existing's tricky:but to live's a gift
The carpark was so full when we arrived in the Hunua Ranges this Easter weekend that we had to backtrack and park on the road. Unsurprising, given the strong sunshine and crisp autumn air, but off-putting. We decided to walk the Cossey-Massey loop, hoping that the majority of people would be taking the much shorter Hunua Falls track, and fortunately we were correct.
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My baby lies asleep on my lap. He is ill for the first time, a tummy bug. Cradling his little exhausted body in my arms and stroking his head I just want to kiss him over and again, I love him so intensely. Soon I will be struck down too, although when I started writing this I was hopeful I might have escaped. I am not prepared for how violently it hits me, I feel I have been wrung out and bruised from the inside, and I am filled with amazement at how bravely my little one weathered it. Fortunately it passes through us both in 24h, and we are now recovered.
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We agree on a time to meet, and I start planning the night before. Countless tiny tabs on my phone in the dim light of the lamp while O sleeps. Routes plotted in the Maps app. Mental calculations: if we reach here by 10.30, will we manage to get there by 3? In the end: we leave later than we’d hoped. Of course. It wouldn’t be a family roadtrip if we left on time. But it’s not disastrous. We’re off, the Toyota Blade close behind, rainclouds battling it out with the sun for possession of the sky.
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At the end of December, when my baby was just three months and I was still spending more of the night awake than asleep, I made a list of three personal and professional things that I wanted to accomplish this year. One of them, as I mentioned in a recent post, was to develop a writing practice.
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It was a sticky hot December morning when we set out on this walk, brightly sunny at first, giving way to heavy grey clouds that chased us back to the car. The path starts at the bottom of a new housing estate, crosses over a mangrove bay, then twists in between the estuary and back…
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It’s Sunday morning and everything is strangely calm. The light is grey through the window, a grey we’ve accepted as the norm this summer. When I opened the curtains a few hours ago the garden was deadly still, a soft rain barely perceptible falling. The trees are stirring now, a gentle musical movement, and a fat speckled-bellied thrush is perched on our fence, lost in thought. Occasionally a rough gust shakes everything up, leaving leaves rustling and dancing in its wake.
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I started writing this post towards the end of October, as I began to stir and emerge from the blur of the first few weeks. I remember turning the page of my calendar and realising with a physical shock that the month was almost over. I’d barely noticed it had begun.
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It’s September 1st 2022, just after 6pm. I’m writing in the grey of the gloaming. Outdoors a dogged barking, the tu-tu-tu twitter of the birds, the occasional rush of a car. The trees are still, the sky bruised.
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August – September Update I’ve spread a teatowel over the counter in order to bring my laptop close. The sounds of the kitchen embrace me: the soft burr of the timer, the hiss and sigh of the pot on the stove. Outdoors night is falling, the window to my right dark and green, grey sky…
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We set out much later than planned. A younger me would have been upset by this, but these days I have all but outgrown the impulse. “Perfect timing”, K remarks happily as we join State Highway 1, providing just the right amount of affirmation for me to relax back into my chair and let myself…
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On the eve of my three year anniversary in New Zealand, I wanted to pause for a moment to try write the words that I would have found comforting back in 2017, before I left.
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I struggle with the seasons here still, in fact it is perhaps the one thing that triggers homesickness the most. I had not realised how much I lived my life rooted in weather and landscape until those things were turned on their head, quite literally inverted.
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Mad to Live 