Tangelo

He liked to keep things. it gave him great pleasure to think about the many uses for a discarded piece of wood. The potentiality that existed in that one piece of silky oak and its comforting texture in his hands. He made chairs and cabinets and go-carts and the steps to our house. In front of our delighted eyes, he built the structure that features heavily in most of my childhood memories. Our cubby house and swing set. From the sandpit to the iron chain bridge that traversed the lower fort across to the upper fort built around the trunk of our mango tree.

The sweet perfume of summer wafts thick in my olfactory memory, the tree laden with ripening fruit as we played beneath its boughs. Inside our cubby house, we were whoever we wanted to be. We ventured to Machu Picchu, explored dolomite caves, rode firebirds down the Nile and still made it home in time for dinner.

The orchard that grew behind the swing set, this was my father's sanctuary. He planted it next to the remains of our old macadamia tree that was struck by lightning during a particularly vicious summer storm and with a loud fiery crack split right in half. Amidst a stretch of crotons, staghorns and native orchids, grasshoppers grew bigger than our hands and leapt from behind tangelo blossoms in the morning as we picked the spicy citrus straight from the branch on our way to school.

Over the years, a transformation of many kinds took place. The fruit trees grew large and unruly, into an impenetrable jungle. Neglected and unpruned, the fruit trees were eaten from the inside out by singing beetles and aphids. A sort of shadowy spectre descended over the landscape. Timber slabs, once smooth and full of promise started to decay and weather from exposure. Cobwebs coated bicycles, their handlebars drooping forlornly, chains creaky and arthritic with rust.

My father was often sad and for weeks at a time, lay cocooned on the couch. Sleeping and crying, choking on tears and medicine. His teardrop-encrusted mug would drip all over the carpet while he apologised for everything. He lived in the past and future but rarely in the present. The present was too painful and surfaced guilt, shame and deep sorrow.

When he was good, he was great. With an encyclopaedic knowledge of flora and fauna, he studied the world around him with fascination. Despite never having the opportunity to travel overseas, he was one of the most worldly people I know. One of his many enduring interests was food, and over the years he pursued his self-education with quiet dedication and enthusiasm, following a curriculum encompassing the historical, anthropological and practical. Weeknights were often spent poring over books and absorbing SBS documentaries, and weekends were for trying out new recipes and techniques. These culinary expeditions often entailed trips around the suburbs of Brisbane (with us kids in tow) sourcing hard-to-find ingredients and whole spices that he could roast and grind in his mortar and pestle and create something aromatic and magical tasting for our Sunday dinners. Around the kitchen table is where we tasted the world. It was also where he encouraged my siblings and I to question and criticise. As both a passionate conservationist and long-time public servant, Dad would often regale us with hot takes and hilarious anecdotes of politics and government affairs from within the bowels of bureaucracy. He instilled in us an irreverence and disregard for authority. He didn't care for trends and stubbornly did his own thing. As teenagers, this was sometimes a source of embarrassment for my siblings and I, but in hindsight it was one of his best features.

Gestures of his love were often found in unlikely places. I did not realise this until I was a young adult, and he wasn't doing well. It was a shattering realisation to make. His love had always been there. I had just not known where to look.

When it came to matters of the heart, he struggled to say what he meant so he built it out of dusty, discarded treasures he found on the streets. Thousands of hours of labour. The house was strewn with symbols of his love. And when he couldn't find the right words, he cooked for us. His love tasted of fresh lemongrass and cardamom and was as strong as the small, fiery chilli's he cooked with. His love smelt like cinnamon, thyme and belacan and sounded like 'Old and in the Way'. His love made a mess of the kitchen but his love was the best thing.

I remember, when I was 10, dad was leaving the house one day and I asked where he was going. He told me he was helping a neighbour fix their roof. I asked him 'why?', to which he replied, 'Someday Katherine, you may need help with your roof'.

You minus 3643 Days

10 years you've been gone. In the aftermath of your death my subconscious counted the days and it became habit. At 1872 days I lost count, but I never lost sight of you. It's been 3643 days. 10 trips around the sun. 10 occasions of pulling Father's Day brochures from the letterbox and realising what that means. 2.5 crop rotation cycles. 5 graduation ceremonies you should have attended. 100s of family dinner's missed.

Now you speak to me in dreams and I speak to you when I'm alone and driving in my car. About the latest David Graeber book you would have loved. The records you'd have played on repeat. I ask for your wisdom in improving the soil composition of my garden. What was the secret ingredient in that Chinese noodle soup you used to make us during winter? No matter how I try, I can't get it to taste quite the same.

I seek you out in pockets of liminal space and time that exist nebulously between this world and the next. Sometimes it's refractions of prismatic light dancing in my periphery during the golden hour. Other times it's a glimpse of a tall beardy you-like figure on a busy street, vanishing into the moving crowds. It's beautiful coincidences. Sharing a glance with a stranger that connects you for a brief moment in time. Call it apophenia, or call it apotheosis. In moments of tangency, usually accompanied by an acute awareness of my own impermanence, I sense you near.