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.

Summer so far..

Six weeks ago - which was beginning of summer for me - was Boxing Day. I was up with the sun and a box of birds, keys jangling in my hand, down on Oreti Beach before 7 am.

That morning, the beach was magic. The waves ran through my ankles; the sea to my left; sand, warm and firm under my feet, Fiordland just there in a haze, a swinging door of wild weather, closing and opening to a new year, new adventure. I dove into the water for my first swim of the summer. It was like washing off 2011. Christmas: good riddance.

It didn't even really matter that I had drawn the short straw for work shifts and that an hour later I was straightening my skirt, brushing sand off my shoulders and putting my salty hair up with a bank pen as I ran up the stairs to work to expose the injustices of the world (then settling for writing about Boxing Day sales) .

And can you hear the freedom in my voice?

Besides the sudden appearance of summer, it was my second day of being cut loose from a five-day special series that ran in the newspaper, called Home For the Holidays. Under the heading there were a few sentences about Southland Times reporters doing a series on people flying home to Invercargill the week leading up to Christmas, and how we were there to capture all that joy.

That week, if you came in on any 1.40 pm flight from Christchurch you would have seen me - or at least felt the darkness coming from my corner of the terminal - in a long black jacket, dark sunglasses, black tights and boots, sitting icily in the waiting area, looking like I might be the point person for a assasination. But no, actually, I was there to find happy people reuniting with the ones they love. (To interview them, not to kill them).

In winter, the holidays are easy and effortless for me. And if it is Christmas in the winter, it means I'm in California, staying with my parents, usually in between jobs and usually comfortably hopeful in my natural state of transience. Its painting by numbers. There are traditions to fall in line with. There are the cards and letters from around the world my mom has out on the table at breakfast every morning after Thanksgiving; there is the standing with my dad and brother at Christmas in Los Olivos, when all the shops stay open late, to serve roasted walnuts like my mom and dad have done, with or without us kids, every second Saturday in December in my hometown for 30 years.

There is the early twilight across the street over the alfalfa field. The calls on the message machine from old friends back in town who want to walk up to Mattei’s for coffee and mud pie then come back and sit in the jacuzzi under the walnut trees, our toes above the steam, with a glass of wine and talk about life and where we are in it, and are we living up to the expectations we set for ourselves at age 8 (I am not a cowgirl and I am not married to one of the brothers from Bonanza, so F for failure from 8-year-old self).

In New Zealand, the season is different. It is summer and this is the bottom of the world so there are these long days of light that I will crave in seven months when it's just bed to car to office and back to bed in darkness.

But along with all the light there is also this wide open space of time, Christmas eve to December 26, then to New Years, full of absences in my life I maybe don't feel as much in May or September.

That was six weeks ago.

The light that was lasting until 11 pm on the beach is gone by 9:30 now. I don't feel so much that resentment when there were hugs and tears and packages in the airport terminal last month that weren't for me. I am back to missing specific people when I need to miss them and when it is right to miss them.

On Boxing Day, after I walked around in the heat and interviewed flustered salespeople and sullen shoppers, I got to go back down to Oreti Beach for a story on the lifeguards down there. I had finished, and was walking back to the car, trailing behind the photographer, when I saw an elderly man in the driver's seat of a parked truck on the beach, facing out to sea.

He had his head down and he was reading. In a frame on the dashboard, on the passenger side, facing the ocean, was a picture of a woman. I only glanced at the picture as I walked past, but in that glance I knew it was that picture that captures everything about her that he loved. And that sitting on a beach in the car, reading, was something they used to do together.

So I write about absences and missing people I love, and being jealous of people who have all that obviousnes right there with them at the correct times of the year. And then I remember how rare that is, and there are years you have that warmth and years that you just remember it being there. And that I think I know so much about loss but I don't really, yet.

It is February now. I know the light in the sky is lessening, but it is still a light to do things under. More weekends to new places with new friends that I need to remember to stay open to; we have more roads to discover before the light fades.

The Garden Party

Today is my father's birthday; I'm dedicating a song to him.

It's a song that was in my head last month, driving, then flying, then driving again, back from a wedding in a vineyard that I went by myself to, knowing only the bride. I had about six hours of travel time the day after to look out windows, forehead on glass, and think about how great it would be to have him turn this song up on the radio and sing it to me right about now.

The wedding was beautiful. The bride was beautiful. At the reception, the sun was coming down into the courtyard through the trees, and there was a fountain; it reminded me of being back home, I had these great new shoes that made me feel tall, yet still me, and everyone was wearing groovy frocks and and sunglasses and it felt like winter had been beaten back ; and at some point I was talking with someone, while holding a glass of champagne and a tartlet, when I was told I was strange.

The moment was surreal. There was the assessment of who had overheard this conversation and who, exactly, was doing the judging - because what kind of guy says that to a girl, who is clearly very much minus a plus one, at a wedding, because no matter what the context, all you hear is you don't belong here with us. I froze and tried not to let the warmth I could feel rising up in me get to my eyes, where it would show how that adjective killed my spirit a little, as someone who has a long history with public events that begin with feeling quite extraordinary and end with the realisation I'm a cautionary tale for some, or many, depending on the crowd.

For these illusions of being destined for greatness, I totally blame my dad.

Because for every parade, stage performance, and pony club show that I've arrived at like a conquistador, Dad has been my trusty sidekick, either in the background or taking the photograph as I stride off to be the heroine of whatever story I had created for myself that morning.

When I was eight Dad took of me at a Western show class I entered with my pony, Mishka near my hometown. Small, hairy $75 Shetland ponies don't belong next to glistening, sleek, $20,000 Quarter horses, but if I was oblivious to this, Dad chose to be too. So he borrowed a Los Olivos Olive Company van and we coaxed Mishka into the back of it and hauled her off to the show, pulling in beside six-horse trailers in a field next to the showring and unloaded her. I remember looking around and thinking yeah okay, so maybe we wouldn't get the blue ribbon, but I was pretty confident of a second or third place.

One thing dad insisted on always, no matter what I was up to: ''safety first''.

So the picture I have of Mishka and I is us in a lineup of horses and riders that are clearly bred to win. Shiny saddles, sparkling belt buckles, spurs and cowboy hats. In the middle is me on Mishka, coming up to the shoulder of the horses on either side of me, wearing a polo shirt, regular backyard jeans, a bandana tied around my neck and a big white astronaut crash helmet.

I remember at some point looking around and squinting up at the other riders, the astronaut helmet slipping down over my eyes, and then down at myself and Mishka and thinking we look kind of different.


There is a photo I have been trying to embed into this post all afternoon. I've scanned it wrong, so you will have to rely on word visuals here. The photo is of me and dad in a Day in the Country parade. This is age 7; about a year before Mishka. To tie me over in my horse craze, Dad had built me one in the back yard, then put wagon wheels and a halter on it. I named it Blaze. I dressed up in cowboy boots and a bonnet and Dad wheeled me down Grand Ave, waving. The great part about the photo which hangs by my bed, to remind me of my roots, is my expression. You can see the defensiveness building in my eyes as its dawning on me that I'm not on a real horse and that I'm not a real cowgirl. I'm starting to get that sullen look of a girl who's fantasy that she is the most beautiful girl in the world is starting to deflate. Dad, the wind beneath my wings, is looking 100 percent supportive as he pushes me along telling me to keep waving.

Story of my life, right there.

So today on my Dad's birthday I'm playing back a song that was always on when we did our Saturday chore drives together, the drives to get alfalfa bales for Mishka where I'd stare hard at the rearview mirror to decide if I liked my face. This song would come on and I'd snap out of it and look over at Dad and be like hey it's our song.

And it still is.

Even more so when you're standing in a courtyard with tartlets and Champagne, defending the way you live your life, which I'm still trying hard to be a good heroine of.

It's it's is a pretty good legacy to leave to a daughter, Dad.

You know why?

(Everybody, altogether)

Cause it's all right now
I learned my lesson well
You can't please everyone
So you got to please yourself



For me, Ricky's lip-synching adds to the overall authenticity of his message.

(On an endnote: I sort of threw this guy to the dogs at the beginning of the story with the comment about me being strange. He said he remembered that I had lived, happily, by choice, on my own in Clinton, South Otago, three years ago. Now I live in Invercargill. And he saved himself by saying strange like it was maybe a good survival skill to have handy if i was going to keep moving to wintry, towns at the bottom of the world that are interesting to me. Tonight I chased an astronomer down Oreti beach in 115 km winds - my bank card, pens, office key, two parking tickets flying out of my pockets, to be lost in the waves - for a picture of him watching his 54th solar eclipse. These are the places I like to make my home. Maybe that is odd. But this is me)

And the rest of the wedding reception was awesome. I danced all night with total strangers.

Us strange girls do that.

Happy Birthday Dad. Wish I was going with you guys to the Apple Farm, then Costco, then to the Christmas tree farm...miss you guys so...

Operation Happiness: 9 things getting me through the winter

Winter.

Not my finest season.

Happiness may only be a dog sunning itself on a rock. But I want it. And usually, and thankfully - very, very thankfully - nothing stands between me and unearned joy, peace, tenderness for the world, etc in spring, summer and autumn.

But winter. Winter, I'm a drooping flower. Anxious about everything. Restless, lonely, sun-starved. Overly navel-gazey, competitive. Sullen...

Augmenting the usual S.A.D. sack blast is a 360 life change for me in the last six weeks. Its a very wanted and positive change, but its a move from sun and wildernesses to a cold, light-less city and a job where I'm writing again, but it also requires me to act smarter then I am, and be a pain in the ass.

This is draining for a people-pleaser.

I spend a lot of time on the phone at a desk that is saturated in yellow post-it notes, on the fourth story of a grey building, which looks out to a clock on another grey building, and a grey sky above all of this, trying to compose hard-hitting questions on subjects I've had about 53 seconds to make myself all-knowing on (it's not always like that but on some days it feels that way).

This time last year, for a reference point, I was coming back from a cycling trip around Prince Edward Island with Angie Kelly, the wind and rain on our faces, sand in toes, blueberries and cheese for dinner, feeling lovely and alive and grateful...

Winter...ai, ai, ai....

My happy list so far: stormy walks on Oreti beach, weekend trips getting OUT of the city, Jo Seagar cooking school's apple cake, baked in the morning, so the whole house smells like cinnamon; late afternoon sunlight on the floor, my french press; waking up buried under duvets to see birthday flowers and sunglasses for when I need them, and I will, there will be light again; and Fleurs Place, my favourite restaurant in the world at Moeraki. Its like an old lighthouse with stained glass windows and fish that's come right off the boats and everything comes on these old plates, like something out of your nana's cupboard. As for the eharmony video: my flatmate downloaded for me after he came home one night to find me on the lawn, headlamp on, trying to coax a stray cat into our gargage with a chicken drumstick. I keep it as a cautionary tale.

And when all else fails to raise the spirits...

Bad boys in suits. It's my guilty pleasure winter thing.

So fun to watch them misbehave (from a distance)

Don Draper's best quote from clie on Vimeo.

This one night? In Malaga?

Three weeks ago, I was emptying out my hiking pack on a lawn, in front of a hotel room in Manapouri, and I found something I thought I had lost.

It was dark and my pack smelled of garbage juice that had dripped down to the bottom. I ripped my sleeping bag out and spread it on a patio chair outside the sliding door and gave the pack a shake. Plastic mugs with dried coffee grounds stuck at the bottom, a headlamp, a soggy diary and a few other things I couldn't identify hit the ground then fell away into the dark.

I've been back in New Zealand a month now. When I shower I'll still look at my belly and see the sunburn I got that last week on the deck in Santa Ynez - the week that was so hot you just wanted to walk around in a t-shirt and flip flops, and sip gin and tonic with limes in a fold-out chair forever - I'd watch it fade a little bit, night after night.

In the morning I zip up a dirty red down jacket with a piece of duck tape over a rip on the right sleeve. It's dark by 5. What I do see in the landscape is as piercing as ever to me - a wintry overlay on the late summer/early autumn I left behind in April. But since I'd been back here, if I see any magazine covers at grocery store markets with any beach or sun or girls in sunglasses, I turn away and look at something else.

That night inManapouri I felt around on the ground, in the grass and my hands wandered around picking up pens and coins and a few gross, damp, garbage juiced wads of something, and then my fingers roamed across it, and I just sat back on my haunches for a second and thought of course I'd find this tonight. And I even wondered if I should just throw it quickly back in my pack.

But I did pick it up, and I wondered how it had gotten so lost, and I flicked it open, just like I did that one night at a cafe, in Malaga, on the beach, wearing my gold sandals, lip gloss and a silvery summer dress with little pieces of copper embedded in the neckline.

I remember taste of the sweet wine my cousin loved, and thinking how beautiful she looked with her fiance beside her. The warm night air, the bread baskets, the bacarones, more sweet wine that led to morning and me in a churreria, chin on hands, watching the slow delicious drip of espresso filling a tiny glass with gold through red blurry eyes.

There were the days leading up to the wedding - the arrival of guests from around the world, sitting in hotel lobbies with the sea just there, and a drink just here, expressing myself with lots of big hand gestures like I was still speaking another language. Washing out the same dress in the sink of the apartment above the streets and the ocean every night with pomegranite and tangerine shampoo and drying it on the balcony so I could wear it the next morning to sit in hotel lobbies again.

Then those go-to-hell black velvety heels that nearly split my feet as I tried to stride over coblestones to the church on that last evening, then gave up and just ran barefoot up the steps, then slipped them back on in the pews to look tall. And how hours later, my cousin's new sister-in-law danced flamenco in heels twice as high as mine and then my cousin pulled her long white dress over one arm and the two of them dragged everyone out onto the floor and the music changed and suddenly we were all doing the electric slide to Friends in Low Places.

And getting off a bus hours later: my aunt, mother of the bride, still stunning as she took my uncle's arm as the sky over the streetlamps exploded in streaks of pink as he took off his cowboy hat. My other cousin held the bouquet; her boyfriend loosened his bright pink bowtie and I walked in front of all of them down the street, walking backwards, looking at them and thinking this was just like Christmas dinner when we were kids, except better and in Spain, and I was carrying my heels in one hand and a fluttering red fan in the other hand...

I flicked the fan shut.

In Manapouri it was beautiful, starry winter night - you look at the sky here and you just think lonesome. I dropped the fan in the pack and drew it closed; put my gloves back on and pulled my hat down almost to my eyes. I headed towards the pub to check the weather report on the news even though I knew it was going to be gloomy.

But that fan. It was like a love letter you keep finding and stashing away somewhere weird to surprise yourself when you're lonely.
There is no comfort for the cold and endless darkness here now except hot water bottles.

But there was this one time? In Malaga?...

A traveller's blessing: From a bleak, cold place, I wish everyone a hot-blooded, wild red Spanish fan falling out of your garbage-juiced, half-frozen hiking pack this winter.

Chocolate milk. Buttermilk donuts. R Country Store

Every time I come back to my hometown I bring a list.

I'm a geek, lists relax me, so when I come back to Los Olivos, California there is a scrap of paper I've written on feverishly while sitting in an airport terminal.

Next to each bullet points are direct orders to myself about favourite roads to run on at dusk, pieces of outdoor furniture I plan to sit all day in with Lompoc tortilla chips and Cowboy Caviar from El Rancho; there are Midland School fencelines with No Tresspassing signs I need to squirrel through, highways up the coast that Cristi Silva and I will be driving in her husband's pickup truck, and MP3 playlists for jumping on the trampoline at night in my parents' backyard under walnut trees.

The list is amended and re-prioritized every few years; new strategies are sometimes called for (i.e. Fess Parker's Wine Country Inn & Spa has put a door-sized board across it's gated pool entrance. Lame. But not impossible.) and as Los Olivos has grown wealthier and lost some its grime and soul, there are now winecountry restaurants to spend a whole paycheck at and vineyards to explore and sometimes I'll read or hear about these places and add them in.

But there one item on the hometown list that is always at the top, unmoved, and marked in stars.

Chocolate milk. Buttermilk donuts. R Country Store.

I used to love running errands with Dad on Saturday mornings. It was my first experience of having 'time to yourself' with someone else and it was where I got my love of jumping into a car and driving away with the radio on. Morning errands were an escape, a reward for completed yardwork (if you rake enough leaves, they fill up the back of a truck, and then that truck has to be taken to the landfill). Easy logic. The quicker you get it done, the quicker you can hit the road, roll down the windows, pass a Capri Sun juice back and forth and tune into the Padres game.

Some Saturday mornings we'd cross the highway and drive down Foxen Canyon Road, past the dusty corrals and oak trees on the hillsides, the mist rising off them as the heat of the day began to burn through; past the cattle on the bare, brown hills and up the winding road to the landfill entrance.

Some years it was weekend softball games and I would ride shotgun with the glove in my lap down Refugio Road to Santa Ynez, then be really scared to get out of the car and be a team player. I wanted to stay in the car with Dad and his John Fogerty cassette tapes.

When I had horses we'd take the blue tarp in the backyard by the walnuts, and cover the floor of the minivan and drive down to the end of Baseline and pick up bales of alfalfa then take the long road back to Los Olivos. I remember rolling down the window and resting my chin on my arms, pushing the flyaway hair from my ponytail out of my nose and eyes and looking hard at the rearview mirror, trying to figure out if I liked my face.

Then I got older and got a license and inherited a car and pretty soon I had my own errands to run, and places of my own I would drive to listening to my favourite mixed tapes.

At some point in my early years as an errand sidekick, Dad and I would stop at R Country Store on a corner of Grand Ave. He'd grab a chocolate milk and the weekend paper and I'd get a buttermilk donut.

Dad would hold open the door and I'd walk under his arm and there was a great feeling of a Saturday morning just beginning, with the Lone Ranger on at noon on channel 32 and then my horse to ride all afternoon and then maybe a sleepover at Jenny Anderson's (Jenny had the best sleepovers) and Xanadu to watch and a lot of interpretive dancing on rollerskates in her driveway until it got dark and her mom called us in.

Whenever I come back, Dad is always ready to take a car out and get his chocolate milk and the Saturday paper. And in all of my wanderings I have just never found a better place to get a buttermilk donut. We'll drive up in his Austin Mini Cooper and get the mail. You can't really talk because the engine is so loud. So he and I will just shake our head and mouth 'tourists' when we can't get a park in town.

We'll pull in at R Country and the tri tip will be smoking on the grill outside and all the neighbors will be sitting outside in plastic chairs with coffee in to go cups and Jim with his baseball hat pulled low will always say 'well I always know your daughter's home when I hear the trampoline at night'. And I'll head for the donuts and dad, the chocolate milk and we'll meet at the counter with the weekend paper and fight over who's paying.

Driving with my father somewhere really normal and familiar is one of my favourite things about coming home. I feel young and taken care of and loved for who I am no matter what I do because I'm his kid.

And when Dad opens the door of R Country and I duck under his arm with my buttermilk donut I feel like life is one long Saturday morning that's just beginning.

I will miss these small, simple drives down the road, for nothing in particular, more than anything.

Love you so much Dad. Happy Father's Day.