great and perfect chestnut horses, Alfie, Noah and Bella, absolutely were or are. I’ve become so accustomed to nagging at horses and pushing them with my seat that my lower leg swings like a pendulum. This is an appalling fault! I need to keep my leg very still and just apply pressure with my calf. The great pleasure of riding Scottie is that when I do this, when I press him gently into a light but secure contact, he sort of surges forward with a great generous wave. It’s so beautiful it takes your breath away.

So of course the other awful and counterintuitive thing I did was to try to mess with that awesome forwardness. We went into the jumping arena and started an exercise cantering figure-of-eights over a pole on the ground. The other Erin went first on her big hot dark bay, and he tried to run off with her, as he does (he has improved out of sight since I saw him last; he used to go straight up in the air or backwards, and now he is going forwards, which is key.) Apparently while watching this I decided that Scottie was liable to run through it as well, so I rode the exercise hanging on the reins for grim death, thus guaranteeing that he would.

It was instructive. I’ve tried to avoid antagonizing Scottie on the assumption that I wouldn’t be able to cope. He did get shirty, and was well within his rights to do so, given my death grip on the reins, which clearly violates the terms of the international convention on equine rights. But Scottie’s definition of naughty, like his definition of a hard mouth, fall well short of the insane brumbies in twisted wire bits I used to hurtle around on as an immortal teenager (hi, Hawkeye!). So his little cow-hops and evasions were not even particularly frightening, let alone dislodging, and when I did sort myself out and reinstate an appropriate contact, he cantered with his big rocking-horse cadence again and I remembered that riding properly is nicer in every way.

And then he was spooked by a person behind the hedge and did a teleport to the left, but I stayed on him, and we went to chat to the person behind the hedge, and Scottie snorted disgustedly a few times and went back to being a cow pony ridden on the buckle. All in all it was a splendid Sunday afternoon.

San Francisco looks ugly and squalid after Sydney, especially around the 101/280 interchange coming back from the airport, especially in the rain. I was glad to be back in California anyway, even if I am missing the fire-opal water at Shark Beach and schmoopily watching grainy videos of Peter Allen singing “Tenterfield Saddler.” Happy Australia Day.

But San Francisco’s beauties do reveal themselves shyly, to the patient eye: breathless empty roads at midnight, the Dolores Street palms standing straight in the orange pools of streetlights; unnecessarily cool air startling your throat and needling your exposed skin; the lemon-and-silver sun after rain.

Despite various tragic events, I am enjoying an extended period of uncomplicated happiness.

She’s the turquoise blob in the middle :)

Back in San Francisco, still under the tidal influence of Janny’s excellent cooking. We had a proper Janny-style lunch of smoked salmon and capers, pugliese, spinach and avocado salad, raw carrots and tomatoes. The lashings of tea was our own innovation. Dinner was steak panfried and cut against the grain, with steamed peas, corn and broccoli and roasted carrots and butternut squash. Raspberries and blueberries for dessert.

ETA: Rach’s jetlagged roast butternut squash

Choose a butternut squash with a long neck and a small bulb. Cut off the bulb, peel the neck and slice into 5mm circles. Quarter the circles. Toss in a roasting pan with salt and olive oil. Roast at 450 Fahrenheit until just caramelized.

They were sweet and savory, crisp around a silky puree. Claire had to be force-fed one, and then she ate two helpings.

It’s been an amazing trip, basically a very good Patrick White novel come to life. I won’t forget having coffee with Aly at the Brisbane port cafe, watching container trucks plough through the wetlands like a Jeffrey Smart painting in reverse. I won’t forget seeing Barbie and Ron again, or saying goodbye to David. Egg tarts, David Malin, Rushcutter’s Bay, Pymble, Redfern, Summer Hill, Bronte, Glebe, Gleebooks, Ariel and Berkelouw.

Three and a half weeks seems about the right length of time. For three weeks I get completely immersed. Then one morning the kids and I wake up and in spite of the fact that there are mangos and rainbow lorikeets here, in spite of the fact that my love for my Australian friends and family gets more intense with every passing year, in spite of summer, we all suddenly miss shabby old San Francisco and our micropartment and our American family and even our wholly reprehensible cat. That time is now.

This morning we went to see a Festival show based on Shaun Tan’s The Arrival. It’s about people who run away, and what they find, and the stories they share when they get there. I cried, of course, but for the beauty and sorrow of it and not because I was feeling sorry for myself. How novel! Australia always used to hurt me and make me feel angry and guilty but this year, for whatever reason, it didn’t. Skud told me it wasn’t Australia I disliked so much as Sydney, and when I got here I realized it wasn’t all of Sydney but only a tiny and unrepresentative sample. The rest is vanilla milkshakes and bats in the Moreton Bay figs.

And all kinds of things that have made me crazy for years and years are suddenly okay. I can’t put it any more precisely than that. Sydney hasn’t changed – well, it has, enormously, but it’s also exactly the same. And I haven’t changed either. I’m just as groundlessly opinionated and bitchy and well-meaning and tactless and incompetent and embarrassingly fond of you as ever, don’t worry. But Sydney and I are okay now, like childhood friends who had a massive falling out and made up and can’t remember, now, what any of it was about. The past isn’t sticking its knives into me any more. It probably won’t last but while I feel like this, while I sit in the house Richard built and listen to the cicadas and breathe the humidity, I am more grateful than I can say.

Every chance we get we’ve been sneaking down to Nielsen Park. The turquoise sky, the liquid sun. On Sunday I collected seaglass, green, brown and opal. Today the water was turbulent, the diffraction grating of the Heads sending big waves into shore. In shoulder-deep water I clung to Jeremy and kissed his salty neck, thirteen again but this time, happy.

We have been having the grandest adventures. Lunch and a swim at Barraba Station. The moons of Jupiter at the Sydney Observatory, on the 400th anniversary of their discovery. Tonight we bundled the children off to Hyde Park, well after bedtime, to the consternation of our taxi driver. The capoeira and circus performances would have passed muster in the Mission, more or less, but the laser show in the Moreton Bay figs was genuinely wonderful. We shared a minivan taxi back to Double Bay, and one of our companions asked excitedly: “Did you see the lights in the trees?”

“Yes,” said Jeremy proudly. “That was my brother.”

A long plastic fringe as a flyscreen in front of a milk bar. Endless afternoons at the swimming pool. Christmas cake with marzipan and icing. A bruise-coloured cloud cracked by a bolt of lightning. Covert glasses of Baileys in our hotel room.

It is the Australia I remember from my childhood.

—–

With its art deco style and urbane hosts, the Playhouse Hotel is the ideal venue for a Roaring Twenties sex farce. Next time we should bring all our crushes, and no children.

—–

The memorial site for the Myall Creek Massacre is very moving.

“This is your inheritance,” I said to Jules as we piggybacked on ahead, moving quickly so the bullants wouldn’t bite my sandalled feet. “I’m sorry it doesn’t have more honour.”

“What is honour?” she asked, and I was enlightened.

Claire said: “I am against the white people, even though I am white.”

I said: “But some of the white people behaved very well. William Hobbs reported the murders, and Governor Gibbs prosecuted them.”

“It’s complicated,” said Jeremy.

—–

On the way home we rescued a snakeneck turtle from the middle of the highway.

The weather cleared in the afternoon and Barraba was a vast green bowl full of sunshine. Claire and Julia wore their Thanksgiving frocks. I wore the black dress I got from Jan, the ruby necklace I got from Mum, the pink pearls Jeremy gave me after Claire was born and the silver ring that Richard gave me just because.

“We’re eating outside,” said Andrew.

There were coloured bulbs in the grapevines on the trellis, and candles on the table. The lights twinkled from the bottles and wineglasses. Everyone had dressed for dinner. Ross had spiked his hair, Kelly was wearing a silver chain, Mum was wearing an indigo blouse with a red and purple enamel brooch. Their faces shone.

“Aly,” I said, “can I ask a huge favour? Jeremy left his camera at Sarah’s house.”

“We brought it,” he said, and there it was on Kelly’s lap.

I poured myself a glass of white shiraz.

Moments of perfect happiness are awesome.

Lamb roast on our last NYE at Cooper Park Road; fireworks; early to bed. Julia was ill all night and I slept, very badly, beside her. Up to write a book review and pack and zoom to the airport and jump in the absurd little turbo prop plane to Tamworth, where we found my Dad, my Dad! Intense conversation all the way to Barraba, and there were my mother and brother and sister and brother-in-law and niece and nephew! The kids formed a solid playblob for six hours. I gorged on Christmas cake and trifle. We played mahjongg. Now I am lying in bed in the Playhouse Hotel listening to rain on the roof.

Decentish flight. The girls were awesome and Julia in particular completely won the heart of a 20something Turkish? Lebanese? guy sitting across from her. I watched Samson and Delilah, the first feature by an indigenous director to earn more than $1m. Wrenching, luminous. We emerged blinking into an overcast Sydney Christmas morning and I drove with great care to 7a. Julia flung herself into Janny’s arms. Claire was occupied in counting the stairs to the front door.

We had Christmas lunch at Lulworth. I barely recognized Ric. He has lost a lot of weight and is mostly in a wheelchair and hardly talks any more, although he did ask very characteristically “From where did their flight originate?” The children were buried in toys. After a brief recess we resumed festivities for Claire’s birthday and dinner and cake. If I woke at 6am on the 23rd and flew out at 11pm and the flight was 15 hours and then I was awake from 9am to 9pm, I think that makes about 54 hours of Christmas? In the event it was just about one hour too long. I retired to bed and slept for a year or so.

Woke to the sound of birdsong and rain. Called Kay and Thussy and arranged to see them; bundled up the kids and Jeremy and Jan and went to the lovely Randwick Ritz, a beautiful old Art Deco cinema palace, where we finally saw Where the Wild Things Are. Clearly, I am a boy pretending to be a wolf pretending to be a king; it all makes sense now. We went to one of the cafes on Bronte Beach for lunch and saw a hundred or so white sails against the grey sky as the yachts set out for Hobart.

Epic days these days usually have a substantial barn component; today was barnier than most. Erin was giving us a dressage lesson and Toni rode past to report that whoever was supposed to ride Bella hadn’t turned up, and that Bella would need to be ridden.

“I’ll ride her,” I said cheerfully. Toni and Erin looked at each other, and Toni said: “Okay. This can be your Christmas present.”

So I had an hour on Scottie, keeping my hands still and soft, trying to get him to work off my leg; achieving with satisfaction two good canter transitions where I squeezed him with my calves and felt his hind legs stepping forward – outside/inside – into the gait. Then I got off and saddled Bella and got back on and had an hour on her; a brief school in the indoor arena, and then a long walk around the Stanford Linear Accelerator with Erin, who was riding The Flying Dutchman. We walked above 280 for a bit and revelled in the knowledge that at least some of the people driving past us wished they could be us.

So I wanted Bella for Christmas, and I got her.

On the drive home I had a good idea for a YA novel.

As 280 swung down to San Jose I saw this fire starting – first the old cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, which could have been no more than shadowy slip of fog, but by the time I got to Randall Street a thick black mushroom of ill omen. I am glad all the people got out, and I am very sorry about the cat.

Then we picked up Rowan and drove to Heather’s house, where we decorated and ate approximately one million cookies, and the children were reasonably charming, and we met a man who had grown up in Ryde in Sydney and who is flying out on the same flight as us on Wednesday, and we started listing people we might know in common and his first one was Rachel Moerman. So I laughed and said: “Have you met her boyfriend?” “Who, Big?” “Yep. Notice the family resemblance?” “Oh!”

Now there are eggs baking for dinner.

It’s no secret how I felt about this decade geopolitically; a decade that started with massive election fraud (not that liar Lieberman would have been a better VP than Cheney), that devolved into state-sponsored mayhem and murder, that saw the ocean rise up and swallow a quarter of a million people and flood one of my favourite cities on earth.

Speaking personally, though, holy wow.

I finally made it over to the new Blue Bottle Coffee location near work, for yogurt parfait and New Orleans iced coffee. It’s a stunning place, all blond wood and huge windows, just like my idealized typical Sydney cafe. Idealized Sydney is awesome; the food is incredible and there are no cockroaches and everyone is going to live forever. I am about to head back to Australia and tear myself apart all over again, the neurotic expatriate’s annual orgy of second-guessing and self-doubt. Whee. I didn’t love my country until I left it and now I long for it with an intense and hopeless passion. I also greatly fear having to move back. Don’t you wish you were me? To paraphrase Garfield, until you actually go and live there again, Sydney makes a very serviceable paradise.

I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t obsessed with the notion of sanctuary: a farm in a green valley fortified by impassable mountains (it was somewhere near Lithgow, or maybe Braidwood), a nine-hundred-year-old college quadrangle, a city on a hill. After ten years of war and bloodshed and political heartbreak, and after having my babies in an empire that seems to have gone mad with its own power, my longing for safety is more intense than ever. And at 38 I am finally smart enough to have figured out that nowhere is safe. Bushfires threaten my parents’ little country town; California’s bankruptcy is the water eroding the foundations of UC Berkeley; San Francisco trembles astride the San Andreas fault.

James Ellroy says “Closure is bullshit,” and he is right. Sanctuary’s bullshit too, and so are happy endings, and so is vindication. The grave’s a fine and private place; other places are busy and beset with interruptions and altogether not so fine. I blame time. It’s time that slams asteroids into your Chicxulubs and shoots your last breeding female in the eastern migratory Whooping Crane population. Of course it’s also time that puts a brand new baby Claire in your arms in the dark of a Christmas morning; that wakes you up at dawn to look into the wide blue eyes of a brand new baby Julia. I would not, in fact, have wanted to miss those moments.

Sanctuary is bullshit. Imaginary Sydney is imaginary and so is imaginary San Francisco, and this sensation of treading water, of struggling to finish a to-do list that gets longer the more items you cross off, this is, in fact, the experience of life itself. You wake up and hug your brilliant, stubborn children, you go to work and listen to peoples’ stories and try to figure out what it is they are asking for and which wishes of theirs you can grant, you listen to music and you mourn your beloved dead. And if you’re lucky you get a few minutes a day, three strides of Bella in a collected canter, one really good cup of coffee, kissing Jeremy on his throat and feeling his heartbeat quicken. The memory of the candlelit table on Sunday night, and everyone laughing.

…is to try to host a small dinner for Optimal Husband on the occasion of his birthday, and to have it pack out the beautiful back room at a favourite local restaurant, and to look up the table at our friends’ faces bathed in candlelight and to be amazed all over again at how smart and funny and pretty they all are, and how much I love them.