All posts tagged: Lismore

There are simply no words for me in these times

Greetings from the Australian rainforest, where birds sing soggy songs after so much rain. The sun is elbowing clouds aside as best it can, and I am grateful to see the small holes of blue coming and going. Today is my dear dead Dad’s birthday, and I’m staying quietly at home. Normally, as my honouring ritual, I oil his antique French furniture; this year, there’s too much mould trying to get a grip, so I’m refusing to feed the spores with expensive linseed and orange blossom. Today is also the monthly Women’s Dharma Day meditation meeting, and I needed it so much. More than I knew. As I wrote last time, I’ve been volunteering daily with Resilient Lismore, a Facebook group formed to help my nearby beloved Lismore (and surrounds) deal with flood recovery. It started in 2017, as a response to the Cyclone Debbie flood, with 3000 members. Now we’ve had 2 catastrophic floods a month apart, including landslides and massive devastation, so subsequently have almost 30,000 members. I’m one of the team of …

COVID-19 got me, then a catastrophic flood: valid excuses for not blogging?

Hi everyone, long time no see. Sorry I’ve been ‘missing in WordPress action’, it’s been a terrible 6 weeks here in Australia. On a personal level, I finally caught Covid, despite being super cautious for 2 years! It was bound to happen: my darling son Nearly22 brought it unknowingly into the home, despite 3 negative RATs & a negative PCR… *sigh I hoped I may be fine (we were only together for a few hours, but one of them was in the car), plus returned 2 negative RATs & a negative PCR, then on Day 6 since my exposure, I was hit by a sledgehammer of chills/aches/red eyes/nausea/fatigue/dizziness/brain fog. It was horrible. I was one of the last people I know to get it, so luckily I had regular soothing phone calls about what to expect, what to take, & what may happen next. I literally spent 10 days in my pyjamas, dragging myself from bed to kitchen to couch to bed. Dosing myself every 1-2 hours, as well as eucalyptus steam baths, became almost …

The flood anniversary, one year on

  This exact time last year, here was my morning view from the front verandah at 7am. My son’s room below the house was underwater up to my thighs. His friend’s motorbike was almost floating, and my neighbour’s cars had water up to their steering wheels. It was a challenging, stressful time, as you can imagine, including several deaths, and I wrote about it here with many more photos in Soggy not Bloggy. It took 3 days for the waters to subside, and miraculously, we only lost electricity for a few hours. Which was great, because I had two teenage boys marooned in the living room with me; we would have likely killed each other without the internet for distraction. Or the toaster of course, for ongoing food requirements (I had waded to the supermarket with water over the top of my gumboots to bring back milk and bread). Today, the nearby town of Lismore- which was devastated by over 11 metres of water literally rushing thorough the CBD– is having a community gathering and …