The Woman on the Mountain by Sharyn Munro Page B

place where I belonged, and the lack of physical work seemed to leave me out of kilter with myself. There was only stress and worry and no release for it.
    I began smoking again, which I hadn’t done since first becoming pregnant. It didn’t help, but somehow chimed with my desperation. I’ll stop when I’m happy, I promised myself. Which I did, just before I moved back to the mountain again with my new partner. It’s pathetic, I know, but I started rolling the smokes once more when that relationship began to sour. They were roughly nine-year cycles, I’ve calculated, but this time I stopped far sooner, determined not to be so pathetically dependent.
    It helps being so far from the temptation of town. Such a strong addiction is always hovering, waiting for the next stressful situation. It’s ironic when I think how hard I persevered with the damn things as a student, to overcome the nausea, so I’d fit in, look cool. If only we’d known...
    Often it rained on our precious mountain weekends, which we thought most unfair. We’d either leave Sydney on Friday evening or at dawn on Saturday. Sometimes the kids would bring a schoolfriend each. If we’d arrived at night, the visitors wouldn’t know what the outdoors was really like until next morning. I’ve never forgotten the pre-breakfast comment of one nine-year-old, whose home was an inner-city semi on the main Rozelle shopping street, with no front yard and a tiny cement rear yard. Taking in the paddocks, the surrounding forest, the mountains stretching away into the far distance, she said, ‘Gee, you’ve got a big back yard!’
    I’ve found four pages of scribblings from one wet autumn mountain weekend in one very wet mountain year. I’d forgotten them, but the freshness of detail, lost if left to memory alone, says a lot about those years of estrangement...

    Rainbound—a weekend feature of life at the mountain as a visitor—without the compensation of fine weekdays; those are wasted on Sydney days spent indoors at work.

    I light the fire in the fuel stove after arriving and unloading—go through the acclimatisation, the transition ritual of reading the Saturday papers I’ve brought with me, drinking coffee by the stove, letting the glimpses of dripping trees and low cloud swirling amongst the trunks slowly make it sink in—we are not in Sydney

    By lunch the papers are read. I start to think about the cabin I am in; what plans we had, what we didn’t do. By mid-afternoon am feeling relaxed; have a beer to prove that it really is a Saturday, and start to plan anew. Line the roof plug those holes, and even—build that extension. I go back through the Classifieds and pretend I have the money for those cedar leadlight doors or that load of slate.

    I love cooking up here—it feels a pleasure rather than a rushed duty. Because it’s dark so early, we have eaten and the kids are nodding off by 7.30—even though they will stay up to 11 in Sydney, driven in one-hour bursts by TV shows. The dim candlelight and the physical day they’ve had all make it seem later.

    They ride—trailbike and horses—regardless of weather. I watch them from my spot by the stove, through the low-set window put there specifically to see up the track. My daughter, in her brown Drizabone and Akubra hat, walking her horse leisurely ... then my son, after the usual repairs to his second-hand bike—a stranger in wet weather gear and monstrous helmet, flying off in a spurt of mud...

    I let the quiet wash over me. The fire crackles, the wind drives the fine cloud droplets onto the tin roof so it sounds like rain, and faintly the trees above me on the ridge line tell me that it is really windy up there—but it is just a faint roar, nothing threatening or disturbing.

    I browse through all my books—some as old as my first memories—and choose the one I’m going to read this trip.

    As the wet weekends continue I stop being angry at the wasted time, the jobs not able to be done,