Kiddo, Mic and Little Abby met up with Tress and I at a cafe in Weston yesterday morning. We had a good brekky, walked around the Cooleman Court shopping centre for a little bit, then Tress and I said our goodbyes and made the drive back to Melbourne.
It was raining throughout the journey. We left a bit after 10.30am, and got home just a bit after 5.30pm. As usual, the drive was long and tiring. As we pulled into the driveway of our home in Melbourne, I had mixed emotions running through inside. As always, it’s good to be home but home is so far from them. We’d had a wonderful 5 weeks with them and it’s hard to deal with being so far from them now.
Tress and I unloaded the car – which was packed to the rafters – unpacked, and put things away and I started to put my home office back together, ready for work the next day. As it turned out, I had forgotten the HDMI cable for the monitor; having left it on the monitor thinking it was Kiddo/Mic’s when I had said to them I had brought my own. So Tress and I decided I’d go into the office the next day instead, and work from home on Tuesday, when we’d have the boys back.
On one of those days when Little Abby came to the Chapman AirBnB unit for her parents to have lunch there, I had played her some Paul Kelly music. I chose the Magpie Song. It was a simple and soothing tune, with lyrics that intermingled the mimicking of the magpies’s gurgling calls with a narrative of quick snapshot of the lives of a farmer and his wife. Tom and Elizabeth bought a farm, worked on it, gotten old, became sick and died. At each turn, the magpie’s “quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle” punctuated a chapter of their lives, which eventually ended, as all lives will. The magpie’s lyrical calls live on, as does creation.
Little Abby has begun her journey. She will grow and live a wonderful life. Even as she goes on to create life of her own, our lives will come to and end. The cycle, the circle, will keep plodding on and lives will begin, and end. Creation remains. For now. One day, lives that ended will be resurrected. New bodies will be gifted to dwell in a new earth. New bodies that will never end. It sounds like a fairy tale, except it isn’t. The “Good Book” said it will happen. We (especially Tress) has been singing to Little Abby, that Jesus loves her this we know, for the Bible tells me so. So yes, my body – torn hamstring and all – will one day take on a brand new form. One that will be perfect. One that will hear the perfect tune that the magpie makes. Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle may sound like a Mozart creation then. Creation won’t then just “remain. It will be redeemed and perfected. That’s real hope. That’s reason to plough on.
Ante 