Tag Archives: parents

Neighbours

Posted on June 6, 2012 by Nicole Lobry de Bruyn

We live on a dead-end. At the end of the road is a park. Three federation workers cottages, built-in 1905, border the grassy reserve where the council has planted paper barks, and then tried to kill them repeatedly by ring … Continue reading →

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Maurice Sendak on ageing…

Posted on June 1, 2012 by Nicole Lobry de Bruyn

In the New Yorker May 21, 2012 Mariana Cook writes of her photographic session and interview some years later with the elderly writer Maurice. Looking at the photo of him and his dog he says, “I am in my bathrobe … Continue reading →

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An Old Diary…Part 1

Posted on April 19, 2012 by Nicole Lobry de Bruyn

Two women in their forties are in the house of their childhood. Once they shared a bedroom. They made a cubby between the Jacarandas with jarrah pickets and hessian wheat sacks. They are sorting for a garage sale. Already so … Continue reading →

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Doing Tax…

Posted on March 29, 2012 by Nicole Lobry de Bruyn

My tax return is late. Horrendously so. And so the later it gets the more I want to put it off. My desk is a mountain of papers and receipts. Looking through the bank statements that I have printed off … Continue reading →

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from “Reading by Moonlight” by Brenda Walker

Posted on March 11, 2011 by Nicole Lobry de Bruyn

“The novelist E.M Forster writes: ‘a wonderful physical tie binds the parents to the children; and – by some sad strange irony – it does not bind us children to our parents.’  He imagines the possibilities  ‘if we could answer … Continue reading →

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In the One Boat

Posted on March 11, 2011 by Nicole Lobry de Bruyn

One day when I visit Dad in hospital he asks me if Mum has divorced him. If not, why is she not here? No communication, he says. You’re not divorced Dad. She’s just up the street at the nursing home. … Continue reading →

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Days with my Father

Posted on March 9, 2011 by Nicole Lobry de Bruyn

I had trouble with jobbies, he says. Even now as a woman in my late forties, my father using this word irks me. But there are no good words for it. Not my mother’s favoured expression inquiring about the opening … Continue reading →

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