The wonderful world of Oz

On the way home from Australia the Tasman, 36,000 feet below me, is black like the sky. On the way to Australia, I flew above the sea in the daylight, white clouds below me reflecting off of a surprisingly-smooth ocean surface, so that the clouds mirrored in the water and joined with the clouds in the sky to form white pillars stretching from sky to sea. It was astonishing.

It has been a lovely trip. Paul and I have taught well together and have done good work. Perhaps I have met part of my goal of making connections with people in this hemisphere so that I can begin to do the work I want to do. I have walked at sunset and at dawn in the Australian bush, smelled the eucalypts, seen the deep azure sky and the olive lacy foliage that I associate with Australia (but which I only really know is true in Canberra). There have been parrots in the trees, flashes of rainbow in the lorikeets, huge snowy white wings of cockatoos. And I have watched the kangaroos, in mobs, eat, walk slowly using feet and tail, and bounce across the horizon.

Today, in case all of that weren’t enough, today Paul and Khia and their girls took me to a wildlife park outside Sydney. There I got a sense of all the native Aussie creatures—the magnificent birds (who knew how many kinds of raptors they had here? Or about the several varieties of black cockatoos?), the terrifying reptiles and insects (all of the 10 most poisonous snakes in the world are native Australian), and the magical marsupials. I saw a Tasmanian devil for the first time, watched an extremely prickly echidna (other than the platypus, the only egg laying mammal) scratch herself. I saw fairy penguins play.

And then the most glorious parts of all were not so much about seeing, but about touching. I ran my fingers through the fur of a koala and looked soulfully into her eyes as she blinked sleepily at me (these creatures are always sleepy). And then there was the area of kangaroos, roaming around, eating feed from visitors’ hands (well, from the ice cream cones we bought with the feed inside). I felt the difference in fur varieties in the different breeds, had one try to put her head up my sleeve and nibble on my watch band, and another throw her head back in delight as I scratched just the right itchy spot on her chest. I found out that koalas have little brown eyes with no eyelashes and fantastic lovely noses. And roos have enormous brown eyes with model-ready eyelashes the better to draw me in and make me love them even more.

Now, I'm home and the pictures are downloaded. The children are filled with questions about Australia and worried that their soccer games will be cancelled because of the rain. I still get a thrill from coming through immigration and having the person there say, "Welcome home." It's good to be home.

(FYI for those of you who don't get the title of this--the nickname for Australia is "Oz" and while that mostly comes from the Aussie inclination to shortening words, there is something Ozish about Australia...)