The advertisement is brief, almost cryptic: ‘Ron’s Cleaning. SAPOL registered. Fully equipped. Reasonable rates, twenty years’ experience.’ It sits alongside three other more flourishing, colourful and elaborately designed offers awaiting a click of the mouse to reveal their wonders. A quick random choice from these three reveals a well-known, thoroughly commercial outfit. I decide — for no reason that I could clearly detail — to ring Ron.
For my next move I chose the ‘Selected Home Services’ column in our very modest, local Hills paper. In the Gardening section I found a few possibilities but again, even in this much smaller, proudly local Newsletter, a well-known, awesomely outfitted heavy hitter dominated the alternatives — except for one, which stood out because it was not only confidently individual, even eccentric: it was also poetic.
Its proprietress, Geraldine, is like Ron, fully equipped and promises reasonable rates for mowing, edging, redesign. She seems somehow less experienced and, judging from her fascinating advertisement, she inhabits a world which is full of colour and promise, even if also full of Bridal Creeper, Milk Thistle, Bindi, Lycium Ferocissium and unwanted Kikuyu. Every garden for Geraldine, or Gerri to use her preferred diminutive, was an Eden-in-waiting ready for the attention of us Adams and Eves. So, I rang Gerri.
Well, alright: why?
Because, a month or so ago, my own relationship with our sliver of the natural world — which is about an acre, overshadowed down one side by eucalypts several hundred years old and presided over by bird life ranging from the lyrical and tuneful to the raucous and screeching — changed suddenly and radically when I discovered I had done some serious damage to my sacroiliac joint. Don’t ask, look it up: whatever way you approach it, it’s no fun, it’s disabling and, along with my wife’s badly sprained ankle, is the unexpected cause of our falling back on the extraordinary resourcefulness of the Gerris and Rons of our peninsula retreat.
'With a war or a pandemic destroying lives and hopes all around you, is it wrong to be taking pleasure in the flowers of the field or the satisfactions of homeliness, art and labour while doing what you can to foster, preserve and protect the very processes of life?'
Ron — a slightly overweight looking forty-fiveish — rolled up on time in his SUV from which he extracted a dazzling array of household cleaning gear, some of it familiar, some