by Mary
July 2020
The last sport my son was willing to play other than cricket (always willing to play cricket) was a season of AFL. I used to cycle the Bay Run circuit in the dark while he trained under the brutal lights of the football oval.
These are phone photos, but don’t argue with #GloriousSydney.
June 2020
I decided if I was going to spend way more time at home, I would do it with nice cups.
Espresso cups by Kim Wallace Ceramics, mugs by Takeawei.
May 2020
From the same outing as the pretty autumn leaves, a suburban snake:
Snakes aren’t as common as the Australian mythos in which we fight a Sisyphean battle against them daily, armed only with our teeth and in some cases our Irish ancestry, but they’re also not as rare as some folks would like to be assured either. I’ve never run into one in a suburban backyard, but seeing them on farms or in the wilderness is not a surprise, and this is the second black snake I’ve seen in a botanic garden; evidently botanic gardens are just big and wild enough to sustain some non-curated predators.
This one in Auburn was definitely the most active snake I’ve ever personally seen though, it was absolutely gunning it across the path and up the hill on whatever hunting mission it was on. I wouldn’t have backed myself trying to outrun it. We paid a lot less attention to the canopy and more to the forest floor afterwards.
May 2020
This album comes via a quick detour to update Wikipedia so that I understood how school reopenings worked in New South Wales in 2020, specifically:
From 11 May [2020], students returned to school one day a week with a plan for a phased return over several weeks. From 25 May, the phased return was replaced with full-time schooling.
Wikipedia: COVID-19 pandemic in New South Wales (2020)
I had decided in advance that when school went back — it was remote for seven weeks, and two weeks of Easter holidays — that my spouse and I would then immediately take a week off work. Thus, the week of 25 May, we went somewhere each day in Sydney to explore, of which the most photogenic was Auburn Botanic Gardens in late autumn colours.
May 2020
Prime example of why I can’t declare photo bankruptcy: autumn in my mother’s garden in May of 2020.
By May, there was very little COVID in most of Australia, which had closed its borders to non-residents in late March and would not re-open them for tourists until February 2022. The weekend of 16/17 May was the first significantly unrestricted weekend, and so we went to visit my family post-haste.
It’s sometimes tempting; I’ve only completely worked through my photos through to early May 2020. After that is patchy: cheer competitions and cricket finals. Somewhere deep in there are well over a thousand photos I took just in two weeks in Europe in 2022.
But I can’t stop when my babies are in there. I don’t yet have any photos to hand of the entire year my son was thirteen.
A few things that have helped:
