Picnic etiquette

Where are we meeting them?
I don't know, somewhere near the pavilion, or was it the lake?
Is that them near the park bench?
No, that's a kid about to do a somersault.
Oh no, I forgot the picnic blanket...
That's OK, we can sit on the grass.
...and I forgot the cutlery.
It's a picnic, we can eat with our hands.
But I made spaghetti bolognaise and tiramisu.
For a picnic?
Yeah, why, what did you bring?
Um, sandwiches and a packet of chips.
Oh. So maybe I went over the top with the food, but the tuxedo's fine, isn't it?
Sure buddy, but maybe lose the top hat.

Masala tea moths

A little sketch of the pantry moths that grew in my packet of masala tea and then flew out one day as though it was a perfectly normal thing to do.

Hey paper tree

The suburbs are littered with them. Planted neatly on nature strips in front of squat brick veneer houses. Not much good for shade, really, because of their scrappy thin leaves sprouting from sparsely tangled branches. But they grow well without much fuss. If paperbark trees were a type of person, they’d be a retired bare knuckled boxer who paints pet portraits. They show their tough history in their rough exterior but when you peel back a bit of their bark you realize just how soft and gentle they are.

Unfortunately for this paper tree, someone put the safety tape around the wrong area and now it’s, well, you know, chopped. Poor thing.

I wonder how many kids had peeled off this tree’s bark, trying to make it as thin as possible so that it looked like paper you could write your name on? Just like I did when I was a kid.

Hey paper tree, see you later. Let’s hope your logs have been taken and used to make something practical like, um, paper.

Lost and found

One of the saddest sights in the world is watching someone put up posters of their lost pet. As I sat in my car waiting at the traffic lights yesterday, I watched as a man on a bicycle stopped at the intersection and stuck his lost dog poster up on a post. It looked like every other lost dog poster – printed out on A4 paper with the obligatory cute photo of poochie/turbo/fang. Only those cute photos are often so close up that you can’t quite tell what type of dog they are. Or the poor dog has red eye from the camera flash, so that your initial reaction is, ‘I hope I don’t run into that devil dog.’

I couldn’t help but feel the futility of the man’s little poster and as I glimpsed his face, he looked so forlorn and seemed to be on the verge of tears that my heart broke just a little bit.

Maybe he’ll find his dog. It happens. His lost poster may match up with someone’s found poster and he and his beloved dog will be reunited.

If only we could put up lost posters for other things we lose and have them returned to us - like friends, youth and the ability to backflip off a swing without breaking a limb.

The little things

Oh yeah, it's March, the month of noticing the little things.