Two Island / Two Continent Connections

My new "Container Massage Room"

My promise to myself for getting my website done was to have a pedicure.  This is an occasional ritual for me, one I discovered after years of ignoring my feet because they were ugly and finally realizing that it’s precisely because they’re ugly (they really are) that one should get pedicures, specially considering that if my clients open their eyes they look straight at my feet through the face cradle of my massage table. 

I went alone to the place I usually go with a girlfriend but she was away.   I sat in my car and finished the story I was reading on the ferry, picked up a latte – that’s part of the ritual - then strolled into the salon.  It was humming with activity and after picking out a colour (“ Jewel of India”) I was taken aback by the sight of a little girl in the chair next to mine, all thick blond hair and fashionable outfit and a bored look on her face – she can’t have been more than 8 years old.  Her mother was looking bored too, but engrossed in a magazine, ignoring both her daughter and the young Vietnamese woman ministering to her feet.

I had a moment of hesitation, wondering about this, thinking there’s some blog material there – a rant about what the world’s coming to when 8 year old girls are bored with getting a $25 pedicure while the south American Indians I was just reading about in my book were spending every day wondering how to procure their next meal.

The rant fades after I hear the middle-aged woman on my other side say something to the woman giving her a French pedicure.  She says something again and I have to ask where her accent is from.  She says “Australia” then “Sydney” and I tell her I’m from Hobart.  

All rants about spoiled eight year old girls go out the window as I delve into this amazing but familiar connection between Tasmania and surrounds and Whidbey Island and surrounds. A middle-aged woman (like me) went travelling when young (like me) met her husband in the US (like me) her husband is a Vietnam Veteran (same) she has a daughter named Erin (me too).  She has travelled the world as a flight attendant (a much more sensible and affordable way than my way!)  and now lives in Mukilteo across the water from Whidbey.   We exchange numbers so we can make plans to get together with our husbands.

And I think of the time I spent hesitating at Starbucks, sitting in the car finishing up one story, doing one more thing so I missed that ferry but made that one.  All so I end up meeting up with one more connection between my two island lives.

Thanks for listening…

Rosie

For information regarding pedicures and how they became so mainstream, read this article from the LA Times

 - A mix of luck, polish

Vietnamese dominance of the manicure trade started with the help of a U.S. star.

May 05, 2008|My-Thuan Tran | Times Staff Writer

Back on Whidbey Island

We made our way back to Whidbey Island from Tasmania via Indiana, New York City and Camden, Maine.  It’s so nice to be back on my own familiar bit of America – the rest all feels pretty foreign but this island is my other “home”.  Even the rain feels familiar, although it would be a lot less thrilling if I’d been living with it for the past 9 months and wasn’t anticipating the arrival of summer after July 4^th as is so often the case in the Pacific Northwest.

Coyote Lake

I was so happy to see my pig Isabel and she was happy to see me and the leftover gingerbread that I brought her from our Christmas in Tasmania.  When we lived on Whidbey we always had a tradition of building a very big, imperfect gingerbread house that the family all decorated with abandon, then ate for a while before giving the leftovers to Izzy after the holidays were over.  

There was a lot of gingerbread last year, and  after a while we started to suspect that the possum that occasionally comes in through the cat door had been chowing down on it which is a good excuse to throw it away, but not nearly as satisfying as feeding it to an appreciative pig.  Although the wallabies and pademelons that spend every night in our yard, mowing the lawn (much to my husband’s delight) would happily eat it, it’s not good for them, so most of it ends up in the garbage.  But I always save a big bagful for Izzy so she knows we were thinking of her.  My kids all roll their eyes at this but I swear she knows!

Izzy outside our apartment

After weeks of being on the road I’m enjoying being at my own little apartment and settling in to my own tiny kitchen.   Apart from seeing Izzy and catching up with friends, my favourite activity is wandering the property on a sunny evening, wineglass in hand, marveling at how much the trees we planted have grown.  There is nothing like planting trees to give you a sense of time and place.  Or adding a few flowers to pots to make it feel like summer, even if it’s a short one.  Or eating Screaming Banshee bread dipped in oil and balsamic vinegar to remind you that you really are back on Whidbey.

 I also think that I like that overgrown, wild garden look for now and it’s not yet time to think about weeding.  Instead I make lists, and then anticipate one of the most exciting aspects of my return to the island.   There is a movie showing at the Clyde that, by some miracle, in spite of watching five whole movies on the flight over, I haven’t seen!  Not only that, it’s raining, which eliminates that summer dilemma: you want to go to the Clyde, but the movie starts during the shank of the evening when the sun is casting long shadows over the wildlife pond, which is almost impossible to tear yourself away from…but sunshine is forecast for tomorrow, so it's perfect!

Thanks for listening. 

(see www.islandtimetours.net.au or the Clyde Theater website for more information on why the Clyde is so special)

First Blog Post - finally!

My new website is finally live, and that is my cue to start my blog.  It was supposed to be completed by the time we left on a road trip from Indiana to Maine to visit my brother, but I have managed to put it off.  Aside from the fact that I was sick with the flu and bronchitis for two weeks, which was a legitimate excuse for being slowed down, specially while I was travelling from Tasmania to the USA, the truth is that I’m afraid, which is something I try to be mindful of, and avoid as much as possible.  But talking about your life is one thing, actually writing it down is a whole different story, one of many that you hope people will be interested in hearing even after you’ve accidently pressed the wrong button and sent out some rant about a wildly inappropriate subject.

I have been writing since I was a teenager and developed an unspoken agreement with my French teacher that she wouldn’t embarrass me by calling on me in class, and I would use the time productively by writing and then be OK with an F at the end of term.  Other students enjoyed reading my stories and then, in a moment of teenage angst, I burned all my writing and rarely had anyone read it after that.

Still I kept writing and wondering if there was something I should actually do with it until recently, when something shifted.  This blog is now something I just know I have to do.  It’s like a freight train that has been building momentum up a long, slow hill and is just about the crest the top and start on a runaway course over which I have no say or control.  Hopefully it’s heading towards the “brilliant, successful blogs this way” sign, rather than the “crash and burn” one.

One of my biggest challenges has been a less than satisfactory relationship with the digital world.  I spent twenty years operating a massage practice and being thankful that it was something that could never be taken over by computers.   But then I found myself living in Tasmania and owning my little tourism business and discovering that the world of computers and websites and SEO’s and Facebook was one I could no longer ignore.  One of the best quotes I’ve read lately was by Mignon McLaughlin “What you can’t get out of, get into wholeheartedly” and I knew it was talking to me. Still, it sat on my desk for at least a year before I succumbed to its message. 

Something finally shifted a couple of months ago when I was forced by various unexpected blessings in disguise to step up.  My new website was one of them, and also thinking, falsely, that my desktop computer had a virus so I finally had to start using my laptop. I had bought it with the proceeds of a small business grant program, knowing that I needed it, but every time I looked at it, it gave me the same sort of pangs induced by an untouched weight set or yoga mat in the corner of a room. 

Now I’ve reached the point where my relationship with my laptop is finally starting to gel and we can go on the road together.  We have had a rough start, like meeting the man you end up married to for thirty years and anyone watching you dance together for the first time wouldn’t have given the relationship a week!  

But that relationship’s still going, nearly 32 years later, as we set off on a road trip across Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Jersey to visit our niece, before heading north to Maine.  My website can wait a few more days, and hopefully those reading will ignore the naivety and ignorance of a digitally challenged author and be patient, knowing that a relationship that started out with so many awkward missteps actually has a chance of being a keeper!

Check out the new website at www.islandtimetours.net.au  It’s not fancy or sophisticated but it’s mine, and I pretty much understand it, which to me is a daily miracle!

Thanks for listening…

Rosie