I picked some lavender just now from the pot on my balcony. Planting it was another of my post-Tuscany promises; there’s a note in my phone that reads: Buy a lavender bush and plant it. I’m pretty sure I wrote it after a long and slightly boozy lunch with my writing crew, and I promised Kalin I would follow through.

Kalin left Italy to return to her husband and her dog to jump into a new dream: to run a lavender farm in northern Michigan. It’s a perfect and challenging dream, well away from the world of corporates and bus schedules and performance reviews, and it’s a beautiful dream made more beautiful by the beautiful woman and her crew striving to make it a reality.

I smell the lavender sprig and I am so many places at once. Perhaps my Granny used lavender in her bedroom, because I am there, opening her jewellery box, tucked at the back of her bureau, pulling out her beads, one by one. I am holding the hand mirror on the dressing table, old with an embroidered back, the glass cut into an-almost-hexagon. There are dust motes in the air, and I can see a Kaye Cottee biography stacked upright with the books about Rock Hudson and Pete Sampras, and the giant Australian Geographic catalogue of birds down by the mattress on the floor where I sleep. And Granny, of course, always half smiling, always open for a dig.

I am also at the street by the park above Kangaroo Point Cliffs, where I walk to relieve the tedium of working on my own from home, a temporary recluse in an Art Deco-styled house with a trapdoor in the bedroom floor, across the street from KFC. At certain hours the house fills with the smell of cooking chicken, those secret herbs and spices cloaking my things with a cloying heaviness. I fall in love in this house, and on our walks to and from the river I run my hand through the lavender bush as I marvel at my happiness, and the possibility of love, and of life in love.

I want to bring those memories into a future state where I feel more settled than I am now, more sure of my path in the world.

So much changes everyday. Here I am in my third year in Sydney, in a busy life of pressure and responsibility. And I am in Italy with Kalin, in Condobolin with Granny, in Brisbane and in love, because of this tiny purple sprig.

It’s comforting to hold these tiny purple flowers in my hand again.