Earlier today, my friend, an Aussie, returned to her family home or her parents' after-the-kids-left-home home—they're in their 80s. A week earlier she’s walking up a mountain road in Tassie almost daily, trying to keep up with the locals, somehow lames her foot, plantar fasciitis, pain as severe as piercing needles if at odd times. Can't risk walking around, or if you do you’re limping all of a sudden.

Returned home having for some months imagined how she'd help out, cook, clean, shop, nurture her folks. Now she's lame, can't do much. In fact, her sick mom does the cooking. This morning she went outside into a summer full of life just limping around the block. She reports all this to me and writes,

“Kookaburra was laughing
At me personally”

A near-kangaroo-like image arises in mind, I'm ignorant of just about any Aussie wild or domestic life down to beer-drinking. I wiki this—bird—my, my, it's gorgeous and petite a “terrestrial tree kingfisher” and perhaps unsurprisingly there’s a common variety known as Laughing kookaburra so my friend was punning, hadn't realized that. Dacelo novaeguineae looking at a photo in fact he seems to be laughing even in his gaze even silently.

Laughing at this wayward gypsy daughter with a lamed foot trying to walk a bit, take care of her familial duties and maybe her whole life for those blocks around the aging neighborhood chorused by a slew of smart-alec birds shaming her. But you know unlike Hamlet able to take a joke.

after love
from the unknown
kookaburra laughing

Maybe she'll like the way I told this story.

Richard Gilbert
20 Feb 2018