The Evenings Came Back

Another footpath, this one at Higgins, on the north-western side of the city. The bus went up on it and stopped, and that was the week arranged. It occurred to us, parking there, that this was probably the shape of the season ahead and not a one off: a stretch in the bush, a couple of days in town, and every so often a house with a driveway and somebody else's kettle.

House sits are not a compromise. They are showers that do not have to be thought about, and laundry done properly, and above all a flat sealed surface to work on. Anything that needs doing to a bus is easier when you are not lying on gravel with dirt working its way into your collar. So we made use of it.

The bus got a real wash. Not the sort it usually gets, which is a hose or a bucket of lake water and a quick pass over the worst of it, done when we happened to remember and skipped when we did not. This was the first proper wash since we left, which is to say the first since January 2024. Every panel, every seam, the frames and the runners and all the places where two and a half years of Australian roads had quietly accumulated and set. Two and a half years is a long time for anything to go unattended, and the bus came up looking like a vehicle somebody owned rather than one that had simply survived a lot of country. Anth followed it with an oil and filter change, the engine given the same attention as the body, both halves of the arrangement that keeps a house moving.

The house sit was not properly ours. The owner was a friend of Jan's and Jan was the usual sitter, but the owner was happy enough to have us instead, so Jan came and went across the week as she pleased and the house held whoever was in it. We slept in the bus regardless. There is a bed in there that has been shaped to us for two and a half years and a spare room in a strange house does not compete.

Then Sal finished. Her last online tutorial ran and ended and that was the coursework done, all of it, with nothing left in the degree except the placement itself. It had come apart in pieces rather than all at once: the assignments first, back at Mannus Lake in July, and now the lectures and tutorials, the last scheduled obligation of two years of study. Nobody handed her anything. A tutorial simply ended and did not have another one behind it.

What that produced, more than anything, was hours. Anth had been holding a new board game in reserve for exactly this, Eternal Decks, bought in hope rather than expectation, because board games have always been more his enthusiasm than hers. Sal will play one now and then and be perfectly pleasant about it. This one she took to completely. It became her favourite, which nobody saw coming, and we played it nearly every night that week, with Jan sitting in for a couple of rounds when she was about. We had not played a game together since she started the course. That is the part worth putting down. Two years of assignments and workshops and intensives had quietly taken the evenings, one at a time, without ever announcing that it was doing so, and the evenings came back the same way.

The same week, down in Melbourne, Torrin started a fifty day trial. Fifty days is a serious commitment of a body, and it would more than cover Canada, which meant the ski season with Shea was no longer a thing being hoped for. Parents worry about the arrangements their children make, particularly the ones that involve signing up for fifty days of anything. There was relief in it for him and a different sort of relief for us: not that he was safe, but that the thing he wanted was now going to happen.

On the Sunday night Grammy arrived. Family were coming to the place she had been staying, so she came up and joined us for the last night of the house sit, and the group was whole again for an evening before Monday and the new two day rhythm took hold of the week.Read more