Won’t you celebrate with me

A few words on turning forty

Hello dear friends,

Last weekend we celebrated the winter solstice (with a family dip in the ocean) and a few weeks ago it was my fortieth birthday. Wahoo! Here’s a little rumination on this milestone and a snippet from our solstice swim. I hope you enjoy.

Thank you, as always, for making a little time in your day to read my words. I am honoured to be sharing this journey with you. And a very special thank you to my gorgeous paid subscribers, your support warms my heart and gives me the courage to continue to write and share my words.

With love and friendship,

Kate xx

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winter sunset in Lutruwita / Tasmania

These days I’m wearing all the things I haven’t had enough of — sparkly dresses, cockatoo earrings, delicate underwire bras, princess plaits, rainbow striped boots, and my favourite lime green, floral overalls. Sometimes I wear my pyjamas to the corner shop, bridging nightwear to daywear with the addition of a woollen vest and a little blue bum bag.

I no longer worry that my children look at me and say, Embarrassing! Can you not wear that at school pick up?. I no longer worry that my ‘shorts’ season is coming to an end, or that my wild eyebrows will soon be framed by reading glasses.

I am a woman who has lived for forty wonderful years and I want the world to know — I’m still burning.

*

Looking back, it probably started long before my fortieth birthday. But that day felt like a turning point. It was a Thursday — 17 precious hours ahead of my twin brother, who was on the other side of the world with his family. Though I’m younger by just five minutes, on our fortieth birthday, I claimed a sweet victory.

Do you feel any connection?, my Aunty asked in a video call that morning. You know, like twins do, pain, joy?

Not really, I said. But I was already thinking of the time my brother had flown home when I was diagnosed with a brain tumour. How he had sat beside me in the hospital garden with a newspaper boat on his head, while I wore a patch over one of my wonky eyes, both of us screaming like pirates. On days like this I miss my twin, especially his easy smile and floppy dark hair.

Did you get any insect gifts this year? my Aunty teased. Not yet, I replied, remembering the giant cockroaches that arrived on my 39th birthday.

Where in the world is that an acceptable gift?, she teased, and we both laughed.

The kids are taking me horse-riding and go-carting, I shared. Oh and I got a packet of giant pumpkin seeds and a book on how to use a table saw. More giggling. Every forty year old woman needs a gargantuan gourd in her garden and solid wood-working skills, I said, but secretly, I hoped my gifts were a sign of something more — an enduring love? An easing into a wild and graceful life?

*

On the morning of my birthday, I had crept upstairs to my desk and picked up my green notebook. I had pressed my thumb into its sheets and flipped it open. And there, waiting for me, was the middle — neat forest-green stitches, running down the centre of two clean pages. I gasped, holding my breath and my pen above the straight grey lines.

Then I wrote the first real thing, and the next, until I was writing the sound of my husband whistling from the kitchen downstairs, and my eldest daughter playing the electric piano in the lounge room. The swirl of auburn tea at the bottom of my green and blue mug — all that is left of the present she delivered to me when I was still in bed. The ache in my left calf muscle from running yesterday. The bouncy curls in my hair, a gift from my hairdresser who said, So you look beautiful for days. And outside the window, the man in shorts and a beanie walking his dog under the dim glow of the street lights.

Later there was pancakes with the kids, a trail run on my favourite mountain, tea and cake with my mum, and a dinner with friends in our boatshed by the River. Everything a wild Tasmanian woman could want to feel loved and honoured.

My mother gave me a beautiful red coffee press. For your writing, she said, and we smiled at each other across the kitchen table, both of us remembering how she was once caffeine free too, until university and all those long evenings at her computer writing.

*

I’m running a marathon, I told my husband one night in bed. Oh, you’re ‘that age’, he teased. And I laughed too, out of sympathy for the woman I had become. But the next day I woke in the dark, one whole hour before my alarm — and even I was afraid.

I may be older than the internet and smashed avocado on toast — my mothers favourite when we lived in Sydney — but I was going to do it, all 42.195 kilometres of pure flat road.

Friends, let me tell you: at forty, I no longer want to be comfortable.

I want my days to rupture. I want to feel the cold winter sea burn my skin. I want the dirt to push so far under my nails I cannot scrub it out. I want to rise, tired and aching, to see the first light of day bend and curl into the most vivid colours.

I want to walk in the quiet of the forest behind my house and hear the insects chirping under the earth. I want to be held against the wall and loved so hard I might break. I want silence and darkness and no one to touch me, sometimes.

I want to roll down a hill covered in autumn leaves with my children, all of us laughing so much we cannot hear the rumble of the city. And I want to gather joy and wonder the way I collect little rocks shaped like hearts, stacking them in an old printer tray beside my writing desk.

There are so many things I want and yet —

I do not want to wear nostalgia like a cloak or a second skin. I quit. I know I cannot go back. I will never be an Olympic gymnast, or sing in a band, or save the eye sight of hundreds of children. And I am alright with that.

I know I cannot forget the past, because memory is etched in my body — the scar running down the back of my head beneath my auburn hair, the smooth belly of an abalone shell, the smell of sweet, sweet lanolin when I wash the vest my mother knitted for me, and the sting of cool air on my face as I lift into the sky on a swing in the park.

Tell me, what are the things you long for?

*

Welcome to your forties, my girlfriends said, in the school playground. It’s the decade where we return to ourselves, peel away the layers, emerge as ‘you’.

Oh, I said, that sounds fun. But lately I’ve noticed new layers growing — skin tags, bone bumps, and pads of fat on my knees. Perhaps, ageing is not a shedding, but a gathering — of all my ‘selves’, vices and errors, yearnings and fears.

Perhaps, ageing is a thickening of the soul, a hardiness that develops with the passing of time, like my vigorous and woody rosemary hedge in our back garden, that will never give up. Not even a child can push through.

And perhaps forty is not the middle, but the start, because the end is somewhere else and it will come, it always does. But perhaps, you already know this — the changes that we all experience in the course of our short human lives.

What do you want to come back as?, my son asked each of us over dinner one night. Something graceful, I told him, a turtle, or a bird.

*

One week after my birthday, I drive to our little boat shed on the edge of the Derwent River. I want to write a letter to you about turning forty. But even here — sitting on the back deck, on a small canvas fold-out stool and looking out over the Bay — I am distracted. I thought ageing was all about understanding. But it’s nearly midday and still the sun has not pushed through the clouds.

I want to write a ‘catalogue of wisdoms’, a ‘how to guide for friends welcoming their fourth decade’, but there is a Great Egret standing on the glass balustrade of the boatshed next door, and she is balancing on one long grey leg, preening her beautiful white feathers. I bet she is forty — in avian years, that is (seven, maybe eight, if my daughter’s bird book is correct).

The gulls, playing on the metal dinghy below, do not bother her. She is a lady of the Bay after all, experienced and wind-boned. A woman paddles a sleek blue kayak, and further out, a tug boat guides a container ship. A dog barks and the air rings with the twittering of birds. They sound worried, I think — but still she does not move.

Suddenly her skinny head turns to the water. I follow her yellow eye to where the weak winter light scrambles on the surface — a maze of mud and steel and bubbles glinting with the tiniest rainbows. And, something within me cracks.

Friends, have you noticed how the world grows more beautiful as you age?

How colours pop, even as the light drains from your own body — your lips, your cheeks, even your eyes?

How everything has an intensity that even you cannot turn from?

How the pine trees dance in luminous green dresses, the westerly wind sings a shanty, and the glistening river-water waves and waves and waves — a constant celebration of you.

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Two beautiful poems on the beauty of ageing

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other things

• On the shortest day of the year my family and I celebrated with a dip in the ocean and a picnic at our favourite beach. It’s a little ritual we started a few years ago. The air was unusually warm for mid-winter in lutruwita / Tasmania, a little Island at the bottom of the world. But the water was winter— my limbs screamed, my blood thrummed, and my breath almost stopped. It took all my courage to stay water-bound. Afterwards, we sipped hot chocolates on the beach and shared jam donuts. And my skin flamed with an aliveness I hadn’t felt in months.

• This song, by Max Richter, written in response to the US invasion of Iraq, a contemplation of the sorrows of war. A beautiful antidote for the current state of the world.

• A woman in a polar night is the perfect novel for winter (thanks Catherine for the gift)

• I’m thrilled that one of my stories has been published in Brain Tumour Alliance Australia’s bi-annual magazine. You can read here.

• I loved this essay by

  Jeannine Ouellette
  on how to write a poem about love without saying the words heart or soul.

• Tasmania has a new chamber orchestra — The Tasmania Collective. Classical music as you have never heard it. We loved the opening night. Link here for more.

• I can’t wait to read this book and then watch the movie. For lovers of nature and walking as a way to be in the world.

• This podcast on the history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Foundational world history for those who forgot.

• This article by

  Bri Lee
  on luxury and literature in Marrakesh. Bri’s tours are on my wish list.

• Thank you, dear friends, for reading to the end, this was a long one.

Snowy and Lullaby

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Until next time,

wishing you warmth and light,

Kate xx