Vanilla

I'm at my parents' house at the moment, sitting at the table on the patio, gazing at the vista of cane paddocks and banana fields wound through with the Russell River and anchored by the dark green bulk of Bartle Frere. It's very quiet in Woopen Creek, four k off the stretch of highway running between Innisfail and Babinda. Sometimes the cattle on the property next door groan, and during the harvest season the cane trains rattle across the rail bridge - but today, it's just the sound of the wind and the distant grumble of tractors.

My parents grow vanilla. Tropical North Queensland's climate is perfect for it, a hot, humid nursery for rainforest plants. It's only year three of their going-bush venture, but piles of dark-brown, lustrous beans are already wizening in the sun. The house floods with the smell of them. These beans smell a bit like my father's pipe tobacco. Some of them smell like sultanas. All of them have the heady vanilla fragrance that now permeates my mother's clothes, something I'll never get sick of, something that invites, when no-one's watching, thrusting my face into the leathery mounds to inhale deeply and surface, giddy, covered in seed-specks.



The shadehouses where the vanilla grows are these lush, jungle-y, shadowed places. Thick vines heave in montrous bunches over support wires, the vinyl oblong leaves veiling hands of the long green beans.The still air is prehistoric with rotting mulch. Vanilla vines flower - it's an orchid - but each flower only opens once, and only in the early morning, and they have to be hand-pollinated. So every ripening bean on the vine, and every gorgeous-smelling bean in the heaps in the sun are the result of my mother and father's 7am pollinating. Every flower needs the match-making of a flattened toothpick to introduce the pollen to its stamen and start the fruit.

My folks are away at the moment, so I'm here, looking after my nine-year-old sister and tending to the fermenting beans. There's not a lot to do aside from that. It's 26 degrees. The sun is shining. The dog is licking my feet and antagonising the cat (who is firmly indoors). Soon it will be time to wrap up the beans and tuck them into bed.

It's so beautiful, there's not much I need to do, aside from appreciate it.