Maxine, that's the name on my birth certificate, but I haven't gone by it since I was twelve. Maxie. That's who I am, and that's who I've been for going on fifty years now.

I was born in 1946, in Maryborough, up in central Victoria, the kind of place where the sky at night actually goes dark and you can see the whole wheel of it turn. My mother thought I'd grow out of staring up. I never did.

The astrology came to me through a woman named Marguerite, who kept a little room above the newsagent's where she read charts for anyone who came up the stairs. I was fourteen the first time I climbed them. She sat me down with a pencil and a set of tables thicker than a phone book, and she had me charting the moon, just the moon, for a whole year before she'd let me touch a single horoscope. Slow teaching, the old kind. It suited me. It suited her too, I think.

By the time I was twenty I was reading for friends, then friends of friends, then people I'd never met who'd heard there was a girl on the hill who'd tell you the truth about your chart. I never charged for it. I never wanted to. The sky is free, and so was what I had to say about it.

I married late, to a man named Frank who thought the whole business was nonsense but loved me enough to let me keep at it. He's gone now, eight years this October, and I still set his cup out for him some mornings out of habit. The kitchen table where I do my work is the same one we bought the year we moved in, and it's seen fifty years of readings and cups of tea go cold beside them.

The computers came along and they do the arithmetic faster than I ever could, and better, and I'm glad of it. I use the Swiss Ephemeris now, the same tables the old almanacs were built on, and it's right where my hand was right, only it doesn't get tired and doesn't need tea. But the reading still has to be done by a person. The sky is doing one thing and your day is doing another, and my job is to tell you how the two connect, in plain words, the way Marguerite told me.

So that's this. A morning's work, written down, for anyone who wants it. No fanfare. No predictions about your future. Just what the sky looks like today, and what it might mean for you, told the way an old woman who has been at this a long time would tell it.

Bye for now — Maxie