It's really beautiful here

here being Lancefield. Only an hour driving time from home, and unfortunately noise pollution is just as thick her as in much of Melbourne - rhis seems to be a flight path - but the cool night air smells so good. It's dry grass, and bloodwo od bark, eucalyptus, a faint tang of manure, very faint, and the lightest traces of the pink rose bush growing next to the house. That rose scent might be on my hands, actually, not carried on the air. The roses are beautiful and invite touching.

I am sitting on an uncomfortable garden chair under a yellow box gum tree, facing across the plain to the hills. Is it mount William? I don't know. The moon is nearly full and lights the sky so that clouds glow and trees and hills are finely cut silhouettes. I left my glasses indoors and I can't see a lot more than the shapes. Every time I look northwards there is a blot of log ht rising in the sky. They are aircraft headed for Tullamarine but to my uncertain  eyes the y look like pincushion hakea blossom.

The last house I lived in with my parents was out of town a bit and set into open country quite similar to this. I would go out at night and stare at the sky, desperately longing for my real life to begin. I could see the stars sharp and crisp then and I could make out the delicate pocks and shadows  cratering the face of the moon. Tonight it looks to me like a mandala beginning to spread across the sky. I still have a cracked plastic ring binder full of sleeves containing the negatives of the photographs I used to take of the night sky through the trees. Long exposures, lying as still as possible on my back in the cool grass. I still have that furious yearning sometimes but without the crisp, clear certainty about what I'm looking for. Maybe it was always an illusion.