On rain, the scents of eucalypts, and border closures

 We've been in Australia 2.5 years now, and to my surprise, it feels as much like home as Minnesota ever did. I never expected to get used to cockatoos sweeping overhead -- last week, I almost collided headfirst with an endangered Carnaby's cockatoo that I startled while biking to work -- or the pink-and-gray galahs that graze in the grass like weird little cows, or driving on the left side of the road, or pints of beer that cost $14. Things have just slowly become normal. 

Every once in a while, though, a thing happens and suddenly everything is weird again. The rainy season has begun. Recently, I was walking through a car park (see? just look at my vocabulary changing) and it began to rain. You know that feeling, when it begins to rain, and there is a particular smell that happens, as fungi wake up and various plants become more pungent? Well, everything began to smell aggressively of eucalyptus. My whole frame of reference shifted. I suddenly was acutely aware of how very, very far from home I am.

I got some news a few weeks back that may mean staying here for another year. I know the pandemic has been especially isolating for everyone, but I just did not factor in the closed borders and literal years without seeing my family when I decided to temporarily relocate to Australia. Virtually everyone I know is also an immigrant or comes from a family of immigrants and so we're all in the same boat. I am trying to be grateful for the relative safety we have experienced since the covid-19 crisis began, but it increasingly feels like there will be an outbreak any day, for which we are not prepared. I hope not.