Blueberries

This is what she’d miss the most - as the haze of city bowed out of sight in the rear view mirror.

Alone with the snake of road now, and the yawning, tree-lined vacuum of countryside to come.

Innocent enough; big blue arching sky piled with soft cloud pillars; their shadows reminded the neon fields below that the shine of canola flowers wouldn’t last in marching shadows.

So many things grew wild, hungry here.

You could get lost in the barrage of life attacking you from all sides.

What she’d miss the most?

Blueberries. Sweet, sensitive little things. Their skin deceptively tough around a shy, soft flavour beneath. They thrived in civilisation; greenhouses nurturing, teasing them with the celcius of their wildest dreams and feeding sweet water til they grew larger and tart and ripe; boxed neatly in their stickered boxes.

The control of it all – for her to measure out her deep blue dose of vitamins every day for her yoghurt and muesli.

To feel like she kept her body buzzing with only the best.

Paddocks out here showed signs of fencing in, careful weeding, straight line sowing. But the large granite outcrops stood, firm and frowning to attempts to till the land around them. They had seen enough, since their own birth before any living human memory. Enough to last ten lifetimes over.

The cloud shadows skittered; the granite hunched on brooding hilltops and dips; eerie sheep bleats like a wail across that ancient living land.

And goosebumps cross her skin like gooseberries. Because laid bare like this in a distant person-free land she is jarring with the land that supports her; like two acquaintences that knew each other long ago before their feud.

She longs for neat boxed berries.

The rock here, it hungers

Always waiting in a frown, with bared teeth, for her

to return home.