Springtime for Hitler and...Melbourne

Well, spring has begun to settle itself into the landscape here. As the sun makes more and more appearances, I can tell time by the elongation of shadows across my balcony, and it's starting to feel like my stay here is coming full-circle. The flowers had long since died when I arrived in Melbourne in the height of February's fever, but when I step outside my apartment there's a feeling--a breeze, the faint scent of dry earth and lemon myrtle and eucalyptus--that takes me right back to where I was the moment I landed. It's the same but different. I'm the same but different.

All over the city nature is beginning to realize the color of itself. Before I came here I never enjoyed the smell of wisteria because the giant vines that crawl up the side of our house (and into the guest room--as in...through the window) always overpowered every other scent in the yard. Now, though, because I'm so far from home, I don't mind it so much. In fact, I might love it.

I've been going on a series of long photography walks through the residential neighborhoods near my apartment and campus. Parkville, which is located just across Royal Parade from the University of Melbourne, is full of gorgeous architecture and curling iron railings and gardens literally spilling through and over their fences. The streets were quiet and the characters ceaselessly amusing. The highlight of my experience was most assuredly a young boy (probably around age eight or nine) dressed in all white, riding down the footpath on his razor scooter screaming the lyrics to "Hey There Delilah" at the top of his prepubescent lungs.

I think in another life I had lemon trees, because every time I see them I'm overcome by an inexplicable nostalgia for a time that I don't remember. I wish I lived in a citrus-conducive climate. While I love venturing to the garden for a handful of snap peas or cherry tomatoes or plump blueberries, I think plucking a lemon or an orange dangling above my head would be so much more satisfying. However, I could do without the palm trees that always seem to accompany the citruses. I never knew it before I came here, but I don't really like them. I feel like they're a cliche of themselves, and especially in a city like this that is so modern and metropolitan and frindy (frigid and windy), I find them to be severely out of place.

You can't tell from this photo, but just beyond the sand and sidewalk is a grassy park bisected by a tree-lined pathway. It's called University Square and it's right across the street from the main campus entrance. I spent the afternoon studying there the other day, and it felt so strange being back on the grass in the sun in a place I hadn't been since my friends were here in the fall. I'm almost gone and I still miss them. I don't think I'll ever stop. There's something about meeting in a foreign country that makes you family in a way nothing else can.

Again, this is University Square without the grass. I don't think the wisteria is blooming anymore--neither are the cherry trees for that matter--but I love knowing the kind of beauty that can exist in a place even when that beauty has crawled into hibernation.

These little spiky poms remind me of the berries that grew at my elementary school in the strips of bark and dirt between the playground and the buildings. They would grow yellow on the bush, then turn a sort of fiery orange-red as soon as they fell. Next to "Indian beads"--tiny colorful plastic cylinders that bulged at each end and for which my friend and I would hunt religiously during recess--the pom berries were the next best find, albeit more plentiful.