new clothes and old roads

Spring has brought with it the call to life that has slumbered deep inside us since the end of march. Everyone in Melbourne has felt it in the last week; something slowly unfurling inside of them, stretching, drawing the curtains, taking its first tentaive steps towars the front door. The light skies and new greenery have called for tea parties, kite-flying, morning jaunts to the market and fast-driving with the windows down. Maybe this has something to do with the life drive; that calling to health and and equilibrium that balances out the destructive forces within all of us. Because new things make us all feel a little more sane. New leaves and new sun brought shoppers out in force yesterday, in search of things to make themselves feel a little newer too. I wasn’t immune—I bought new clothes last week for the first time in months. My overwhelmingly black wardrobe, which I had mentally penned as “classic and elegant” suddenly took on the characteristics of “dowdy and morbid” in the light that blasted through my bedroom window. I came home with new blue jeans, a red checkered shirt and a white t-shirt with an old film print on it. I got my eyebrows waxed for the first time in months too. Undeniably, the had weather awoken some innate urge within me to rejuvenate. And suprisingly, instead of the usual retail therapy guilts that go with any significant spending, I felt nothing but lighthearted as I emptied my bank account down to the remaining $4.49 that I’ll have to make do with until payday. Not that I need the Bible to justify my spendings, but if the lilies of the field get colourful new dresses for spring, why shouldn’t I?

I’ve always been a little skeptical of the idea that the weather acts as a mirror of ones interior state, but in the last week it seems foolish to deny it. Breathing in the spring air seems to have cleared away the cobwebs of stress and depression better than Zoloft ever could. Not that I don’t love a good gloomy day, in fact I rather enjoy reveling in the melancholy for a day or two. But after five months of it, warm yellow light and a fresh breeze proved to be exactly what was missing. It makes me wonder whether people that live in warmer climates really are significantly more mentally healthy and happy than the ones in the arctic.

But spring isn’t only a call to embrace the new; for me it seems fundamentally linked to a turn back towards the past. Towards other times, other things that happened under the same sun and the same weather a year or ten years before. Of course this can happen at anytime of the year, but spring seems to be the time to call up old friends, listen to old music, visit places you haven’t been to in months or years. During spring two years ago I got my drivers lisence. I met the season soaring along the bumpy back roads between Coldstream and Chirnside Park to work and back, past farms and bushland with the windows down so that within a week my dashboard was littered with hay-fever inducing grass seeds. I listened to Imogen Heap and Liz Phair incessantly, and even though it was a brand new era of my life, I remember feeling that it was as though the last eighteen years of my life had compacted together to deliver me into that one moment. Spring weather constantly calls me back to childhood, to the cyclical nature of life, and thus at the same time as it celebrates newness, the strongest feeling that I get from spring is one of wholeness. Wholeness is one of those words I hate, like purity and stability. But the “wholeness” feeling I get from Spring hasn’t anything to do with that, it’s a wholeness that seems to come from seeing life (past, present, future) as one; an intangible yet real thing working together to construct and order life.

Maybe I’m analysing Spring far too much. Maybe my all too visceral body is respondly purely and simply to its seasonal body clock, caveman style. Perhaps Spring only triggers a bout of nostalgia, serving to remind me of my provincial origins and the fact that deep down I’ll never escape a primal love of pop music. Either way, crawling out of the cave sure feels good.

*Ladies* of *Cambridge*

Your week is filled with factory-fresh Mercedes and traffic lights routinely set fifty feet apart. Silky wet tram tracks, clamouring children, a bevvy of hurried umbrellas. But today is quiet, you’re half asleep—lacy shop fronts and flourishing billboards curtsying to a nonexistent audience on the footpaths below. You might see somebody different here today; a shabbily dressed musician busking on the street, a beat-poet girl writing in the park, a few joggers blasting indie from their ipods. But in all likelihood, there’ll still be the women.

“What do you want with those shopping bags, Carmen?”  (paper, cardboard, plastic.) “I use biodegradable ones now.” Because, at last, being environmentally friendly has caught up with the upper-middle class, who don’t start trends; (far too busy, they merely follow.) Except for perhaps, those recurring slate grey fisherman’s pants and crocodile print boots;

“Well like Jean said, you simply can’t get them anywhere further east than Camberwell.”

But you’re not impressing us one little bit, Jean darling—with your handmade jewellery and vintage designer purse. Postmodern fashion died in the arse in the nineties and you’re nothing more than the wealthy dregs of its remnants. Today it’s especially prominent;

“Size thirty-three point five, thankyou.” Like we’re in Paris or Denmark; “forgive me, sometimes I forget what country I’m in!” Arctic white teeth flashing.

“Oh! That some of us should be so lucky.” (Tongue clamped between your own teeth as you mentally subtract that sum into English.)

And at the counter; “Are you sure that’s the final price?” All bargaining and batering like we’re in Malaysia or Singapore and she’s struggling to feed her sobbing malnourished offspring wasting away at home.

“In this economic climate you have to watch every cent you spend.” Insurance banker husband, hefty paternal inheritance, crown jewels aside; “No, we really can’t afford that today.”

“Well, better keep those credit cards in their wallet then, darling. Those shoes simply don’t fit and I really don’t have the time.”  (You have till five, actually.)

Five more robotic hours, to think about tonights frozen food, Penelope’s childhood and how, five years ago, you would have given anything to live here.

“But now she’d much rather be north, or north-west. It’s this suburb, see. It’s just no good anymore.”

It never was going to suit you anyway. You’d be much better off in the North. Yes, in the shabby cafe’s with ochre crockery and wooden utensils off Sydney road, or in the musty shops on Smith street, damp like you’re grandmother’s closet. You always were a a sucker for nostalgia, for it’s fleeting back dissapearing around a street corner, it’s fading footsteps on a grey footpath leading to nowhere. Nostalgia grows so much better in the North.

“It’s just the right climate, and besides, out here we really don’t have the time.”

You’d be much better off to take that vinyl suitcase and you’re fluffy beret and sit yourself down on the 96 tram (if you can find room).

“We don’t have much space here, as you can see, our schools are full to the overflow.” Spoken as though her precious antique tea-cups might spill and break if another Hawthorn barrister impregnates his russet-haired, slim-thighed secretary. Disaster!

“Xavier wouldn’t know what to do with itself!”

It’s amusing, really—the thing’s that scandalise here. Take heed of the thing’s you simply can’t get away with. No midnight visits to safeway—floppy moccasins and cloud-print pajamas, just for some tim-tam’s and a carton of milk.

“They don’t bat an eyelid at that in the North, can you believe?” But here, like Enid said, it’s simply not done.

So traipse back up through that glorious mecca of cautious consumption to your hatchback parked in the no-standing zone, pay that tiresome ticket and be on your way.