Wattle Day–a Spring memory.
This piece from 2015 was written some months before dad died, in the year of his last wattle and his last Father’s Day. The boy is now nearly 21, and our footy teams are both in the finals! Breathing in the bittersweet memories.
Officially we hit Spring today.
The other day I walked out my front door and my tiny garden of evergreens was drenched in golden flowers. It’s funny how a flower can spring forth (spring, ha!) with barely a warning.
Wattle fresh, wattle fleeting.
We have the spring rains to come, Father’s Day, a significant family birthday (13 year old boy) and footy finals, though our teams have released us from duty this year. Sigh. These are the markers of this month in Melbourne.
But today, it was the wattle which sent my reflections back to last Father’s Day, when I took Dad a bunch of wattle from the garden, knowing how he loved the fragile flower. Drooping around the lillies, the wattle added whimsy to a somewhat sombre occasion.
That Father’s Day was our first whole family gathering for years, with the traditional roast being served. Dad had passed the baton to the kids, as he could no longer stand up to cook. We worked as a team to make the rib eye roast, the gravy and all the vegetables.
In a change for that year, 2014, Dad was at home, for a brief period out of hospital in a year filled with dramas and emergencies. ‘Hospital in the home’ had been given a go, and the doctors were ministering to him with saline, pumping him full of fluid every second day, trying to keep his kidneys functioning enough to keep him alive.
By the Sunday of Father’s Day, Dad was so bloated he could barely get up. Breathing was hard, and he clearly was not well. But as people do, he rallied for the event, ate and drank and made it through the meal. Afterwards he told me that he didn’t really enjoy the meat, as he couldn’t taste the food anymore. Taste, fleeting.
The next morning, drowning in fluid, we lifted Dad into a van and delivered him back to hospital. The road from there was traumatic: a near death fluid overload, heart strain, then opiate overdose and hallucinogenic delusions. The hospital stay led to a period in respite care, where for the first time we visited Dad in an aged care centre. A week before Christmas, he came home, with a dialysis routine sorted out, and the future ahead of him again.
This year has been an almost hospital-free year for Dad, and next weekend he will come to ours for a roast for Father’s Day. I have put the wattle in the bottle at my place, oh yeah! Camparis all round, please, on the rocks, and stirred with bittersweet wattle.
Postscript: I wrote about the last Father’s Day roast for The Guardian. Includes the wing rib roast beef recipe!
