Green Thumbed

I woke up this morning after four hours' sleep and decided that I would do something that I had put off for a long time - cleaning the backyard.

The last time I remember cleaning the backyard was for my brother's 30th birthday celebrations, oh, let's say two years ago.

Okay, I am not your typical slob... I do clean the house when inspired (every few months) and I like a relatively organised space. I am not a neat freak, though - it's not like I have colour-coded my underwear (anymore) and I am happy to leave certain things unwashed in the sink until there is a critical mass (or until the leftover food on the plate starts to grow legs).

My previous housemate, Li and I took up the enormous task of cleaning the backyard two years ago. Like explorers, we took our gloves and machetes (read: meat cleaver) to the jungle that was the backyard and started pulling away at weeds and hacking away at overhanging branches. I had the added advantage that Li worked part time as a gardener in one of the local houses to supplement his student income.

Several hours later we stood over the empty courtyard, victorious once more over all that nature had to throw at us - some poor defenceless grass and a few helpless branches.

This time, however, I have had to go at cleaning up two years of accumulated mess alone. I lifted up a garbage bag of leaves that had been sitting there for some time to reveal a tiny ecosystem of earthworms and a hundred silvery wriggling things (which I thankfully did not recognise) as well. Gross.

As I pulled away at the grass and weeds with my rubber-gloved hands, the number of creepy-crawlies amplified - here a spider pregnant with eggs, there a fluttering moth, and mosquitoes everywhere.

The tree in the back had overgrown again, and I looked pensively at it after an hour or so of clearing the weeds and dead leaves below. I finally got my brother to bring the meat cleaver again, and I whispered a quick apology before hacking away at the branches.

You know that scene in ninja/kung fu movies where the hero cuts through a forest deftly with his sword and bamboos and branches fall around and behind him as he takes a stance and faces off his enemy coolly?

That was so not me.

The meat cleaver was blunt, and after hacking at the green branches for ten minutes, the branches had barely a graze. The tree shook in the wind, as if laughing at me, and saying 'Is that all you got?' before smacking me around with some of its branches.

I remember all my training in my sporadic years as a Boy Scout (Tenderfoot extraordinaire) and took to the branches but this time at a 45 degree angle and then pulling as hard as I could as the bark showed. It started to work, and soon it was me laughing at the tree, cutting off its multiple low lying limbs and clearing the pathway for the sunlight so that the weeds below could grow healthily once more.

Oops. I think I just undid a morning's worth of hard work.

Random Memories: Eight Years Old  

I remember when we were still kids, we used to have a garden outside our home in TD. We had a mango tree and a papaya one as well, with a healthy layer of grass underneath to complete the Home of The Year look.

Every few months, the grass would grow to a point where we were sent out to go and 'pluck the grass'. We would grab at it with our bare hands, throwing it into a pile in a corner, wishing all the time that we owned a goat that would eat our work away.

The reward after two hours of hard work was that you got to set the grass on fire. This was before the days of hazes and environmental consciousness and pollution. We would set a newspaper on fire at the kitchen stove and then run through the dining room, walk gingerly past the living room and then try and stuff it into the stack of grass.

I remember as kids we were entrusted with the task of blowing up the fire - we would huff and puff until our faces went blue and we staggered a little from the hyperventilation - it was then we decided fanning it with newspapers were the smarter option.

I would laugh gleefully as the flames finally consumed the grass, sending puffs of smoke and dancing pieces of charred newspaper up into the air. All that was left in the end was a mound of ashes which we used to fertilise the trees, and the... grass and... weeds again.

Oops. I think I just undid two hours worth of hard work.

A New Year. A New Resolution.

Happy 2011 to all my friends, family and readers, who have given up reading this blog entirely for the sole reason that they have married and remarried, have had four babies and moved into nursing homes waiting for me to put up another post since my last one!

Haha! Indeed, this blog has been forsaken for the far quicker gratification of the mistress that is Facebook. Add to that the iPad and hanging out at Karen's and there you have my year in a nutshell. 

But no longer. This will be a year of returning to my first love - of writing, and telling stories.  Terribly.

Random Memories: Nine Years Old

Karen and I were walking along Box Hill aka Asian Central after dinner yesterday, and out of curiosity, we strolled into what looked like a candy and snack shop.

The shop itself was a curiosity - it sold your average snacks and drinks, but then there were display cabinets displaying soft toys (understandable) and bras (what the?!) for sale.

We sauntered around the shop a bit, picking snacks at leisure. As we were checking out, my vision strayed onto these little square boxes sitting enticingly along the counter, and my eyes suddenly lit up with nostalgic recognition!

These bubble gum boxes were the stuff of my childhood - sold everywhere, from supermarket counters to the old grandfather-vendor who used to sit outside my primary school.

They were sold for the measly price of 10 sen each, and brought me much happiness as a child. Four little baubles of bubble gum, bursting with fruit flavours! My favourite was the grape flavour, and so I bought a box with little hesitation.

For the mere price of 30 Australian cents I suddenly held a key to my childhood again, as I have not seen this bubble gum for a very long time.

I remember how as a child of nine, this very box of bubble gum taught me a very important life lesson - inflation.

The cost of living had gone up, and trying to keep the price of the bubble gum the same, the manufacturers had taken instead to the sneaky task of removing one bubble gum, so that only three balls of pleasure were left in the box.

I remember when I first opened the box with three gums in them. I stared blankly for awhile at the three purple balls and turned to look suspiciously at the supermarket that sold it to me.

My little mind raced to the factories where these magical bubble gums were made, and I imagined this poor Japanese auntie, tired from overwork, accidentally miscounting the bubble gum quota per box, making the life of this nine year old particularly miserable for the day.

It was only later, when my second and third boxes all had only three gums in them as well, did my mind finally compute that my nine year old life was never going to be the same again.

It was a harsh lesson for a young kid to learn, and I recounted my story to Karen, who laughed and we made a little bet on how many this box would contain.

Karen, the eternal optimist, said four, while I - all illusions broken at the tender age of nine - said three.

My fingers fumbled clumsily with the outer plastic wrapping  and I popped open the box to find - four! little bubbles of joy!

I actually let out a little laugh of disbelief, my childhood self restored once again. Sure, they cost the equivalent of 90 sen today, but even hope has not escaped the claws of inflation.

Every bite still burst with (artificially flavoured) grape flavour, and I did what my nine year old self would have done - two gums first, then wait for the flavour to run out, then one, wait for the flavour to run out, and then the last one.

It's amazing how the mouth remembers.