Sweet Surrender by Mary Moody Read Free Book Online

encouraged us to abandon the idea of keeping stock while water reserves were so low, and he redesigned and rebuilt the fencing so that when the day finally comes that we are once again able to put animals out to graze, they won’t be able to walk through the wetland or trample and despoil the creek or the dams that flow into it. He also eradicated the broom and blackberry that had started to proliferate in various paddocks and set aside an area for natural bush regeneration. The trees that have seeded on that hillside are now well over three metres tall.
    Living in an extended family requires tolerance and compromise. For twenty-six years while the children were growing up, my mother, Muriel, lived with us at Leura, and it required a lot of give and takefrom all of us to make it work. Having our young family at the farm reminded me of how carefully the situation had to be managed. It was harmonious most of the time, but there were some hair-trigger moments. Ethan needed to get up extremely early to shower for work. David was also in the habit of rising early, to make his ritual three cups of coffee that allow him to ‘ease into’ the day. Our water pressure at the farm is pretty dodgy, reliant on a pump to send water into the kitchen and bathroom. Some mornings David inadvertently had the taps flowing in the kitchen during Ethan’s shower, leaving the poor boy shivering under a pathetic cold drizzle. Words were spoken. Yet this living arrangement, so common in previous generations when young married couples often stayed with their parents until they found their feet financially, ultimately became very agreeable and cosy.
    David loves small children, but doesn’t have a natural aptitude with them. This interlude enabled him to develop a delightful relationship with his youngest grandson. One of David’s chores is to care for our flocks of geese, ducks and chicken, which involves releasing the geese to graze every morning, feeding and watering the remaining birds and collecting the eggs. In the evening the eggs are collected, water freshened, and geese rounded up for the night. Caius took to helping his grandfather with this task, and the sight of the two of them striding purposefully down to the poultry yard together every morning, each holding a walking stick, did my heart good.
    Having Isabella in the house somehow seemed to mellow David. It’s impossible to ignore her presence in any room – not that she’s particularly demanding. It’s just that she needs a lot of interaction and affection, and I realised that David was paying more attention to her than I had ever seen him give our own children. Not in a practical sense, but in terms of making eye contact with her, talking to her and keeping her company in the back room while the rest of us were busy with other things. We became very, very attached to both the children and accustomed to the house being full of life and noise and action.We would have been happy, I’m sure, to continue living this way indefinitely, but after nearly two years, Isabella’s deteriorating health forced her family to move back to Blackheath, where they were closer to the hospital where she receives treatment.

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    Beautiful Isabella, with her alabaster skin and long red hair, is a joy and a great worry to her parents. Isabella’s journey has been a rocky one, probably from the moment of conception. There is no obvious explanation for why she failed to thrive in utero, no illness, no accident, no set of circumstances that would cause placenta and baby to remain so tiny. In her young life she seems to have spent almost as much time in hospital as she has at home, hooked up to a feeding pump that delivers vitamin-enriched formula directly into her stomach via a valve in the side of her small, thin body. The fact that she survived is, I suppose, a miracle in itself, due to the advances of modern medicine – which make life possible for infants who