Heavenly Beverley : A Bucketful of Anniversaries.

July tends to be a fairly eventful month of our calendar for significant anniversaries. A couple of these dates almost snuck past, due to my busy schedule of rearranging the Gallery for the Winter Wonderland exhibition.

Today, I have the time to catch up. We are in the Gallery waiting for lunch, the fire crackling, the Beagle snoring contentedly, and Michael sitting by the warmth of the fireplace. A Mexican wrap and pea and ham soup sound just perfect for a cold Saturday afternoon. And I don't think we will attract too many more guests brave enough to venture out to visit us.

My birthday, which falls on the 17th, raises all sorts of ambivalent emotions inside me. Getting older doesn't worry me at present, so that's a positive. However I don't tend to enjoy winter as a season and I happen to have been born right smack in the middle. I am already growing tired of perpetually cold feet, a dripping nose and the multiple layers I find myself wearing for insulation purposes. And I resent the minutes wasted dressing and undressing just for a ten-second pee.

I also have very few visual memories of myself as a child. My family tended to take slides rather than photos, and as these have deteriorated or vanished, I have few tokens of my younger life. Somewhere stashed in our cupboards are old photo albums from my late teenage years. Maybe it's time to haul them out and take a peek.

This year, my birthday bash will be at the Gallery - an open house of sorts. For a start, the Gallery is almost twice the size of our house and we can set up the BBQ, undercover, in Michael's workshop. Between the fires and the gas BBQ, the venue will be warm and welcoming. Bliss.

Another momentous decision in July 2010 sent our lives onto quite a different tangent. My beloved Michael, very unwell in both mind and body, resigned from paid employment after thirty-six years in the mining and ancillary industries. He was broken, spent and needed to recover his health, as far as possible, in a private retreat from the rest of the world. And so, we moved to Beverley.

This is our second winter since he nearly died from double pneumonia. Last July, he battled the Bitch for most of the month, ending up for a spell in hospital on IV antibiotics to tame the illness. This year, his fight with the Bitch started much earlier, culminating in three months on antibiotics, including a month of IV infusions given by our GP three times a week, instead of being hospitalised yet again.

Michael is relatively well at the moment, delighting in the challenge of creating Dory, his newest sculpture. The joy is mixed with intense concentration, as this piece is testing him to the limits of his artistic skills. And I have no doubt, that on Dory's completion, she will be quite beautiful.

On 6 July 2012, we become the proud parents of the Forbes building. We celebrated the usual way - with a BBQ. Our friends and families just assumed we had lost our minds. She was a dilapidated disaster of a dump, full of gaping cracks, holes, rising damp and fretting brickwork. Walls were moving ways they shouldn't, the roof was one huge colander and the whole building was bitterly cold in winter and liable to cause heatstroke in summer. Mortar on supporting external pillars was missing and we were in danger of the eastern wall collapsing. And minor nuisances - no power, very little water, no sewerage.

We have so had the last laugh. On a cordial budget, Michael and Gary (when we could afford to pay him) dragged the building kicking and screaming to a lovely example of an exquisite restoration, with perseverance and lots of sweat, a fair bit of blood and many tears. The only work done by outsiders was by Dave the Brave our electrician, Guy, our international man of mystery handyman, Dan, brickie to the stars, a motley crew of plumbers, Don and his trusty excavator and Sandy, master concreter. And we thank these noble tradesmen from the bottom of our hearts!

Six months before we opened the Gallery, Heavenly Beverley was born on 8 July 2014. Callum, computer savvy, technological smarty-pants, complained I was using Facebook as a blog. Whatever a "blog" was. Facebook, he informed me, was for short posts, images and thoughts. A blog could become my ongoing record of the insanity of my life. Fair enough. So Cal and my intended daughter in law, Bron set up a blog page for me, including my most revered totem - a glass of vino.

And so my writing took on a whole new dimension. Very rarely do I regard writing as a chore. Most days, a thought, a feeling, an image or a story ignites the wordsmith in me. Some days the posts are stacking up in my head, waiting patiently for their turn to tumble out onto my laptop or into my journals.

And this July will see another event ready to add to the anniversaries. In spite of no money, we are going away for six days just after my birthday. Our pension cards are providing the train ride to Kalgoorlie, one of our favourite places, respite funding is paying for accommodation and our wonderful friend, Lynn Isaacs (one of our artists) has been fundraising to add $70 to our kitty. This money will go towards hiring a car for a day or two. And the kids are going to cough in towards a massage for each of us. We can hardly wait.

Last night, wrapped up on the couch, we talked about being with and caring for each other. This is an ongoing wonder. We don't like being away from each other, we touch with our hands when we're sitting or walking, our eyes meet at every opportunity and we love to entwine our bodies around ourselves. For the anniversaries we share - the good and the not-so-good - all are better because we found each other.