A Season for Everything By Tarla Kramer Copyright 2013 Tarla Kramer Smashwords Edition License Notes Thank you for downloading this free ebook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form. If you enjoyed this book, please return to Smashwords.com to discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support. When I was small, we lived in New Zealand and the smell of cool damp forest always brings me back to my earliest memories. I was four when we returned to Adelaide. I was shocked to find I did not actually belong to nice, green New Zealand and my parents told me my real home was this dry place of yellow grass. My son’s first memories will come when he smells rain on hot, dry earth. We moved to Alice Springs just before his second birthday as the spring rains were beginning. We would stand under the eaves during the downpour and enjoy the privilege of not having to get out of the rain. I learnt that the rain came most often if there was a tropical smell in the early morning. It was a surer guide than trusting the weather people, who didn’t seem to have a clue. I also learnt that to be considered local, you had to have seen the Todd River flow three times, a score which I notched up in my first two months. It was the Greenhouse Effect, the experts said, and that wet spring was hardly normal. It took until early December before the place started to dry out again. As well as leaving my forebears in Adelaide, I had left a lover behind in La Paz, Bolivia. He was the father of my son. We were trying to get our act together as a couple but as week after scorching week went by, I heard nothing from him. Through January and February, the top temperatures stuck at around 40C. I remember noticing that it was slightly cooler one afternoon as I hung up the washing and saw on the news that it had only reached 37C that day. The heat continued until the end of March without relent, high thirties every day. I would find it strange to see fashion pages with winter clothing in the Woman’s Day. Apparently it was autumn elsewhere, although there was no evidence of it here. The locals commented that by now, Alice Springs was supposed to have experienced a few cooler days of around 30C. Yeah right, I thought. Then one day it happened. I stepped outside in the morning to a breeze so cool it almost chilled and walked around in the garden, letting it wrap around me. I found something warmer to put on and paced up and down some more. I had not heard from my man for six months when, just like that first cool wind, an unexpected envelope appeared in the letterbox. Winter followed, so mild that my tomato plants and self-seeded papaya tree thrived. I loved the crisp, sunny days when you think of everyone else, freezing their arses off down south. Some Aboriginal sisters told me it usually rained more often in winter but we had only about three lots. Winter finished early and by mid-August, it was really spring again. Dust devils chased each other across the dry landscape as they ran from 30-second showers. By September, the first hot days blazed up. I dreaded the six months ahead and wondered how the hell I would survive. But in between the hot days came gentler ones, with the scent of citrus blossom in the air, and my hopes of seeing you-know-who again were growing. A storm hit in October. I took my son to the top of Anzac Hill to watch the lightning streak across the sky. Not for long because a part of me still wants to hide under the bed when lightning strikes. The thunder spoke of an aberration in the weather and that summer, the rains just kept on coming. By January, the station owners were buying up extra cattle in the anticipation of a bumper year. February 2000 brought the Big Wet. The Todd flowed so many times that even the people off the tour buses could have classed themselves as local. Work colleagues in Sydney asked me if I had any photos of it raining on the Rock, not realizing that it was 450 kilometres away by road and that the roads were cut anyway. I wished my man were here to see the rain. But it was probably just as well he wasn’t because I would have been tempted to stay in bed with him instead of working. He arrived after the rain, as the wildflowers germinated. The wildflowers were wonderful. Each time we drove into the country, something else would be flowering. Further south, even the self-absorbed Sturt Desert Pea deigned to put in an appearance. After three months, my partner’s visa expired but before he left, we married on a perfect winter day of steady rain in Adelaide. When he was gone, frost killed my tomatoes and papaya tree. Then it was back to dreadful September. I felt trapped in Alice Springs, closed-in by the hundreds of kilometres of desert in every direction. I had been here for two years and sometimes, in the melancholy of late afternoon, I would wake and ask myself: Where am I? What the hell am I doing here? Why is my other half on the other side of the world? I stuck up photos of my Swiss friend’s daughter playing in the snow. Somehow, I got through that summer. By now, you have probably realized that my favourite season in Australia is autumn, with its promise of a long period of grace from nature’s baking oven. But timing has never been one of my strong points and I was leaving soon. On a mild, autumn night, the full moon shone in my window, keeping me awake, and the cat meowed, demanding to go out. I could hear a murmur of some Aboriginal language outside. Those sleeping under the stars would have been even more inclined to lunacy than I was. On 1 June I returned to La Paz for six months on a mission to get pregnant, so I missed the cooler season here. Over in Bolivia, the Greenhouse Effect had been busy too and there was a lot more rain and snow during winter, which is usually reliably clear and sunny in the Andes. Then came an abnormally dry spring and the summer rains only began after I left. Meanwhile, the southern half of Australia was having the wettest spring on record but the rains dried up the moment I returned. In Alice Springs, summer was arid, with only a couple of days of drizzle, while on the news, I saw an Aymara woman being swept down the streets of La Paz. The only clouds here billowed with smoke from endless bushfires. At the end of March, I gave birth to a daughter and waited for that first, cool morning but it never came. April went by, still in the thirties, the hottest April on record, then May, much warmer than it was supposed to be. The first evening chill did not arrive until it was almost June. Meanwhile, it was snowing like never before in La Paz. My husband joined me at last. He came to settle in Australia but for a while, married life turned out to be as difficult as long-distance romance. Smoke haze from bush fires far and near engulfed Alice Springs, as well as dust from a whole continent in drought, which had me reaching for my inhaler. Clouds gathered but were too high up to deposit any water. Or I would see distant streaks of rain that evaporated before it fell to earth. Until one morning, we woke again to a tropical aroma in the air. We hardly dared to hope. Then it came down and the smell of rain on hot earth made us all as joyful as my little man, who danced in the gutters. ### Author’s Note This piece was published in BushMag, Journal of the Outback, in Alice Springs in 2003. It was a magical time, and all of those involved patted each other on the back and felt good for a while. Some of us put many hours into making the magazine an annual publication, but it didn’t happen. As the Editor, Helen Womack, said, “BushMag was a flower that blossomed in the desert only once. It was all the more beautiful for that.”