Enter Young. Young is a town which happens to be about the same size as my home town. The town in which I grew up, and hated as I was growing up. I’m sure that more than a few friends of mine have heard me bitch about life in small towns before, and will be greatly surprised to find that I’m quite liking this one. Odd. I know.
But, anywho, we’ve had a few minor hassles about exactly who we’re working for, and on which farm we’re going to be working, but we have three open options, one option is far more desirable than the other two, but the other two would still be fine anyway. So, whatever happens, we’ll be fine.
I’m still sick though. I have this sinus/hayfever/cold/thing, and it’s driving me nuts. I’ve never had hayfever before. Ever. I don’t know why the hell I’ve suddenly fallen victim to it’s ugly, ugly consequences, but I have. Aparently, almost the whole town suffers from hayfever at this time of year – it’s something to do with the cherries ripening and the harvest of them – loads of pollen and insects and god-knows-what-else in the air.
Ye gads. I just read over that ^ entry, and realised that this journal is starting to sound like a travel diary. “Oh it’s a beautiful town but the pollen is just awful.” shudder My apologies. So, in an attempt to rectify that, I’ll talk about my mother.
She worries me. She seems to be getting worse, in the sense that she’s far more [read: over-] protective of me than she ever was while I was a child. Call me cynical, but I think if she had shown me this much concern when I was growing up, I would have been a far different person.. When I say she’s “getting worse,” I mean, worse by the day, by the month, not just ‘worse in comparison to 20 years ago’. Far more over-protective than she was 5 months ago. I know that this stems from the fact that she keeps seeing Clay as a far-more-upfront-and-direct-and-even-perhaps-aggressive-version-of-my-father-and-nothing-could-be-worse-for-me-than-that – but what she doesn’t see, what she doesn’t know, is that I have complete faith and trust in him [whilst still healthily keeping my wits about me]. Quite seriously, I would trust him with my life. She can’t see a] that I would; and b] why I would. And it stems down from the fact that she tries to rule the family with her iron fist, which occasionaly is covered by a velvet glove. And the fact that no one ever stands upo to her, so she keeps on keepin’ on, thinkin’ it’s alright to do that.. I’ve realised in the last month, that both my sister and I are actually quite terrified of her. Oh what a complex web we weave.. it’s a complicated family, but, having Clay’s outsider perspective shown to me has been quite illuminating… Speaking of my sister:
[Prelude/Reminder: My sister and her family [husband, who is disliked by my mother, and two small children, aged 5 and 4] have also packed up their life to go travelling. They joined us in Hillston [aka the freezing-nowheresville where I was before this] about two months ago, and will be moving on shortly to another town. Clay and I are spending a month of “family-free-fun” on our own here in Young, before all sides of the fammilyThere’s also a whole lotta shit about my sister that I’ve faced and worked through [with Clay at my side]. One scary moment that I faced in Hillston: I was standing in our unit, crying, telling Clay about some crap [read: difficult to tell story] relating to my childhood, and me ending it with “I just don’t feel like I have a sister,” then hearing a knock on the door, and seeing her face peering back at me through the glass sliding door… And we went through whatever it was that she came over for, and then Clay just up and says “Jody, can you tell your sister that you love her, she’s just feeling a bit down and I think she’d like to hear it.” And christ, I burst into tears when I heard it, and tears are welling again now.
Agh. That reads like a “woe is me” story. In general, it’s up and it’s down, there’s good and bad, black and white, and a thousand shades of grey inbetween… then there’s the rainbow.. the kaleidoscope.. lalalalala…