I’d had my amazing Mum for a long time. First word that comes to mind in describing her is, simply, beautiful – inside and out. We called her our Queen of Love and Laughter. The matriarch who kept our family stuck together like glue.
She was born in 1926 – hard times world-wide – but despite that, Renee Lange, from an early age, created a world for herself where gloom, anger, negativity had no place. Not only did she grow up through the Great Depression, but World War II as well. In a strange way, and I’ve never thought about this till now, Mum was a bit of a loner. She read, and she loved gardens and gardening – Godwottery it’s called. What an ebullient word – from the line in T.E Brown’s poem ‘My Garden’ (1876) – ‘A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!’
After her mother became single during the war, Mum was sent, from time to time, to live with her grandfather, and the aunt who’d been assigned to his care when he became widowed, on their farm at Ebenezer in the Barossa Valley. So for months at a time she was treated like an adored, only child. She would walk – a mile or so along the dirt road to school – swinging her case and singing
‘Down a country lane, wild roses bloom, without a single care
I haven’t time to be a millionaire.’
Mum always had simple needs and was still singing this song well into her nineties.
She amused herself on the farm, climbing trees to look for birds’ nests, searching for eggs laid by the free-ranging hens, gathering lighting wood for the wood-stove, cleaning the milk separator, helping her aunt pick fruit from the orchard, vegies from the kitchen garden. It was an idyllic time in her life, and she told us that it was here that her life philosophies, life skills, ethics and ideals were born.
She married my dad in 1945. He was a country boy from near Lochiel in South Australia’s mid north – had grown up on the family farm. But while his elder brother had stayed to help his father, Dad had done his apprenticeship in boiler-making, and when Mum met him, was working at Islington Munitions Factory in Adelaide.
My memories go way back to when I was possibly only two years old. My parents were both incurable romantics, with music in their veins – at that time the war-time songs and jazz classics. As I sat between them in front of a cosy winter fire, Dad played the harmonica or saxophone while Mum sang, with soul, all those wonderful standards that I love to this day. From those two, down through the generations, we have, each and every one of us, inherited their love of music.
In her late thirties Mum became a kindergarten teacher. This didn’t sit well with my dad who, in accordance with the times, would have preferred to have had his wife at home, but it was the beginning of Mum’s life journey as a strong, independent woman. During this period she did make a handful of very close friends – women friends of her ilk. Fellow godwotters, music lovers, readers and beach-combers. With a girlfriend and children packed into a station-wagon they’d head to a remote beach shack on Yorke Peninsula for school holidays. A time of swimming, long beach walks, collecting firewood for the wood stove, evening food preparation of fresh fish, healthy salads, a glass or two of sherry for the mothers, and much laughter all round. All those kids still talk of those times being among their favourite memories, as we all do I think when it comes to beach holidays. Something just magical about them. I have written about some of mine in my memoir.
In the seventies, when her kids had grown and left home, Mum left her marriage that had become unsalvageable. She went to live in a barn on a friend’s property. And I mean a real thatch-roofed barn – not a barn converted into a home. But she made it into her home, for a few months. In it she had her bed, a wood stove, a table (always covered with a lovely table-cloth and fresh flowers), chairs, some pots and pans, and a battery operated record player with her vinyls. Glen Miller. Benny Goodman. Doris Day. Dinah Washington. She had to carry water from the house but she was free. She loved the outdoors, birds, the native flora.
Later, in the seventies, she travelled to Europe. She was over sixty. Had no itinerary. Roamed Europe for three months, gaining more life skills, strength of character and knowledge of the planet. In the mid eighties she was diagnosed with breast cancer, had a mastectomy, was supposed to have chemo and radiation therapy but refused it. Instead she decided she would heal herself naturally – with mind and spirit. She went to live on Kangaroo Island. In an army tent. In the bush, thirty metres from the sea. She would live quietly and allow only a handful of like-minded people into her life. She knew instinctively that this was what was required for her recovery. Again she decked the tent out in her style – rustic marine-type furniture – things made of driftwood, her wood-stove, bed with hand-made linen, table and cloths, pottery containers of shells, chairs enough for herself and a couple of friends, music, lanterns, and always flowers brought in from the bush. Here she read, wrote about her environment, made cards from coloured seaweed she’d picked up on the beach, made friends with penguins, sea-eagles, possums, snakes, and a multitude of birds. Before this she had met the love of her life who owned the piece of land she was living on. He flew over from the mainland often to spend time with her. Their lifestyle here in this wild remote place was the stuff movies are made of. At sunset, they’d sit on a large piece of driftwood they’d dragged up from the beach, and with wine in hand, they’d clink their glasses to each other, their love of the bush and their complete happiness. They dreamed of building a cottage here. It wasn’t a dream for long. Mum project-managed its creation from beginning to end. Together she and her sweet-heart carted large pre-cambrian rocks up a cliff-face in a wheel-barrow – for the fireplace and chimney – one pushing and the other pulling. The cottage was small, one whole wall of glass overlooking the sea that was virtually at their doorstep, a deck, bathroom, and one large room that was kitchen, living and bedroom all in one. Mum lived here for more than ten years. Cancer had no chance. We, her family, went over to visit from time to time – pitching tents in the bush and indulging in the simplest, most beautiful lifestyle one could imagine. Fresh fish and salad was usually the fare – sea spinach for greens – picked from just outside the back door.
This is beginning to read like a biography and I could go on for hours but won’t of course.
A few weeks ago at almost ninety five her life was coming to an end, and she was ready to go. My siblings and I sat in vigil (in turns) at her bedside for her last two weeks. We didn’t want her to die alone. We wondered if the staff at her Aged Care Facility had ever heard so much laughter coming from a dying person’s room, but Mum’s love of fun, her sunniness and sense of humour were with her till the end. We thought there must have been some serious ramping at the Pearly Gates as she was so nearly there and wanted to be, but had to wait her turn! Then the rascal went and died alone. I had just left her, and my brother and sister were still a few minutes away. So I think in the end she was in control – a bit.
Maybe there is a book in her life. We are left with her love, the sound of her laughter, her music, her songs and the memory of her Pollyanna nature. And of course we already miss her enormously.
For the one who hasn’t been able to ‘find anything’ of mine lately, here it is at last. If I was the committed writer you are there’d be no excuse. I dream that, one day, to write will be like cleaning my teeth – a daily thing. My calling.
Till next time,
Sue