Letting in the light

Geranium in the window and my writing day

I have a geranium plant growing in a pot under one of the leadlight windows in my kitchen at the back of the house. The plant started out as a small cutting in a jar of water on the bench, after my sister, Dani Netherclift, broke off a cutting from a geranium growing in the garden of the house our brother Grant and I shared in the early nineties, shortly before the time when he and our father drowned.

Geraniums are hardy. They can last for decades, and even over generations. That house where Grant and I lived isn’t far from where I live now. It’s in the next suburb to the south, and any time I want, I can catch a tram past a handful of stops and get off and walk up to linger a moment by the house. I often do just that.

The house looks almost completely unchanged from when we lived there more than thirty years ago, as do the two houses to the left of it as I stand on the footpath and peer in. An Italian family owned all three houses and lived in the one two houses along. Given how much the three houses and their gardens look the same, with the first one where the Italians lived grander than the others, the middle one drab and unkempt, and the one where we lived cosy and sweet in appearance, I think it’s likely that the same family still owns them and probably still live in the grander one. I resist the urge to knock on the door, and if the family does still live there and happen to open the door, to ask them if they remember me, from back when I was twenty-one and lived there with my brother.

It’s quite possible that the geranium was already growing there back then. I may have passed it every time I opened the front gate and walked through.

Dani doesn’t live nearby. She’s based in a town in the mountains to the north. A while ago, though, she took a tram and walked up the street to look at the house that Grant and I shared, and she came to meet me afterwards and gave me the pilfered geranium cutting. I put it carefully in my backpack, on top of my books, and made sure to take it out and put it in a jar of water when I arrived home. By the following week, the cutting had doubled in size and sprouted a pale-pink flower that filled the kitchen with that distinctive musky scent of geranium, a fragrance that mostly reminds me of our grandmother, Veronica, as she loved geraniums. But they grew in most of the familiar places I lived in or visited throughout my childhood. Our family lived in hot, dry places, and geraniums don’t need much water to thrive and are not shy about heat.

The geranium in the jar quickly sent out long roots and outgrew the jar. My daughter potted it in soil and returned it to the place by the window to remind us to water it and keep an eye on it until it was happily established in the pot and then we’d put it outside, since a geranium isn’t an indoor plant. But it’s been there for weeks now, and the plant keeps on growing taller and wider. I haven’t seen a flower since it went into the pot, though, and soon I’ll have to put it outside as I think it needs more light if it’s to flower. I enjoy seeing it in the mornings, though, when I get up and put on the kettle by the currently rain-spattered leadlight window. The early morning sun shows up the soft fur on the round leaves with their curly edges, and without having to form a specific thought, I feel the closeness of family memories, and the gentle presence of love: Dani’s love in thinking of me and bringing me the cutting, my brother’s gentle love for me and the time we spent together in that house, and the love of other family members who are gone now, past generations who loved us and loved these plants that bloomed readily even when there was little rain to be seen.

None of us, of course, knew what was coming, in the time Grant and I shared the house. It was unimaginable that he’d be dead in less than two years, at the age of twenty-five. That this came to be makes my memories of sharing the house with him more precious, but the time there was already precious. It was our time of getting to know each other as adults. As kids, we’d bickered and carried on as a brother and sister close in age often do. We were markedly different but we also had ways of being alike, maybe because, as he put it in that time when we shared our city house, we were both ‘dreamy people’.

Our parents had moved far away interstate for a good while around that time. It was just the two of us, then, having left country towns behind when he rented the house and invited me to move into the second bedroom. We both worked mostly from home and spent the days close together, working at the large drafting table he’d set up by a window at the back of the house. Our conversations grew long and deep. Sitting alongside each other, only looking into the other’s face when we caught it in reflection in the window, it was easy to talk without reticence about whatever was on our minds. He was working part-time at a restaurant and the chefs taught him to cook. He made us delicious Italian and French meals that we ate together. Eventually I moved out with a boyfriend, and he moved on to a different place.

And then one summer afternoon, he was gone, and now his age is always twenty-five, and I’m forever thankful for that time when we really began to know each other as not only siblings but also as two young people who liked to spend time in each other’s company.

~

I’m still feeling my way into what this substack will be. Maybe it’s like the geranium, still needing more light before it’s ready to bloom. I’d like it to be a place where I share the day-to-day moments of my writing life.

Today, I’m writing at one of my two most favourite cafes. This one’s in the same suburb where I shared the house with Grant. The café owner had a previous life as an orchestral musician, travelling the world to play. His dream, in opening this café, was that a close community would form around it and writers and artists would choose the place to come and do their work at its tables. He’s succeeded at gathering that community around him.

As well as keeping an eye on next week’s deadline for a short piece commissioned by the Guardian, I’m absorbed by the work-in-progress of my third non-fiction book. It’s the story of a series of events that played out earlier this year, and I’m finding the work challenging, though it’s starting to flow along. When this year began, I didn’t expect to be cast into a state of profound grief. Maybe I had reason to expect it, but I wasn’t allowing in the possibility. I’m not sure grief can be anticipated, anyway, even if signs are present and pointing the way to its imminence.

Last night, I went to the launch party of the wonderful Heat literary journal. It’s been my favourite journal since Ivor Indyk started it, years ago. I remember buying my copy of the first issue and thinking, wow, this is different and exciting.

Dani had a piece published in issue 20 of Heat this year. The day the issue came out, I went to Paperback Books in the city and bought a copy, reading Dani’s engrossing, lovely piece while I sat on our velvet couch, a good place for reading. The piece is about Dani’s approach to our mother’s death, something that was looming on the horizon when she was writing and submitting the piece and then had come to pass by the time of publication. There’s an eeriness to reading it, a turning and looking back to the time when Mum was still alive.

Dani was reading at the launch party, and I wanted to go, to support her and hear her read, and to support Heat too. But I don’t often go to literary events. I’ve never found it easy to be social in groups. I’m a one-on-one person, soft-voiced and preferring less public spaces for talking and making connections. Still, I enjoyed myself, catching up with past students and colleagues from my twenty-plus years of teaching creative writing at universities, talking with a beloved cousin who’d come along, and then, alongside my partner, settling with my back against a wall in a court yard tendrilled with ferns and hanging plants, close to where six writers recently published in Heat stood up to read aloud excerpts of their pieces. I liked looking around while Dani read, watching the faces of people listening to my sister’s words as she spoke them in her voice, also soft in tone.

~

Books:

I finished reading Maggie Mackellar’s When It Rains, and for today at least, it’s stopped raining in Melbourne. I’ve also finished Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes To Me, and on Monday when I was sick and needed a day’s rest in bed, I read Seascraper, by Benjamin Wood, a 2025 Booker finalist. That was perfect for a day of staying in, dreaming of being by the sea. I’m back to reading Helen Garner’s published diaries now, onto the third volume, How To End A Story. I’m not hurrying as I’m reluctant to end my reading of the diaries. They’re published together in one volume now, but I’ve relished slowly making my way through the three separate ones, starting with the yellow notebook in Istanbul.

~

Mentions:

Dani Netherclift

Maggie Mackellar

Arundhati Roy

Benjamin Wood

Helen Garner

Heat Literary Journal