A Monday That Finished at Three

The Cotter was not actually any closer to Trinity College. That was worth admitting up front, because the whole point of moving there was proximity and the map did not support it. What it did offer was a run in that avoided the worst of the Canberra morning, and on the night before a first day, avoiding traffic counts for more than saving kilometres. So the bus came down off Jan's street on the Sunday afternoon with Grammy behind it and turned west out of the city, and we were parked at the Cotter Campground not long before dark.

Rain came with the last of the light. Not much of it, the kind that settles in without ever committing, but enough to keep everybody inside. Grammy's van went in nearby and stayed shut. The bus did what it does on a wet evening, which is become very small and very warm, and we stayed in it.

Anth had been here before. Late in 2025, during the long separation, he had spent a couple of nights at the Cotter on his own while Sal was elsewhere, one of the quiet stops in a stretch of quiet stops. He remembered the shape of the place. Sal remembered it too, but from much further back, from a childhood in Canberra when the Cotter was somewhere families went on a weekend and the river was for swimming in. She had not set foot there since. It is a strange thing, arriving somewhere in the dark with a partner who knows it from eight months ago and finding that you know it from thirty years ago, and that neither of you can see anything out of the window to check it against.

The amenities block was across the way and the temperature had dropped to something with real intent in it. Anth went for a shower anyway. There is a calculation that gets made about these things, the walk over in the cold against the hot water at the end of it, and the walk back in the cold afterwards with wet hair, and on this occasion the calculation came out in favour. He came back moving quickly and did not linger outside.

Monday started early, earlier than the drive required. Sal was not going to be late. Two years of assignments, workshops in Melbourne and Brisbane, intensives, the long separations that paid for them, all of it had been building toward a day that would begin with finding the right building and parking somewhere sensible, and she was not going to have it start with an apology. The bus went into the city in the grey and dropped her, and that was that. She walked in. The rest of the day belonged to her and nobody else was going to be able to help with any of it.

Anth and Grammy went to the Aldi. There is no dignifying that. On the morning that closed out two years of work, the other half of the household did a grocery top-up: the trolley, the aisles, the things that had run down over a week at Gundaroo, the packing at the end where you move quickly because everyone behind you is waiting. It took the time it took. Then there was the rest of the day to get through, and no particular way to get through it except by doing ordinary things slowly and checking the phone more often than was useful.

Just after three, the message came. Sal was finished.

We drove back in and collected her. There is not much to report from the drive, which is itself the report: no crisis, no disaster, no story to tell about it. A day had been done and it had gone the way days go. The thing that had loomed over the last stretch of the journey, the final obstacle between Sal and the end of a Masters of Counselling, turned out to be a Monday that started early and finished just after three.

Day one done. There would be more of them, one a week, stacked up between now and whenever the hours were satisfied, and the shape of the coming months was now fully visible: a day in the city, then out again to whatever ground we had found for the week. But the first one is the one that proves it can be done at all. The rest are just the rest.Read more