We had a fabulous trip south to the Fleurieu Peninsula, driving through the Australian spring with the yellow wattle trees in all their glory.

The recent rain has turned the fields into an ‘Irish patchwork’ like the singer crooned about in the song, ‘the 40 shades of green’. It is not likely to remain so pretty, for when the summer comes, the landscape will dry up and be dusty brown.

Meeting up with Mai and Rick after 31 years was quite special, and although we all may have changed, and have a few more lines on our faces, it all doesn’t matter. It’s the eyes that we connect with. I love the twinkle and the sense of fun, and suddenly the years just slip away. We were all very different in Kota Kinabalu way back then, yet sitting over dinner, and walking along the beach I listened to Mai chattering, and there was an instant connection. It was as though we only parted yesterday.

Her stories had me mesmerised. She has been on a mission to find her own personal history, and she shared some of the experiences of being a refugee from Latvia, and arriving in NSW, and she described the early years of painful separation that her parents must have experienced. How hard to bury their one year old baby daughter, in the new country after just a few months of arriving. Mai found a small piece of paper amongst her father’s possessions, and it was in Latvian. She had it translated. Later she found the small gravestone, now in broken disrepair, and had it replaced and the words etched on the stone in English.

‘As a bud wilts before it flowers

So you child in the morning of your life

Did leave us’

One of the highlights of the trip for me was fishing at Rapid Bay. I caught 4 whiting… and one was turquoise!

Amazing, and it was so exciting. Luckily Rick was with us; to help with the killing and the hooking and so on… I would have been in a right tizz, without his calm practical skills. I did catch a bright red and blue angler fish, with 2 yellow ‘whiskers’ but I let him go. John was chuckling, imagining the poor fish saying, ‘what the hell was that all about????’ – Yanked from the sea, photographed, then the hook pulled out of its jaw, and then thrown back in!

We ate the whiting, stuffed with grated ginger, red onion and lashings of lime juice; they were so sweet and not boney at all. Brilliant!

This week has been stormy, the sea full of white horses, and so I have been busy embroidering and piecing together my little bit of patchwork, that makes me feel I am entitled to go to the Tuesday meeting of the quilters’ gang.

What can I say… keeps me out of mischief.

By the way I walked to Brighton on Monday and took a notion to look at Lily’s bench, and lo and behold… her relatives must have removed the old plaque and replaced it with a shiny new one! Stories within stories.