Whalers crescent

I went to my first wake on Monday night, and it was not how I thought it would be.

I had already spent two evenings in a foldable canvas chair on my deck, looking at David’s house and the cars outside on the grass, coming and going, telling myself that I didn’t want to go across the street to pay my respects because I didn’t want my last memory of David to be David without life. But this was a lie really, I didn’t want to walk across the street because I didn’t understand how the ceremony worked – a memorial service I get, I have experience with, with photos and music, and a schedule of who is speaking next and what prayers to recite – but not a wake. I didn’t know who it was for, and why. I didn’t know what I was supposed to feel, other than the fear that a 4-year-old has of a dark hallway. So I stayed on my side of the driveway.

I listened to the radio, and ate a bowl of ice cream, made myself a gin and tonic, had another bowl of ice cream, then a wine, and watched the lights go on and off in the top room of his A-frame house that had been empty for two weeks while he had been in hospital. I had passed the hearse on the gravel road coming into Omaui on Sunday at noon as I left for work; I knew he was being brought home for two days, for viewing, but I didn’t know what time, and I was ashamed and relieved to have missed this part, and I pulled over to let the hearse pass. I thought that was sort of right and fine and appropriate to our dynamic while he was alive, that we would pass on this piece of road this way, this last stretch that came down into Whalers Crescent, me going to work, sunburned, with sand in my ears, and him coming back here for the last time so that the town could say goodbye.

I moved to this town because of David. In November I drove out with a photographer to do a story on him for his first exhibition opening. We drove down this long gravel road that turned off the main road to Bluff and headed for cliffs and bush and then you turn the corner and there is the sea and a handful of cribs. It was an old whaling community and it felt like, feels like, the edge of the world, and very, very far away from the third story of a building in the middle of the city I that I work out of.

David lived on the end of one of two streets in Omaui, and he came out to meet us as we pulled off the gravel and onto the grass. He had just gotten back from a trip through Belize, Guatemala, Mexico and had done a series of 36 photographs of his trip in August and September. But it was his diagnosis with an aggressive cancer in January that gave every photograph its urgency. You walked through chronologically. The first was taken about two hours after he had been told at the hospital he probably had less than 12 months to live, which meant that he wouldn’t see the next summer. He had been given a camera for his 49^th birthday and it was in the passenger seat when he saw a storm coming in over the mountains and pulled over and watched it come towards him and then he got the camera to capture the obvious metaphor. He got better with the camera as the year went on, as his health worsened, as he went through chemo, and got up early, because the sleeplessness then, to get sunrises on the Omaui beach and the way the light caught the barb wire of a fence, and a bird coming out of the water during the winter, with snow on the sand dunes – it had the feel of someone trying frame every nuanced piece of the world’s beauty before he left it.

When the photographer and I first came up to the house, there was tiny place with a carport and a deck across the street, half hidden by a wild garden growing around it. It had a For Rent sign in the front, a bathtub in the back, a place to gut fish, if I ever got into that, a veggie garden, an apple tree, and the pounding sound of the ocean, and after some deliberation, and some emailed prodding from David, this is where I am now. The last time I saw David while he was still well, was when he pounded on my glass door, while I was scrambling eggs without having opened the curtains to the morning yet, to tell me there was a beached whale down below and the whole town was down there trying to refloat it. The next time I saw him was in hospital, for a followup interview for his exhibition. The last time I saw him was at the exhibition a week ago, in a wheelchair, and he was so tired he could hardly keep his eyes open. When I kissed his cheek and said I’d see him when he got home, I knew I probably wouldn’t. He told me he had big exhibition planned with a new project that was going to blow my mind. I asked if he could say a little bit about at least. He said he couldn't. It was going to be a big surprise and it was going to blow everybody's minds. On Friday, I got a text saying that David had died. I called his sister, and she said they were going to bring David back to Omaui, that there wasn’t a day in hospital that he didn’t ask to be brought home.

When I did go to see David, finally, it was in the early evening, when I got home from work on Monday. I parked my car, got out, and marched over, ready to get this over with, so I could go out for a run on the beach without feeling like I was being silly and childish. There was only one car in the driveway, and the door was open to the kitchen and I stepped inside, knocking, seeing figures on the porch. Two guys came through the house, and I remembered them as students from around Invercargill and I said who I was and said I was David’s neighbour and then I just started to cry. One of the students put an arm around me and wiped his own eyes, and said they had been neighbours too for awhile, last year and we talked about how David looked after all of us, bringing us muffins and making sure we were happy here and how he told us we shouldn’t swim past the waves or we’d get dragged out to sea, and then pointed to the small room around the corner from the kitchen counter, where people had put loaves of bread and cards and baked goods, and I went in. David was in an open coffin on the bed. The curtains were open and the sun had just set.

It wasn’t how I thought it would be. The sky was red, the sea had pulled back and the lagoon was full of new sea water. There was even a full moon. I stood there for a few minutes and it was how they say, that it seems like that person could just open their eyes, or move a hand. It was more unbelievable that he wouldn’t do those things. Just outside his room, you could see that first photograph of the storm coming over the mountains. There were books, and CDs and music posters still up. I had thought I would want to walk in and walk out, but it was the opposite. I wanted to stay. I wanted to talk to him. If there had been a seat in the bedroom, I would have sat, and stayed for a long time. It was like standing in a very small cathedral. Afterwards, I went for a run, and then for my first night swim in Omaui. The moon rippled on the water of the lagoon as I slid through it, then turned on my back, and realised then that the aching in my upper body that had frightened me all week, was less likely to be a tumour lurking somewhere in me, and more likely that I hadn’t been doing backstrokes properly, and I should probably take swimming lessons if I wanted to get better and that I also need to stop being so ready to die all the time.

Yesterday, I had the day off, and I went back to being the socially awkward neighbour who watches people from her deck in her pajamas, well into the afternoon. I watched people I didn’t know move the furniture out of David’s house but I didn’t see his sister, who was the only one in the family who would recognise me. It was the last official day of summer. In the early evening I went for a run and a swim again and on the way back up to the house I picked blackberries and later that night I ate them with vanilla bean ice cream and crumbled Oreo cookies and read the last chapter of Mrs Dalloway (advice for readers who haven't gotten around to torturing themselves with Virginia Woolf: don’t read Mrs Dalloway, if you are feeling like your world is already rocking, it will tip you over ) and I left the window open because it was warm.

I woke up to the house shuddering with wind and rain and it was cold in the room and a huge, wild, bottomless sadness filled me, the kind of sadness you have in the middle of the night when you’ve woken up from a dream you can’t remember. David’s death made me feel alone and un-buffered, and other things made me lousy too, and all of it seemed to involve the storm. It seemed to be taking something away and I thought, well, that was it, that was summer.

Which is just a depressing final sentence.

So I will tag this on: apples are falling from the tree in the backyard and there are more blackberries to be picked, which make for great pies, and pies need people on decks to eat them. And I have weekly additions to my growing collection of scratched up $5records.  The Doobie Brothers just sound better on vinyl, trust me. Or just come over.



Your table is waiting

I had set out to describe – kind of vavoom destination style - a long weekend I spent in Waiheke Island just before Christmas, but instead I keep coming back to this string in my head linking a honey and vineyard-saturated island off of Auckland to Antarctic-battered Invercargill, a place that couldn’t be less vavoom, and now l can’t pull the two apart.

I got to Waiheke on a Friday, still wearing my work coat with unreturned second keys, scone crumbs, gum wrappers and work receipts in the pockets; I walked from the boat to the place I had booked, sticking to the grassy verge of a road that went in and out of afternoon light through the bush. I shifted my carry-on bag from one shoulder to the other, looking at the free folded map I’d taken from the ferry terminal and holding it up. The sun hit the sides of my sunglasses, making me squint, and I kept charging down the wrong roads, thinking they connected until some kids on bikes pointed me down the path that cut through the bush and led to the road I was looking for. I was limping a little, and annoyed, by the time I saw the tops of tents on the lawn first, through the trees, then a roof, a porthole window, and steps leading down to bean bags scattered around the deck of the main house where my boots echoed off the wood. Reggae music mix was coming from a stereo in the kitchen. I watched as a guy below with long dark dreads did a cannonball into a rock pool and then backstroked his way to the side. A leap up and out, a tugging up of soggy shorts, and he walked a few feet away to a Jacuzzi, where he slowly lowered himself in, arranging his dreads over the side, just behind him, as the steam rose around his face. On an upper deck covered in drying board shorts and bikini tops, a girl was trading beer space in the outdoor fridge covered in Jaigermeister stickers for a bottle of vodka.

I assessed this all woodenly –sunglasses still on - at the reception desk. I felt like an alien creature sent to destroy mankind by first blending in, pretending to be a relaxed and fun person.

That morning at the airport bookstore I had bought Gone Girl, and had read a few chapters on the ferry trip to the island as Auckland’s skyline disappeared and the wind whipped at the jackets and dresses of the passengers standing all around where I was sitting. It was a novel about a woman who suspects her new husband wants to kill her and every so often I would look up and watch the people from the wedding parties travelling over with department store bags of wrapped gifts hooked on their arms – the woman who cut my hair the next day said 20 per cent of New Zealand weddings happened in Waiheke – and I wondered if I should put the book away, to restore equilibrium to the boat, but then I’d pick it up again because the heroine talked like I do and I wanted to know how the me in an alternate life gets into that kind of situation and then how she gets out of it.

Later, checked into the hippie homestead with folded linen on my lap, I sat on my tiny bed, hungry, but torn. I had food with me, but I didn’t want to make dinner in the communal kitchen, because it would mean I would probably have to speak to people. I thought about this dilemma for awhile, staring at the wall, hands settled politely. Then I took off my work jacket and my boots and took out my sandals and a sundress. I put the linen on the bed and my book in a satchel, put my earphones on, pulled my iphone out and turned on music, and walked into town, down through Little Oneroa reserve and Pohutukawa trees in full Christmas bloom, a bright, punk red. People were still in the waves, even though the sun had gone down.

I hated that I had every opportunity for rest all around me, but I couldn’t flip that switch to let it in. I used to dive right into beautiful, free places and absorb them and not fear long, blank spaces of time, but now there open sesame process with an access code that mysteriously alters, leading me away from feeling pressured to frantically produce something, anything, and just hide out and be still for a little while.

There’s breathing exercises to do this, or the visualising of a still pool of water, or a sunset. Or, for natural-born loners who have to fake extrovertism during the work week, there are nice dinners, alone, with wine, wearing a favourite lip gloss and nail polish and a new bracelet, in a town on an island where no one knows you.

There’s an art to this. You have to choose the right kind of table in the right kind of eating establishment to do the fork-winding and drinking and staring at nothing and reading, especially when it’s a Friday night at the beginning of summer. Outside that night it was warm and people were on decks and laughing, touching each other’s elbows as they made their points and running fingers through their hair and looking over their shoulder at the boats in the water and the stars coming out.

I did find an Italian restaurant for this, one with spaghetti to be wound around a fork, and four hours, nine chapters and about a hundred horrified facial expressions later, I left the place with a deep, deep hatred of the heroine, but with an unshakable love of the Marsala-drenched Tiramisu I had just finished, remembering just in time that I was not at home, watching back episodes of Offspring on my laptop in bed, and it was not cool to delicately run a finger along the bottom of the bowl and lick it. At some point between the tomato and basil bruschetta and the scallops the waitress had come by and had switched on the lamp above my table for me as I read. All night she had felt like a guardian of this zone I was happily building dream sandcastles in; I almost expected her to check my temperature and smooth away the hair from my forehead as she left with the wine bottle. I had had two glasses and I’m a lightweight so even the stars looked delicious as I walked carefully down the steps, hand on railing. I had marked my place in the book with a serviette, and couldn’t wait to keep reading. There was a trail above the ocean that went back to Little Oneroa and as I walked it, thinking about how the story had changed on me so fast and then thinking how I wanted to be able to do that, to hold someone captive in a restaurant for four hours with a strong storyline; and then I just thought how very fine it felt to be on an island, at night, just looking up at the stars, and down at the sea, and how I had three more days of this place all before me – I had already planned to read all night, then soak in the spa in the morning and nap until my facial and maybe book a pedicure for the afternoon. I heard myself say out loud Your table is waiting. And I had to think about why I said that at that moment. Then I remembered and it made me grin a bit, at how I’d pulled that one out of my head.

On a Saturday in Invercargill, during March, which was a difficult month for me, I woke up and decided I needed to put on a dress, and get my hair cut then go out to breakfast. I needed a plan. I needed lists, fresh goals. I had bills to pay, all the stupid mundane bills that you put off doing all month but bills like parking tickets can be that one thing you can take control of, when another part of you feels like everything is just a downward spiralling mess and you just wants to stay in bed until it all solves itself.

I ordered eggs and a coffee and went to bar table by the window which had chairs tucked underneath. I like the deep-seated booths, but of course those are for two people or more on busy Saturday mornings. I didn’t really mind the barstools. My coffee came. I stared off and drank it. A few chairs away, there was a guy on his laptop, and he started talking. I thought he was on his phone, but realised he was talking to me. I turned to him and answered back because I’m a nice person and it’s Invercargill, not New York City, and even if he was a psycho killer I probably work with his cousin, and he moved down to the seat next time mine, to show me what he was working on on his laptop, and I resigned myself to eating my eggs, when they came, while he talked. If he was interested, really, in anything I had to say, this would have been bearable. But it was evident pretty quickly that it didn’t matter what I thought about anything, he just wanted to talk and have someone, anyone, respond. I understand that this usually comes from loneliness, and I hate people being lonely. But it made me really sad that the spiritual revival bill writing morning I had planned, would now be spent trying to arrange my face into appropriate facial expressions.

The waitress came over with my breakfast. She swooped in really. She looked at me and at him. Then in this slightly affected five-star dining establishment voice and said to me pointedly, ‘your table is waiting.’

She stood there awkwardly with the eggs and a giant pepper grinder like I was an idiot. I didn’t understand.

‘Your table,’ she said again, in the voice, with new urgency. ‘It’s waiting for you.’

Then she left with my eggs and started walking towards one of the booths. I picked up my coffee and my papers, apologised to the guy with the laptop, and followed the waitress to the table I hadn’t asked for.

‘You didn’t need that this morning,’ she said, putting down my plate and serviette and silverware and then showering the eggs with the cracked pepper. I realised then how haggard I probably looked, which was depressing. I sat down obediently, thinking okay so you and I are terrible terrible people. We’re going to get in big trouble for not being nice girls; that poor guy... Then: So I can I just do that?The whole morning began to gain this whole new sense of liberation. I was giving off the vibe of someone wounded, weakened, vulnerable to predators who had moved in to pounce on the last of my energy at the watering hole. But that morning I had this protectoress who had just given me permission to be a mess. And now I had the booth.

I sat there for hours, triumphant. I spread Home and Garden magazines and bills all over the place and ordered more coffee, called my brother, texted friends, made plans to run a marathon and go to surf camp in Bali. I took a magazine quiz and didn’t like the result so I took it again, lying a little bit, and got the answer I wanted. I increased the amount going into my long term savings account by $25. I paid all my parking tickets. I ordered the lemon cake for lunch.

It didn’t solve anything massive in my life that Saturday morning; but I got traction, and I got a little bit of myself back. I go back to that cafe most Saturdays now, even for a takeaway coffee, out of loyalty.

In Waiheke, after that walk home from the restaurant, I came back and met the grandson of a Mayan revolutionary on the deck above the rock pool and Jacuzzi eating olives and pita bread with humus under Christmas lights. When I am exhausted the first thing to disappear is my curiosity of other people, but I came back from dinner full wonder for everything, and when I rounded the corner and everyone was there – the guy with dark dreads, the girl loading the beer fridge, plus ten other people around a big, long wooden table covered in wine bottles – and it seemed rude and silly to go to bed, so I grabbed a wine glass from the kitchen and came back out. Some of my best friends in life I have found at backpackers on nights like this, and I love that this underworld of jobless, wandering adventurers has always existed, around long tables illuminated by Christmas lights, with stories to tell, and all night to tell them, which is a whole other kind of table that was waiting for me.

The grandson of the Mayan revolutionary didn’t introduce himself that way, but as a painter on his way back from Nepal to Mexico for Christmas. He was a Buddhist, but his family was Catholic. He had been named after a patron saint. Christmas would be spent on his ranch on the coast. It was a ranch he had inherited from his father who had died a few years ago. Everything he told me about the family land, surrounded by the cartel, on the ocean and his father were responses to questions I asked, and I know, I know, I know it makes complete sense that everything would be fabricated. That his grandfather had been given the coastal land, as part of a grant from the Mexican government to the Mayans, and the Mexican president, in turn had been given the son of the Mayan leader to be raised in Mexico City. How that son though, was handed over to the president’s Italian bodyguard to be raised by the bodyguard’s family, a man the painter still thought of as a second, maybe even truer grandfather. Then how is own father had grown up strong, brilliant and had taken his education in Mexico City and had become a doctor, had fallen in love with the daughter of the patriarch of the hacienda he was a doctor in and married her, and then became a politician; the painter had been pressured to also go into medicine or politics but he went to art school in Ashland, Oregon instead and now has a studio there, as well as in Nepal and Mexico. He only paints five portraits a year and they are always commissioned, usually by wealthy fiancées who believe they are marrying the most beautiful woman in the world. But the painter is the one to decide that. Part of the arrangement is that the couple is flown to one of the studios and her beauty is assessed by him. He only paints the most beautiful, because he only does five portraits and he is in demand. But he is a Buddhist and of course, true beauty is elusive.

It was better than a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel. It was like Arabian Nights.The whole table has been invited to the painter’s ranch, to ride horses and hunt for jaguars in the jungle next Christmas. I googled the painter and his family and the Mayans later and it adds up; but even if it didn’t, it was better than Gone Girl, which I finished the next morning and then abandoned to the shelf in the backpacker’s lounge, before walking barefoot across the hot, hot deck, togs already on, even before coffee, pulling my sundress over my head and taking a big leap into the rock pool.

My point, maybe, is that sometimes you need the quiet corner tables, just for one night or Saturday morning, before you can really come back to the big long tables on decks, and ask people how they are, and really have capacity to let them tell you all about it.

And tip your waitress. They are guardians.

Into the groove

So I know I should be really really excited to be flown back up to Wellington tomorrow for the Royal New Zealand Ballet production of Giselle. And I am excited, don't get me wrong here. What's not to adore about ditching a hospital advisory committee meeting and weather that's driving me nuts for an overnight in one of my favourite cities in the world (that's a big status for a city to get, but for beauty, people-coolness, memories and general magic it slides in just after Madrid).  And I'm really really grateful (little wave there to the RNZB PR person if you come across this blog) to do this twice in one year. I had an amazing two days in August for the opening of Cinderella, which was gorgeous, and fascinating to watch unfold from master class, to costume studio, to stage that night. I used to work at the bar across the street from the St James Theatre and serve people who had come from the evenings at the ballet. They were always buzzing and chatty - its kind of lovely to be on the other side of that now. 
One of the perks is that the ''official'' company hotel where the journalists covering the opening get chucked for the night is the Museum Hotel, a place I always loved wandering past when I was a poor scriptwriting student, with cloth bags and exactly six dollars in change to buy fruit and veges at the farmer's market on the waterfront on Sundays. After the August opening - also, you may have noticed, my tweeting debut, a painful birth -  I made sure I had a cocktail in the lounge upstairs  that looked over that waterfront and and after finishing my story, sat back in the plush, velvety cushions, sipped my drink and said a little prayer of graditude for the years when little adventures can come with a steady income trickling in (emphasis on trickle).
So the reason I'm not really really excited this time around:
I have to tie these trips to some kind of local angle to Southland. Last time - after a shake down of the company - it turned out there was a class pianist who had lived in Invercargill as a kid. This time there was no such luck.
It was then suggested by the chief reporter (with a wolfish grin) that I could be the local angle.
I could request to take part in the master class and do it as a first person piece.
I laughed, cringed at the thought, protested a little, then sent off the request to the company, thankful in advance for tight policy restrictions that would kill this idea fast. But last week, they got back to me in an email.
Everything was cleared. The director would be expecting me at the warmup class at 6.
Great. Awesome.
In the car in front of the gym the other night - a place I've been spending a lot of time since I got that email - I talked to my dad about the new story angle and he reminded me of the ballet, jazz and modern dance classes I used to take with Madame Christine in Santa Ynez until I was about 11.
Did I remember those classes?
Seriously? Every time I hear Get Into the Groove, I am mentally crossing a mirrored room, in a horizontal-striped turquoise leotard doing that skip, skip, arms out ''grapevine'' move. And unfortunately that song gets a lot of airplay on Southland radio (farmers love Madonna).
On Saturday, I bought new yoga pants at the Warehouse, and I've gone through every workout top I have that I wouldn't think twice running on an empty beach in. But alongside 32 bodies that are born to transcend normal limitations in front of floor to ceiling mirrors on all sides...there's no hope in hell of this being anything but Josie Grosie going back to high school.
I've had to abandon the idea of having any dignity in this situation. So while I'm dignity-less, in tribute to my inner 7-year-old dancing queen, I found a horizontal top, kind of a turquoisy green, that I think I look kind of nifty in.
I'm gonna rock this class.

http://youtu.be/YjaQRRPmX2I

oh! you pretty things

I organised my own retreat this weekend to this place, my bed du jour, to have a think about life.
In the past the mattress and the view here have been a pretty scenic perch to work through big decisions. Which I seem to have a lot of right now.This is a studio in Curio Bay - about an hour from Invercargill - and besides having a bed made of driftwood, separated from the beach only by a sliding glass door, it has the best power shower in the world, a jar of coffee beans next to a grinder in the top cupboard, and a really great stereo system, with a stack of scratched-up CDs, the best of which - in my extensive research throughout Saturday evening, with a leftover birthday bottle of Pinot gris - was a '96 David Bowie greatest hits album.

 

I actually don't know Bowie that well. But the more I gazed out to the horizon and gave deep and reflective thought to the big questions in my life that seem to require an immediate decision from me, the more compelled I was to swan back over to the stereo and press repeat on track 4.

During my retreat, no cell phone, no internet,  I listened to the ocean, watched half of Midnight in Paris, slept for ten hours, became a big Bowie fan, and I don't know at exactly what point the switch finally flipped, but driving back home on Sunday I felt a lot of hope about whatever is on that big fat beautiful horizon.

So no epiphanies for me this weekend. Just rest. Which was maybe what I really needed.

Anyway, track 4, going out to all you overthinkers...

 

 

I just want to see some palm trees

My evening routine for the last five weeks has gone a bit like this (except tonight; still at work at 1am, trying write about neuromodulation and phantom pain at a fifth grade reading level. The below is waiting for me out there): 

Lean into the rain, wind, sleet coming at me head on, all the way to my car; drive home in the dark, which has been dark since about 5 pm, put on merino wool socks in the dark. Crank up the heat in the dark. Maybe punch on a light, finally. Turn on the evening news, drag my duvet to the lounge, heat up chicken soup in the kitchen, put the kettle on, stir soup, then organise myself on the couch - soup, socks, duvets, polka-dot covered hot water bottle, and open my laptop and cruise expedia.co. nz for the kind of hotel room in Los Angeles that I can wake up in on Monday morning in sunlit sheets, eyelids fluttering then opening to see palm trees and a pool, maybe hear a fountain somewhere, and I will think ah shoot its light outside, I'm late for work.
And then it will wash over me and everything in me will just exhale, unravel.
 Hello holiday.
And I will roll over, curl up, and go back to sleep, sun in hair, on shoulders, music from about a million different radio stations on the streets.

I'm loving the idea of spending just one night in the city I'm always only just passing through, even though I know I'm supposed to be sleeping off jet lag before getting on a flight overseas the next afternoon.
Cristi Silva, my best friend from high school, is driving down from Santa Barbara for the night. I'm so excited.
She said we can go anywhere I want in LA Sunday night. The town is ours.
You know where I want to go? About five metres away to the hotel pool. I want to eat baked Doritos, drink diet root beer, flip through a stack of really bad, pointless magazines, maybe even bridal magazines and hold up the pictures and do the Psycho theme and then you know where I want to go to dinner?
International House of Pancakes.
Maybe Carrows. Is there a Baker's Square in L.A.? I want waffles and streaky bacon for dinner. I want to be my 15-year-old self again. Eat cool whip on toast with strawberry jam.
And then crawl back to bed.
I've been planning on waking up in L.A. for about six weeks now. I don't know why it represents everything I feel I need right now. There is a lovely, very mature, international itinerary that unfolds in the days after.
This is also one of my first holidays as an adult that isn't an actual life move.
Its just a holiday and I love that I do want to come back to where I am now in a month.
I want to come back to post offices with 'please remove muddy boots' signs, and quiz nights at the pub, mulled wine, dessert nights, mid-winter dinners, snow on the mountains, Jamie Oliver cooking shows, freezing cold winds at Oreti beach, long baths on winter mornings listening to Beth Orton, opening up the bathroom window to see the frost covering everything outside. Persimmons and pears and grated nutmeg in porridge.
I love that this holiday is supposed to be just that, a month to just relax a little bit and think about what's next. And be thankful.
(And eat baked doritos and wear big sunglasses by a pool and sleep till noon like a rock star).

memorials in small towns

Last March I went running on a back road near Kurow, a farming town in the middle of the South Island, where I was spending a lot of time then. It was autumn, like now, and the light on the hills in the early evening was changing. There aren't many trees in the area; it was dusk on this road  and so I made it my aim to run to the one big oak tree in the distance, before turning back. It was planted by an old farmhouse on a long straight road.

When I got there the lights had been turned on in the front of the house. I didn't want to hang around too long; I worry about dogs. But then I saw that under tree, near the roots, there was a plaque that had been placed in the ground. Weeds were growing up around it.  I stopped and crouched down to look and pushed the weeds back, and on the plaque,  mossy and faded so you could hardly read it were the names of two boys who died, one killed in Italy and one in Africa, in WWI. The surname of the brothers was still the same one the mailbox almost ninety years later. You look at that one mailbox, one farm, in the middle of the  mountains and two losses for a mailbox out here seems pretty unbearable.

Memorials  - sometimes trees with plaques, but more often in stone or concrete - are usually in the centre of towns, I've found, but not always down here. When I started writing this, I remembered this photo I took two years ago. You have to look hard, but there is a war memorial for WWI in the paddock below the house. That was what I first saw when I stopped the car, this structure in the middle of nowhere. When I hopped over the fence and climbed up towards it, I saw this house, with open windows, curtains blowing, vacant for years.

Down the road, in a nursing home on the coast, this woman I interviewed about Anzac Day, Lorraine, who is 92, said there were always dances going on in those years, for men coming home and the farmboys leaving during WWII at the town halls. They were boys you had known from birth, who were like brothers, and boys you had crushes on, and maybe that one boy who drove you crazy, that you couldn't get off your mind. She said they would dance all night until that last slow song Wish Me Luck, a song that she still hated, because it was always the song that ended the night. You wouldn't want to let them go. But you could never let that show in your eyes.

I don't know if Memorial Days are more haunting to me now because I am older, or because I live in a rural area with an ageing demographic who weren't raised to give grief a lot of room, and you see how many names are engraved on these plaques and memorials, how many trees are planted for a soldier who didn't come home, and you wonder who was left in these towns to love.

Yesterday was Memorial Day in the U.S. It just made me think about this...

milford

This last Saturday, walking through rain, hood up and rapidly blinking water off my eyelashes, I listened to a man walking a few feet in front of me talk over his shoulder about a play that ran at the Fortune Theatre in Dunedin called Belong.

We weren't talking about theatre in general, but he began talking - or shouting; it was raining and we could barely hear each other - about it after I joked that I still get my feelings hurt a little bit if someone mimics the way I speak.

It was just an aside comment and I didn't give it much thought when I said that. It's not a big deal when someone does it, but it gets tiring that there is still a place in my head that recoils to hear how different I sound to people and suddenly the way I pronounce herbal and scone becomes yet another quiet, cold assurance - face to the wind - that no matter where I go in the world, I will always be an interloper.

He told me the play was about people coming to New Zealand and trying to make a home here and be accepted by the communities they had moved into. He described a whole story line that I don't remember. But I understood why he mentioned the play. That what he heard in my voice was a desire to belong, and that it was not unusual for here, and some playwright recently had been able to capture that in a three-act play.

Milford was as stunning as it has been for a thousand years; I have pictures.

But the part I loved the most about walking for four days through glacial valleys, under icy peaks, passing waterfalls you can't even see the top of and pools of water that reflect all this, after years of just hanging out around Milford's boundaries, was having a woman named Judith come find me in the lobby of Pompolona Lodge after I had taken off my pack, sit down next to me and ask if I was Gwyneth Hyndman - and tell me her mother was a Hyndman, and she always looked for my byline in the newspaper, which always came a few days late with the supplies, because apparently I am a lost, but now returning member of the Southland Hyndmans. They know I am here, she told me. And I thought, weird, but I was kind of thrilled by this.

I have this picture I took of it as my screensaver. Every time I see it I am reminded that someone saw my name down on the dinner list and she came out and found me in a group of strangers and drew three generations of Hyndmans from memory (then the rain got into my pack and soaked the paper, but I put it together a bit and took a picture of it).
But there was something about walking out of the mountains with a piece of paper like this, that I can draw a line to and say - if I am mimic-ed - this me, right here, and these are my people.