It’s been drizzling and damp the last few days. I take my chance to walk a few blocks and visit a pond I’ve gotten to know. Most of the streets around the city are tidy, controlled. The people wear shoes all the time. City dust is a sad smell. I feel heavy from a week of work. My shoulders are a mess of neat concrete knots. My feet slip around in my wet thongs. Something small and brown flitters across the footpath in front of me, into a restrained, tasteful, potted buxus. The street sweeper will swing through later tonight, but for now the damp leaves in the gutters glitter in the sun. A shiny car parallel parks in the distance, but otherwise the road is empty. I can hear cockatoos squabbling now, and a wattlebird rasps from a bush. I turn the last sharp corner before the grid disintegrates – there!

                                                                                                I see trees spilling over, making new trunks where their branches hit the ground. Look here, small clouds of anonymous insect specs are minding their own business just above the sodden grass. And here, by the water, life has volcanoed up. Muck and mud and boggy ground between the reeds smell proud after the rain. I could almost be back on the mangrove flats. When I shut my eyes and bow my head, to mix in my own salty sweat smell, I am there. I watch tiny fish darting at disintegrating blackened leaves in the shallows, and I wonder if you could fry them up like whitebait. Mostly though I just watch them, and let the wild stillness bubble up between my cold toes.

– Tara Willoughby