​Condamine Dawning
The photo was taken of morning milking on a typical morning at Proston in 1938 by Great Granny Goos. By the look of her shadow, she's most likely using a Kodak Box Brownie like the one I first took photos with. It was a useful camera with two viewfinders.
Memories of old women with thin boney hands and skin incapable of thermal retention. In my farming community, men's hands and women's hands were oh so different, men's, growing thick and calloused, like a pair of bricks as their lady's hands grew thin and wispy.
Life on the land wasn't for me. Mum said I had doctor's hands, speaking volumes of the lives of women on the land and the hands that held them. The creep of age itself, heartbreaking. Yet they were a chirpy lot, having negotiated with middle age and come to a truce with the relentless creep of time, their hearts a patchwork of repair. There was no rage at the dying of the light. Their rage had left them pocketless and resolved into a different kind of fire; an unjustifiable pride in their children, unquenchable love for grandchildren and an implausible satisfaction in a life redeemed by service.
As I peep through the bars of my troubled youth, I remember those passed on, their Germanic triumphalism bearing them through opened gates, to have patched hearts restored, and women's hands flushed plump with youthfulness and men's hands doctored.
farming life -
a pre-dawn chorus
calls for the sun
This piece was inspired by :http://belindabroughton.com/?post_id=34&title=warm...
