“This oregano is best before 1985!” my sister cries, adding it to the pile on the laminate bench. It’s Hervey Bay circa 1991. My family is staying in Gran’s retirement villa, my sisters and I on camp stretchers in the garage. A single pedestal fan brings short bursts of breeze, rotating relief from the December heat.
The town is not yet on the backpacker circuit. There aren’t any cafes, shops or streaming services, and there are only so many games of Scrabble we can take.
So we “make our own fun”. Argue; roam the quiet, manicured streets; rummage through Gran’s house. My best discovery is in the fridge: salad dressing two whole years out of date. I show my sisters the bottle with a mix of glee and revulsion. Next we comb the pantry for disgusting delights. Gran doesn’t seem grateful for our help, doesn’t understand our horror at the idea of living so long that you have herbs almost as old as your grandchildren. Instead she defends herself, backed up by my parents: “Dried oregano doesn’t go off”; “Salad dressing is mostly oil and vinegar”. We get in trouble for checking use-by dates at every meal.
In turn, we don’t understand anything: that my grandfather died decades ago, before we even existed; that since then she has lived alone and cooked most meals for one; that unused ingredients just sat there, until somehow years had passed.
She must have been in her mid-60s then, but she was old. “Old in a good way,” as my kids would say now, her reliable morals, soft perm and flowered dresses making her a grandmotherly type now only seen in sitcoms. She was old enough to have food sitting in her fridge for years, slowly becoming a toxic poison administered via salad.
I, however, am not old. I’m not even 50, well in my prime, despite what my teenagers believe.
Which is why I’m unsure how to feel about the can of lychees I tipped into the compost last December with a “best before” of January 2020. They still smelled fine – sweet and overpowering – but were more orange than usual. I almost ate one.
I remember buying them to make cocktails, sticking the tin in the tiny pantry of our Sydney rental. Then Covid arrived and that house became our world.
Before the first lockdown my husband went out foraging for essentials, came back juggling a whole salmon and wheels of cheese among tins and toilet paper. After a week of chowing through brie and fish, we started a permanent stash of more practical, less perishable groceries under the laundry bench. The lychees moved there too, into the milk crate of cans.
Things went back to normal(ish), the bushfire/pandemic reckoning never arrived, and still no lychee martinis. We moved twice, the out-of-date fruit gracing two new pantries. Two kids hit high school.
Getting older is teaching me lessons about time. How it compresses and expands, swelling a year into what feels like decades, but slims to a sliver in hindsight. How the never-ending days before the kids started school suddenly sped up, and now I’m trying to cram in things before they leave. I know some of time’s tricks, but I’m thrown by its circularity, the way events resonate across decades, getting stranger the longer you live with them.
In January we visited my parents at their lovely new apartment looking out over Batemans Bay. It’s very practical and easy: there aren’t any stairs, you can walk to town for coffee, shops, bridge and golf.
I helped my son set the table for dinner, neatly arranging the placemats, serviettes and cutlery in ways we don’t bother at home. I grabbed the salad dressing from the fridge door. Primed by thoughts of Gran, oregano and lychees, I glanced at the use-by – expired – then popped it back where it lives. It’s mostly oil and vinegar, it doesn’t really go off.
I didn’t mention any of this – the salad dressings and lychees, the strangeness of time – to my kids. There’s no shortcut to understanding.
I chose a different dressing and sat down to dinner.