Seasons and Aileen

The Australians are very strict about their seasons, mapping them to the calendar with a precision I’ve experienced nowhere outside of fashion (and boy is Australia outside of fashion). December, January and February are Summer; March, April, and May are Autumn; June, July, August, well you get the idea. So drum rolls please: in two weeks Spring begins. I can’t wait. I found myself explaining to someone a while back that we’d move to Australia largely for the climate and it sounded strange and somewhat superficial. At the end of a wet and dirty winter it sounds deeply spiritual and nourishing.

It’s ironic that the modern Aussies are so robust in their definitions of the seasons. It turns out that the very idea of four seasons is yet another colonial import that doesn’t really work down here (think rabbits, crinoline skirts, irony). Depending on where they live/d – sorry but neither tense makes this sentence correct – Aborigines believe/d there are between five and eight seasons. What we are in now is something between Winter and Spring, a Sprinter if you will, and it is indeed something to behold. The Australian bush has a beauty which is normally unphotographable. When you are there it is serene, massive and empty. When you photograph it it’s just big and empty. The difference is perhaps the wind that whispers and roar through the 700-odd types of eucalyptus and…well, no ‘and’. That’s probably about it. The bush is green, green, green. But then Sprinter comes along and suddenly there are patches of yellow, purple, red and white. If these were imported blooms, roses or tulips, it would be too cold for them now. And also, this is difficult to describe, they’d be wrong. The way even the best silk flowers in the world are wrong because you can only compare them to the real thing. The flowers of Sprinter are beautiful because they are so uniquely Australian.

This has been the worst winter. I feel like writing something vaguely poetic, like ‘It was a wet and dirty winter, the winter Aileen died’. But grief isn’t poetic in real life. It’s just shit. It’s strange being so far away from New York and still missing Aileen. Being down here Oliver and I could probably have counted on seeing her and Mike and the kids about once every two years. And yet I miss her all the time. I miss the possibility of her, the idea that sometime in the next twenty-four months she’ll be in my life as more than a memory or an old photo.

Bizarrely, I keep remembering the things she taught me. I had no idea until she died that Aileen had ever taught me anything (other than not to get cornered by her when drunk past 11pm). But now I come to think of it the list of what she taught me is endless. She taught me you should always put face-cream on when your skin is still wet because that way it retains the moisture. She taught me you shouldn’t scowl at the parents of a crying baby on a plane because they’re already deeply mortified and they do have a right to travel. She taught me how to powder my nose without going to the bathroom. She taught me to give to homeless people. My religion (uptight judgemental selfishness) bans this last practice, preaching you’re only exacerbating the problem, feeding someone’s habit and their dependency. Try telling that to a bum on a cold winter’s night, Aileen said. All he wants is the drugs you’d take if you were in the same situation. One man’s barstool after all. I thought of this tonight, on the way home, and I turned back to give an old man some dollars. He said it was his fiftieth birthday and I told him he should thank my friend Aileen. Like that might make a difference. I was going to wrap this back nicely to the seasons. Something about roses being here when they shouldn’t be, Aileen not being here when she should. But what’s the point? Things don’t always end the way they should.