A walk in the Park

Join us for a few minutes in the park around the corner. We went for sunset earlier today.

Pioneering

We think our things are here, in this very country, stacked in the great stacks of containers that spring up like mushrooms at the port each day. When we rode past them on the train this morning, we pointed. Was ours red or blue? I had to go back to the first blog entry to even remember what it looked like—big and rusty and like the back of a truck was all I remembered. The huge red container and all of our things, though, will sit on the dock waiting for the customs and quarantine people to have their say about it. We’re told this will take two to three weeks. Even though that’s just a small percentage of what we’ve waited so far, somehow it seems like a very very long time.

One of the things which marks this time of having only small amounts of borrowed stuff is how rustic it all feels. I mean, I can’t quite claim to be Laura Ingalls Wilder as I type on this laptop and then send my words out through our wireless internet, but there are some things about our life here that wouldn’t seem quite so strange to Laura (although my mention of them would seem quite odd).

The biggest place I notice this is in the kitchen. It wouldn’t be too strong to say that we tend to have something of a kitchen appliance addiction—just small appliances, mostly, but a rather large addiction. And since we cook a lot, we use this addiction well. We added up the cost of all these little appliances and decided that it didn’t make sense to sell in the US and buy here in NZ—we’d just buy the transformers to step down the electricity and use the ones we have. But those ones we have are on the ship, or rather, in the shipyard. So I mix the bread by hand, chop the onions with the one good knife we brought, grate the potatoes with the box grater.

I’ve actually always wondered what I would do without the gadgets that make my cooking possible. And I think that if I had my old life and my old level of busyness, I would have to change what I cooked rather a lot, not make homemade bread, not make dinners with so many ingredients. But in addition to my house being mostly empty except for the family, my days are mostly empty except for the family, too. So dinners are staying just as complicated, but I’m using the old fashioned way of getting the job done: child labour. I’ve always baked with the children, but these days, we don’t just bake for fun together; we cook together because I need their help.

Aidan has learnt to peel the garlic they have here which is so different from the papery covering on garlic in the US (here it’s clearly fresh, with greenish white thick skins). Naomi grates the cheese or the potatoes. When they want fresh bread, it’s not just to get me to start the whole thing in the bread machine. It’s to weigh the ingredients (the measures are all different here—ah, metrics), begin to mix them together, feel the ache in the arm when the dough gets stiff, the slow change to silky elastic dough as the bread is kneaded enough. And this working together brings us closer to the food, closer to one another. It’s significantly slower, and it’s also grounding, connecting in some way. This doesn’t mean that I won’t use the miraculous food processors and kitchen aid once they’ve made their way through the bureaucracy, but it does mean that I wouldn’t trade this time without them.

And then there are some things that will continue to feel like we live in a different age even once all of our things arrive. Here in New Zealand, they mostly don’t use clothes dryers (if you agree that this is remarkable, you’re an American). So we have gotten good at pegging the clothes out on the line, at watching the clouds for rain, at measuring when we might do laundry again based on how long the washing is taking to dry. Here we garden and compost and walk to the veggie market in the village. Tonight Michael went to the town meeting in the community hall to be among the many who are petitioning to get a traffic light put in from the highway to the turnoff into the village. As he attended inside, Aidan and I went to the park next to the community hall and threw balls for Perry until Jemma and Phil walked by. And so even though we don’t know that many people yet, and even though all our worldly belongings sit on a pier in Wellington, and even though cutting the onions each night makes me cry (and the children go through a little dance of trying to make me feel better), there’s something lovely about being a pioneer, here in this, the most wired country in the world, in this snug and comfortable house. Now we just need a horse to pull the minivan and a go-anywhere wireless internet card…

Pictures from the weekend

So, even though there were blue moments this weekend, there were also some lovely, grounded ones.

This first picture is of a rose from our new rose bush. I've waited eleven years to have a rose bush because we didn't have the room for it in Cambridge or in DC. Here, we have several roses already in bloom, and this new one is now planted out back, where I can see it from the bedroom and smell it from the open French doors in the study. Magnificent.

Next is from Saturday morning at Paraparaumu Beach, where we'd been to the farmer's market and now were playing at the park (Michael and I are on the other ends of the sea saw, and from the top of the sea saw you can see the sea).

You'll see that Michael has become quite the dashing kiwi fellow--on the Ocean Road stairs, in full boogy-board gear, and in front of the Christenberry print weaving red New Zealand flax into a flax flower (which he gave to the neighbor who smoked us the fish). He's jumping into NZ life with both feet.

And last, the children (ours plus Naomi's friend) for an evening walk up the beach. We walked last night through the warm summer evening (the warmest night we've had since we've been here) and the children couldn't resist swimming in their clothes as the sun set. When we got to the part of the beach where Trish and Keith live, we were going to go and borrow towels, but instead they came out to the beach, with Keith's sister Anne. Soon Jemma and Phil joined us and we all waited, while the children bounced in the waves, for the comet to show up on the first clear night we've had in nearly a week. The children played, the adults watched the sun set and the comet rise, and life felt pretty close to perfect. It's all a mixed bundle, but it's always beautiful.

Borrowed time

There are many sagas to this move, but some only happen in our minds. Maybe most of the sagas only happen in our minds. In any case, the saga of our stuff is a mind-only saga. I’ll explain.

When we were first contracting with the movers, they gave us an estimated arrival date of mid- to late-January, with their best guess being that we’d see our stuff the week of January 29. That felt like a looooong way off from December 4 when we last saw it, but it was reasonable. After all, we were moving a rather large distance.

When we arrived here, we called to check to see whether they had an updated arrival date. They did. February 28. Note that that is an entire month later. I was way down in the dumps about it. We called earlier this week for an update (especially after the tanker sank off of the coast of England). The website said that our stuff was in Spain, transferring to a ship to China. The fellow we spoke to said that the scheduled arrival date was something like March 15. Of course, they weren’t actually sure where it was or which ship it happened to be on. This seemed like a bad sign. Would he investigate? Yes, he would, but it took him several days, each day making us feel more and more like we should be looking for our purple couch in photos from the shores of Devon.

Thursday morning we got the email: sorry, we were wrong. Your things aren’t in Spain and they haven’t not run aground in Devon. They’re actually in Sydney Australia and will be here, er, January 29 as originally scheduled.

This is, of course, a miracle. The ship still needs to come in, get unloaded, and have the containers clear customs before they can schedule it for delivery to us. So it might be a week or two away. Still, the idea that soon everything we own will be in New Zealand—that’s astonishing!

The difference between thinking we are months away from having our things to thinking we are days away is as wide as the Pacific. For the first two days, I was floating. I moved the furniture in and around in my mind, felt the flurry of excitement and also concern about all that needed to happen in the next two weeks rather than the next two months. There are walls to paint, furniture arrangements to figure out, things we didn’t manage to give away before we left to deal with, and all the borrowed things to give back.

Today, though, the things coming has awakened a fierce bout of homesickness. The purple couch won’t sit in the lovely livingroom on Belmont Road. The purple chaise, which I’ve imagined still tucked into the corner of my second-floor study, will be hard to place in this much-smaller house. I worry that a bunch of misplaced American furniture is coming to join a misplaced American family here in Paekakariki. Will any of us fit in?

Every night I dream of house renovations. Last night we were peeling off fiberglass nailed onto a sun room, and discovering a huge highway just outside the yard. We sat on the grass with the traffic whizzing by, dismayed—no renovation was going to move this 10 lane highway from our backyard. A US renovation dream. Some nights our renovations are in beach houses. Sometimes we install granite like the lovely counters in Belmont Road. Two days ago, we pressed shells into concrete countertops. When I woke to find the formica in the kitchen, I felt a wave of sadness. My days and nights are both in a state of revision.

We just finished dinner—the four of us, Perry lolling about, and Naomi’s friend, all eating a fish I've never heard of in the warm summer sunshine. The sound of the water garden from the next door neighbor competed in lovely ways with the gentle rhythm of the ocean. Our across the street neighbor, togs (= bathingsuit) in hand, called over the fence to tell us he was going to smoke the fish he caught last night and bring some over after his swim. Marianne came and picked up some fresh banana bread, and we made plans for dinner Monday night. This morning we picked up a William Christenberry print we got years ago from the Morris museum in Augusta, which we brought with us and had framed here. From the other room, the Indigo Girls are singing Winthrop, a song set just accross from Logan Airport in Boston: “Hear the dim roar of the last flight out, and for someone there is someone never coming back.” Old friends and new, old life and new, all coming together here bit by bit. This borrowed furniture has done most of its time now. Soon this house will be all us, and there’s something wonderful and also lonely about that. Our borrowing time is over, and so is the image that there is still a place to return to in Washington DC. For now, the children and the dog and the purple couch will all find their homes here.

Scaling

Today, at work, I’ve been charged to read about and think about New Zealand education and keep “fresh eyes” to notice differences between what I see here and what I see in the US. That’s not hard. I’m starting with reading the draft of the New Zealand national curriculum. I’m really impressed with it, am trying to track the qualitative differences between what I see here and what I experience in state-wide curricula in the US. There are some pieces of what they do in NZ that I think are obviously what we should do in the US. For example, here one of their core principles is that: “All students experience a curriculum that reflects New Zealand’s bicultural heritage and its multicultural society.” Why don’t we do that in the US? Why don’t we think of ourselves as a bicultural, biracial country with a multicultural population? Our history is so affected by the black/white issue, and our present is so affected by the incredible diversity of the country (especially around the borders). Yet we're afraid to address these issues head-on in schools, and so we inch our way around, perhaps believing that if we don't talk about it, maybe the issues will go away. It hasn't worked for the last 250 years, but hey, there's always the chance things will change.

The NZ curriculum is also much more values centred, and the values are not always the same ones that I’d expect to see in an overall description of a national or state wide curriculum. You expect "responsibility" and "integrity" and those are there, but there are others that seem unexpected. For example, “curiosity” is a core value as is “care for the environment.” This feels quite different from the values I've seen in equivalent documents in the US.

So, to check these assumptions, I started to play with the Virginia Standards of Learning (SOL) curriculum, which is the one I know best. There the difference started to pop out even more. The SOLs are much more tactical, much more connected to specific hard goals. There’s talk about being best in the country, best in the world. None of that “best” talk exists here in NZ; although they aim for “excellence”, it’s not a comparative excellence, not excellence versus someone else’s excellence. That’s interesting too. The arts focus here is about stimulating “creative action and response” and “celebrat[ing] artistic and aesthetic expressions of self, community, culture, and our unique environment”. In the SOLs, where the arts are included (with a small self-congratulatory passage about how forward thinking it is to think of the arts as a part of the curriculum), they’re about enhancing critical thinking and getting to be smarter, better, etc. Creativity is mentioned in passing. Enjoyment is absent.

Each of the SOL goals is future-focused in an achievement kind of way. They’re about getting students to be at the top of their game, to be competitive, to be successful. The NZ goals seem qualitatively different. The “vision” is to have young people who will be: “confident, connected, lifelong learners, and actively involved”. Those are almost quality of life issues—as though the schools here are about raising happy people and not just successful workers. Interesting.

But then I worried about comparing apples to oranges, a national curriculum to a state curriculum. Maybe at the state level you have to be more tactical, more comparative, because of the smaller scale. So I poked around with scale issues. The medium state of Virginia has about 1.5 million children in its schools. New Zealand has 760,000 children. Massachusetts has almost a million students. California has 6.3 million students. That means that California has more than 2 million more students in its schools than New Zealand has people of any age living here. That’s astonishing.

I think I’m just beginning to understand these issues of scale, just beginning to get a sense of even what scale means at this level. I look out my office window at a busy, bustling city. The tall buildings (as tall as the buildings in DC, certainly), poke up from this central district, and houses climb the hills around me until the land falls away to the harbour. The city sidewalks are packed with people with briefcases, young children holding hands as they venture out on a field trip, elegantly-dressed young women sipping coffee and flipping through fashion magazines. If the buildings were taller, it would look like New York City, only with more hills and better views (New Yorkish people in a Seattle-like setting). But the buildings aren’t taller, and the downtown is walkable in an hour or so, and from my window I can see where the buildings end and the single-family homes begin. All scaled down.

What becomes more possible at this scale? Is this kind of educational system that is about caring for people’s lives (rather than prepping for the harsh realities of a job force) possible here because of the scale? How about the lack of high stakes standardized testing? What becomes less possible here because of the scale?

Last difference to note today. The core curricular areas of the NZ national curriculum are arts, health and physical education, English, learning languages, mathematics and statistics, science, technology and the social sciences. Of all of these, health and physical education is the one I’m likely to be least attracted to from my background. Check out the “four interdependent concepts” which are “at the heart of this learning area” (here I'm quoting)

• Hauora—a Mäori philosophy of well-being that includes the dimensions of taha wairua, taha hinengaro, taha tinana, and taha whänau, each one influencing and supporting the others*
• Attitudes and values—a positive, responsible attitude on the part of the students to their own well-being; respect; care and concern for other people and the environment; and a sense of social justice.
• Socio-ecological perspective—a way of viewing and understanding interrelationships that exist between individuals, others and society.
• Health promotion—a process for developing and marinating supportive physical and emotional environments that involves students in personal and collective action.

* in this learning area…Haurora and well-being, though not synonyms, share much common ground. Taha wairua relates to spiritual well-being; tahah hinengaro to mental and emotional well-being; taha tinana to physical well-being, and taha whänau to social well-being.

(ok, not quoting anymore)
Here every aspect seems to be about raising well-rounded people, about raising thoughtful, respectful, healthy people. From the arts to physical education, from English to maths, the whole educational system seems to be about raising people to be happy contributing members of the society. We've got to find a way to make that scalable.

New beginnings

After all of the weeks of staying home with the children, yesterday I went to work for the first time. I have a very part time job at NZCER (nzcer.org.nz), where I’m a senior researcher trying to begin to understand the NZ educational system. But before I start beginning to understand the educational system, I suppose I have to begin to understand my role there and what I’ll actually do.
And so it was another new beginningish sort of day. There were people who came to say hello to me whose names I forgot instantly, there were awkward moments of wandering around and seeing people in the kitchen or in the toilet and thinking that maybe they had introduced themselves to me or maybe they hadn’t. So do I introduce myself to them—rude, if we’ve just been talking and I’ve just got it confused. Or do I not introduce myself—rude if we haven’t been introduced. Sigh. There’s all this awkward new beginnings flavour to all of this, and I must admit that I’m a wee bit weary of new beginnings. It seems like I’ve faced just about enough of those at this point. I’ll trade you six new beginnings for one familiar—even tedious—conversation.
It was so interesting to enter into a place where no one particularly knows me or thinks about me. I’ve been at GMU almost 5 years now, and even though I don’t know everyone at the large College of Education and Human Development faculty meetings, I do know lots of people, and I have a sense of the place. I know how it works and what some of the divisions are and which people always eat lunch together on retreat days. I know that I can talk candidly with my dean and become more impressed with him each time. I know that if I come up with an idea I’m really excited about, the administration will really try hard to make it work. GMU is a fantastic place to work, and I’ve known that. The thing I didn’t understand so much until yesterday is that not only do I know them, but I feel like the folks there really know me. In the huge Mason campus in Fairfax, I almost never run into anyone I know, and so I would never before have said that I felt really connected to that campus (I mostly work at the little Arlington campus). Yesterday, though, I discovered the difference between not knowing every single person (the way I am at GMU) and not knowing anyone at all. That turns out to be a rather large difference. It’s amazing how obvious that looks written down.
And, in case I wasn’t feeling quite disconnected enough about being at a place where no one knew me, on the train ride home we got a call from the mother of our babysitter. Aidan had fallen at the park, and our babysitter, fast on her feet, had carried him to her mother’s house. I could hear him screaming on the background as I tried to discreetly talk on a crowded train. He’s fine. He fell on a climbing structure and hit his mouth on the metal bars. He cut both his lips, badly chipped a tooth, and may, of course, have done worse damage to his teeth than we yet know. It’s all ok—it was looking at his mouth once I got home that it first really hit me why we have baby teeth in the first place. Very clever design feature. But, even though I wouldn’t have done anything differently, I wish I had been there with him when he fell, wish I had been able to comfort him and care for him. So it’s more mixed bag.
What isn’t mixed at all is that Michael and I have been taking Perry for a walk in the morning before the children wake up. We throw the ball down long stretches of empty beach and watch Perry’s footprints in the sand—fast heavy ones on the way to fetch the ball, lighter trotting ones on the way back. Even if the weather has been awful (as it continues to be nearly every day), there is nothing mixed about that walk. On the rare sunny morning, the sun glints off the waves and illuminates the foot of Kapiti island first before flooding the beach with light. On grey mornings, we can look up and see the clouds caught in the hills, admire all the layers and textures that grey knows how to be. The beauty of this place is creeping into me and becoming part of who I am somehow. It is as certain as sand in my sheets, as Perry’s tail wagging, as Aidan asking to be tickled. And it is part of the rhythm of my day, seeing beautiful things everywhere I look. That is one new beginning that I’m not tiring of experiencing, the question of what the beach will look like this morning, of what shape and texture the sand might be today, of what patterns the clouds might make this morning. And there will be evening and there will be morning, another new day.

In the swim

Today we discovered the wonders of the Porirua Aquatics Centre which is located (perhaps not so surprisingly) in Porirua, a suburban enclave of Wellington about 20 minutes away from Paekakariki.
We began our trip to Porirua in a quest for Michael’s new glasses. His broke somehow as he was picking up Perry on Monday, and he’s been squinting ever since (not his best look). So after French toast, we headed to Porirua, which we had been wanting to explore. First stop, we found ourselves in a real live shopping mall. This one could happily have been in Tampa F:, tropical plants inside, huge food court, the Body Shop advertising a massive sale on body butter, jewelry stores with “layby now for Valentine’s Day” signs in the window. There were two glasses stores.
What were the differences between buying glasses in the Porirua mall and Pentagon City? Pentagon city has three glasses stores, and each of the stores has maybe 20% more glasses than the stores here (but all of the stores have enough selection to make me dizzy). And the other difference is that I’d never have let Naomi go on her own to the store next to us which was having a sale on children’s clothing. Never.
The food court, like all the food courts I’ve seen so far here, had a couple of meat-pie-and-muffin kinds of places and a whole lot of Eastern-facing restaurants—many kinds of Asian and Indian. We ordered a dhal dish that was so good it made me moan in ways that embarrassed the children—this from the food court in a MALL. I’ll trade the extra glasses store for that any day.
Then to buy a couple of more things on the endless list of new household items. Whenever we contact the international moving company currently in charge of our stuff, we get depressed and have to buy something to brighten up the house and let us know that actually we live here even though virtually nothing we lay eyes on is ours. Last time it was a bookshelf we bought when we heard our things wouldn’t be coming until something like February 20. This time we bought new covers for the bed (a duvet cover for Naomi and a blanket for us) because the stuff won’t arrive until the first or second week in MARCH. You can’t imagine how tired I am of the clothes I brought (less than half of which are suitable for the summer season as it’s understood in the NZ context).
But the treat of the day was the Porirua Aquatics Centre. We had been introduced to this magical place on Wednesday, when Marianne took us there. But the magic was a little thin Wednesday, as the huge waterslide was closed and then someone threw up in the pool and they closed it for several hours. Today, we thought we’d try it without the vomit.
It’s a big indoor pool complex, with a big lap pool, a huge pool to delight children—with things that squirt water, a river that snakes around with real current, and the occasional bout of big waves in the wavemaker. The water in the main pool never gets over Naomi’s head, and is rarely over Aidan’s, and it’s warm and designed to be a child’s paradise. Then there are three hot tubs (of varying heat and with varying age differentials—from “all welcome” to “adults only”). The true joy of it is a huge waterslide (“hydroslide”) which weaves in an enclosed tube outside the building, falling from the roof, winding down the outside of the building, and hurling you back inside into a shallow pool. It’s long and twisty and oodles of fun for kids and adults. We must have gone down it—in different combinations—50 times today. And then, when we were finally tired and cold and our skin and eyes were smarting from the chlorine, Michael and I sent the kids to do the waterslide on their own (totally safe, and with lifeguards every 10 feet or so) and we slipped into the sauna.
At the pool, the differences from the US were startling. Each of the water effects was familiar to us, and the place reminded each of us of someplace we’d been. But those someplaces were often enclaves of the very rich (the Alaska cruise, the posh hotel where I once attended a conference in Phoenix, the expensive water parks outside DC). This posh and well-designed place is for the masses. It cost us $15 to swim for the day with our family. The place was filled with all kinds of people—giggling, bikini-clad girls climbing up the water slide, trying to look cool with the little kids rushing around them; huge Māori men wearing swim belts and water jogging in the lap pool, the distinctive blue-black tattoos circling massive forearms; families with three generations eating crisps and lollies in the café area; teenage mothers holding young children in the not-so-hot, toddler friendly hot tub. The majority of folks in the pool looked Pacific-island, but there were also folks of Asian, European, Indian descent. And all of us, stripped down to nearly nothing, hurling down the hydroslide or bubbling in the hot tub.
Somehow it all came home to me in the sauna at the end. We had been feeling particularly cheerful because Gabriel, Marianne’s son, came and said hello to us, which made us feel like we weren’t so all alone in a far away place. And we had had a conversation with Gabriel’s father, Jorge, who greeted us enthusiastically (nothing personal—he’s enthusiastic with everyone—but it still felt fantastic). And then Michael and I sat in the sauna, enveloped by the fantastic wooden smell, the heat that hurts your nose, and surrounded by huge Pacific men and small, wrinkled, old Pacific women (and one white hippy with long grey dreadlocks). We have smelled that lovely hot sauna smell before, but it’s always been in places of relative wealth, and I’ve always felt just a little guilty for the privilege I have in the face of so much poverty throughout the world. Here, I had the sense of the sauna as not the domain of the rich Anglo, but as an ancient practice that stretches around the world. There was something more shared and egalitarian about this lovely sauna than about others I’ve used before.
And that was true of the whole place, ultimately. It was wonderfully mixed, with the dramatic differences in body type. (In the US, we have large color differences as we span from quite light beige to quite dark brown, but here there is less color variation and far more ethnic variation in body size and type.) It was filled with families being playful and tender together. It spanned from tiny new babies in swimdiapers to ancient women whose skin hung loosely from their frames. It was a lovely chance to do a fun thing that felt utterly non-touristy, to feel like we really lived in this place, played in this space, shared this space with others. And for a little while, it felt like we might come to belong here; after all, we’re all relatively-recent transplants to New Zealand, and everyone loves the hydroslide.

House tour

Here's a video of our house for the SERIOUSLY interested. WARNING: this video is mostly for our parents and beloved others like Patsy and Robyn et al who are really wanting to know what our life looks like. All others will find this seriously boring. Don't say we didn't warn you.

Reinvention

How many times in our lives do we get to reinvent ourselves? Really. How many times have you had? When your family moved to a new town when you were 12? When you went off to college? I study adult development, so I know about transitions and growth over the lifespan, and I know that we’re changing all the time, most of us, and that our perspective changes as we gain experiences. But how often do we actually get to become whoever we want to be—far away from who we’ve been before?

I remember facing the inevitable pieces of my past when we moved to Georgia. There were some lovely things about that—people really knew me, held pieces of my childhood in their minds. And at the same time, it’s limiting to be in a place where you’ve been known over time. People have assumptions about you, people remember parts of you you’d rather have them forget. And those assumptions hold on forever—assumptions are really hard to change.

I saw a woman after the St. John concert in November in Augusta. Kitty, who had been the DFA choir teacher, had taught across the hall from me for the three years before her retirement. I wanted her to meet my children, to show them a piece of my past when I was a school teacher. I introduced them to her, and the story she told them was not about our DFA days together, was not about students we’d had and what had happened to them. The story she told was that when I was 12 years old, my father brought me to her house and I swam in her pool. Somehow, time had shifted between us. I was wanting to introduce her as a former colleague, and she had remembered me as a little kid. I wondered how much of her time she spent thinking of me as little Jenny as she taught across the hall from me.

Here there is none of that. No one thinks about little Jenny. Who am I? What patterns of my personality, my quirks, my habits do I hold on to, and which do I leave behind? I baked a cake for Aidan’s half birthday, but he only gets half the cake and something had to be done with the other half. In DC, we’d have given it to a neighborhood friend. In Cambridge, we’d have given in to Graeme. We’re still looking for those friends (there’ll never be another Graeme), so here we wandered around looking for folks at home who might like a cake. And it was only after Michael and Aidan left, cake in hand, that I wondered whether I wanted my New Zealand self to be someone who brings cakes to people. In Boston and DC people knew me for my baking. Maybe that was limiting and maybe it’s time to try a new thing.

I don’t dance or paint or pot. Or maybe I didn’t used to dance or paint or pot, but here I do those things. I have traditionally worked too many hours each week. Do I still do that here? I am a vegetarian. Does that change here where the animals are raised in more humane ways and the meat is among the best in the world?

Since I was a teenager, I’ve kept my toes polished, and you can track the stage of my life with the color of the toes: pale pink when I was in high school, red in my early 20s, and then the oddest colors I could find—blues and greens and purples—in the last decade or so. Naomi and I used to paint each toe a different color sometimes. I am not a splashy person, but for nearly all of my life in memory, I’ve had pretty splashy toes. For the last week, my toes have been naked. I see them, utterly unfamiliar, and wonder whether I should get used to the look of my naked toes. Or maybe playful and adorned toes is still who I am, but something else changes (the haircut change, however, didn’t go that well).

How do I want to be in the world? Who am I here in this new context? Who do I like best about the selves I can be, and how do I encourage those pieces of my selves to come more to life?

Today, we went to the stream and the kids and Perry played until all were wet and sandy (I think it may have been the best day of Perry’s life thus far). Today I read to Aidan and we snuggled together and tickled. This evening we played rugby on the beach with some new friends, Brits newly moved to this country. On the way home, Naomi and I walked down the beach, talking about the nature of the universe until the comet made a dazzling appearance. When I finish this entry and hit “post,” I’ll slip on a coat and walk Perry with Michael on the beach. These things are the pieces of my life here, the pieces of who I am becoming. Some pieces I choose and others choose me, and the whole thing unfolds: me, in the kiwi context. (And, as of this afternoon, with purple toes.)

Comet confusion

Today was Perry’s first full day with us in his new life, and if it was any indication of the rest of his time here, he’s going to really love his New Zealand life. Here are pictures of Perry doing what he does best—lounging and loving.

We went out to see the comet again tonight and walked farther up the beach. And, after sunset, there it was, higher than last night (as we expected) and magnificent—a slash of light traveling west across the horizon. Then, after the ooh-ing and ahh-ing, the walk back down the beach, where we stopped to talk to a friend who was fishing. Then, almost at the stairs to Ocean Road, there was a strange light in the sky. And look at that, another comet, this one more comet-like than the first. So, while admitting to ourselves that we don’t know what a comet is, we thought we’d let you see both. The comet is allegedly the second brightest since 1935, and you can read about it here (http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/SC0701/S00033.htm). Anyone with any wisdom about this subject is encouraged to let us know before we head out to see it tomorrow. And if, as we suspect, the first thing we saw wasn’t a comet, what was it, this slash of light in the twilight sky two days in a row? I feel like an ancient one, staring at the sky for omens. I wonder what omen I’m seeing…

Free at last!

Monday 15 January 2007

Today Perry came home and I saw my first comet. Not a bad day, really.

For those of you who have worried: Perry got off of the plane and was completely unphased by the entire experience. He seemed genuinely happy to see each of us, and was also just entirely Perrylike. He sniffed around, ran in and out of the house, sat down on the sofa, snuffled the shells. We took him for a walk up the beach and discovered that a) he’s a little afraid of the water b) he has no taste and thus drinks the saltwater and c) he (and we) didn’t know it at the time, but salt water really doesn’t agree with him.

When we got home, we put him on the back porch, where he mournfully looked in the widow as though being on the back porch for 15 minutes was a terrible fate (this from a dog who has been at a kennel for 30 days!). When he got back inside, he collapsed in his regular place—within 3 feet of wherever we are and uncannily in front of wherever we might need to be next.

All night we have been joking about the terrible psychological damage we've done to this dog. We expected some kind--any kind--of change in his personality after his ordeal (god knows there's a change in MY personality after MY move). But there's nothing. He is utterly and completely Perry. He wanders around the house as though he's always lived here, happily roams in and out the usually-opened french doors, and wags his tail with delight whenever anyone comes near him as he's sleeping in the sun. We'll have to figure out how to keep him from drinking the salt water, but that is likely to be our biggest transition issue.

Tonight we went down to the beach at sunset, as we always do. But tonight the main event was not the sunset but just afterwards, when we searched the horizon for the comet I had heard about on the radio this morning. There were clouds on the horizon, and we seriously doubted that we’d be able to see the comet which was to show up just above the horizon at sunset. So Aidan and Naomi and her friend Jessica (who’s spending the night) all built sandcastles while the sky darkened. And then, there it was, a slash of light in the cloud break, slowly creeping along the sky. In and out of the clouds it went until finally it disappeared for the night. We’ll try again tomorrow, when it’ll be farther up in the sky and longer after sunset. We think it’s totally appropriate that the long-awaited arrival of the largest, curliest, and most spectacular dog of all should be heralded by a cosmic event.

(Pictures, top to bottom: Perry at Wellington Airport, his ENORMOUS crate behind him; Perry, Naomi, and Jessica at the beach; the horizon on which, I am sorry to say, this picture does not show a comet, and Aidan blowing out the candle on his half birthday cake)

Celebrating the children

I don’t think I’ve ever had this much unscheduled time with my children. No, I’m sure of that. There were months when Aidan was a newborn and Naomi was in preschool when the rhythm of my life wasn’t so different from this—when Michael had a full time job and I had a full time mothering position. But having these two kids home with me for weeks at a time while Michael is at work, that’s an experience I’ve never had before. And we’re just home together. We don’t go to the zoo together, don’t go on outings, don’t do much of anything. We play in the yard, bake bread, read books, go for walks on the beach. We spend lots of time just sharing space as I skype with colleagues or work on this blog or do other work things and they listen to Harry Potter books on their MP3 players. Sometimes Naomi will have a friend over. Sometimes Trish takes Aidan for hot chocolate at the café. But mostly it’s the three of us together.

There are times when I get really impatient about the whole thing and deeply crave adult conversation. I get frustrated with the occasional fighting and snippiness (I can’t believe my spell check let that word through). Sometimes I count the days left until the kids go back to school and I can actually be alone again and shower without small people opening and closing the bathroom door (it’s 18 week days until school begins again on 7 February). But these feelings are outside the norm for me.

More usual for me is the sense that the kids are very nearly the most interesting people I’ve ever met. I love talking with them, watching them play, learning about the way they see the world. They read or listen to Harry Potter nearly constantly (we don’t have a TV) and their vocabularies are growing enormous. In the dark at bedtime tonight Naomi asked, “This is the time for our small conversation, right? What shall we converse about?” And this morning Aidan asked, “Is it ok if the door is ajar?” which is not a sentence I associate with a five-and-a-half year old (thank you JK Rowling). The children are teaching me about this world, teaching me about what driftwood looks like and what magical lands can be found in and outside our house. Today at the beach, Naomi named her boogie board and created a whole life experience for it as she “walked” it down the beach. At dusk Aidan showed me the figures he sees in the ngaio tree outside his window. I watch them watch this new place, navigate the new people, get confused about the accents, find secret paths in the hills. I love them more each day.

Today in NZ and tomorrow in the US, it’s Aidan’s half birthday (which we’ll celebrate tomorrow, since I lost track of the date today). We used to celebrate half birthdays because the kids used to have summer birthdays and they’d never get a chance to get cupcakes in class with their friends—so we’d bring them in during their half birthdays, in winter. Now we’ve turned our worlds—and the calendar—upside down so that their birthdays are in winter (one of Naomi’s first questions upon moving here was whether she would finally have school on her birthday this year (the answer is yes)) and their half birthdays are in the summer. So this year, we won’t celebrate half birthdays with classmates. This year we’ll bake his half cake in the summer rain (as it’s forecast) and eat it around a table all the way around the world from our old home. And we’ll do it to celebrate the passing of time, to celebrate Aidan and his reading (and his healing face) and Naomi and her love of horses and her wonderful big-sistering. We’ll know that there won’t be so many more years of our lives when the children want to cuddle for a long time before bed, when they tell me, as Aidan did on the beach today, “You know, Mom, sometimes I just prefer spending my time with adults” or when they climb into my bed in the morning and beg to be tickled. It’s as wonderful that Aidan is growing and changing as it is that he’s still a little boy who likes to be in my lap as much as possible. We’ll celebrate both things—the growing up, and the being young still. Happy half birthday, Aidan.

NOTE: For those of you tired of pictures of children on the beach, relief is ahead. Monday Perry arrives at last, and you can believe that for the first several days of his homecoming, the blog will be mostly filled with pictures of a dog on the beach. Good news?

One month and two days

Thursday, 11 January 2007

One month and two days since we got off the plane

I have been getting used to the idea that I live in New Zealand. I can say that sentence (“I live in New Zealand”) without a grimace now, and I can list dozens of differences, many of which surprise me, and many which delight me. I can walk around in my house in the dark and not particularly bump into things, and, on a clear night, I can look out my bedroom window and spot the Southern Cross. It’s gotten easy to pick out which stairs are the ones that lead to Ocean Road from the beach, and we have a stream that we walk to nearly every day where the kids have found hideouts and secret places in the hills. There is some amount of routine in the non-scheduled days of mine.

But today I was back to feeling astonished that we live in New Zealand. The kids and I went into Wellington on this sparkling—and warm—summer day. I got my hair cut, and maybe there’s something about that that changed me somehow. Sampson like, I watched my hair pool on the floor and wondered what on earth we were doing living in New Zealand (I wonder if Sampson also felt dismayed when he looked in the mirror and found his locks so diminished). And then we met up with Michael and had lunch together, and the kids and I went off to Te Papa, the national museum. They have a traveling exhibit there on Ancient Egypt which Aidan has been desperate to see (for reasons known only to him, although it may have something to do with the fact that Naomi hates hates hates mummies). We walked into the huge museum, which I’ve been in half a dozen times now, and we headed to the Egypt part, which is one of the only areas of the museum with an admission fee. And there I saw the merging of ancient and new cultures in a way that I found enormously moving. The signs were in English and Māori, and it somehow powerfully affected me to see this ancient Egyptian culture in the two languages.

I’ve seen mummies in museums in New York and Boston, but seeing them here in New Zealand felt quite different. This exhibit, because it’s in a museum that is very Māori-conscious, handles the fact that there are human remains in the exhibit differently than I’ve seen it elsewhere. The mummy herself was apart from the rest of the exhibit, in a room more like a tomb than a museum (but not dressed up to look old—just unadorned and somber). There was a tray at her head where people could leave offerings—and there were Pohutukawa flowers and fresh green leaves wilting in the tray. There must be some custom about taking off your shoes in the presence of death, so there were shoes neatly lined up outside. And, on the way out of the exhibit, there was a lovely basin of water and a sign inviting you to use the water for a ritual cleansing should you choose to do that. I don’t remember that at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

And because of the way the Māori were highlighted, I saw the Egyptian society differently too. And I saw my society in a new way. In the US, we have a strange underpinning of Christianity as a part of our lives, but we keep a veil up—almost all the time—between public spaces like museums and the expression of that Christianity. In museums, religion is an artifact of study. Here, there is so little religion that conversations about it seem utterly out of place. Yet somehow the Māori influence—in a practicing, belief-centred way—means that there are ceremonies that are foreign to me that still take place inside these spaces—in the blessing that opened Michael’s new building at the Department of Conservation, in the Pohutukawa blossoms next to the glass-enclosed mummy. These things remind me that I am very foreign here, that I am far away from the things I take for granted, and that the world is far larger than I will ever really understand—even in this tiny country in the middle of the sea.

And then the commute home on the train, past harbours with white sailboats and black swans, through suburbs climbing steep hills and plunging towards the sea. And we walked along the beach on the way home from the train, watching three women—two in clothes and one naked—plunge in and out of the evening ocean. Then inside to do a smidge of work until the light on the hills was too much to bear, and down to the sea again to watch the sunset. There’ll be a video of that tomorrow so that you can experience it with us.

I’ll attach a couple of pictures from the day. I love the one in front of the inscription of a fragment of poetry about New Zealand: “It’s true you can’t live here by chance, you have to do and to be, not simply watch or even describe. This is the city of action, the world headquarters of the verb.” I don’t know if all of that is true. All I know is that we do seem to have come here on purpose, and I am trying to describe and also “do and be.” Thanks for coming along.

(There’s also a picture of sweet Aidan, who had a mishap on Monday night with a soccer ball and a sidewalk. His face was the loser, but it’s healing beautifully.)

Over the hills

The first thing I noticed about New Zealand when we visited in April was the hills. New Zealand has the most amazing hills I’ve ever seen—amazing in their variety, their texture, their color. It’s as if some species of giants had a Hill Fair at a local high school: Hill building contest. Points awarded for originality and beauty. All winners will be displayed together in exhibit in middle of Pacific Ocean.

There are hills that are gentle and rolling, hills that are rocky and glacier-carved. Hills covered with grass and brush (and sheep) and others covered with the stubble of cultivated pine trees—or the incongruous ruin of harvested trees, remaining bits helter-skelter down the hill like the aftermath of a tornado. There is almost no end to the variation in the hills (we’ve seen a tiny part of this country, but a huge number of kinds of hills). As we traveled through the South Island, I took pictures of the different kinds of hills, and thought about what they reminded me of: spiky ones that looked newly-formed, gently-sloped ones that looked like the rain and wind had shaped them over millennia, hills that were totally out of scale—way too large to rise out of the flat, otherwise-hill-free plane or too small and unaware of the huge hill behind it. The hills tell the story of the forming of this land, the divergent and sometimes violent ways the land pushes up from the sea.

Now that we live here, I’m getting more and more familiar with a single set of hills. Paekakariki is a tiny village that rambles over the little strip of land between the sea and the hills. Because of this, either the sea or the hills (or both) make up nearly backdrop of every scene here. The most magnificent houses have views out the front to the sea and out the back to the hills. Our house, tucked in one of the steeply rolling sand dunes of this town, has glimpses of both, but views of neither.

I feel held by the hills. At first they felt looming and otherworldly. Now they feel protective, somehow benign and magnificent features on the daily landscape. They remind us, here in a place where the sea changes color and texture from moment to moment, that there are stable places that are just as captivating as the changing waves. Unlike the hills of Wellington, which are dotted with Victorian houses, perched like mountain goats in the most unlikely places, these hills are a patchwork of olive green grass, tufts of deep green bushes, and a scattering of blue and yellow and white wildflowers. And sheep (or occasionally, cows) stitch the whole thing together, offering a sense of scale and slope on impossibly steep swaths of green.

The hills hold the clouds, too, catching tufts of grey against the green. And they hold this little village, which is nestled in the crook of these hills as they sweep first close to the sea and then pull away. I don’t feel protected or sheltered, because the weather comes at us from the sea (just now the wind picks up outside and whistles in from the west). But I somehow feel held in scale by the hills, held against the vastness of the sea in this little island so far away from any large land anywhere. Rather than providing shelter, the hills anchor my sense of place, forever capturing the undulating waves in rock and green. And they feel old and solid next to the ever changing sea.

No matter how long we stay in New Zealand, it's hard for me to imagine that I'll ever tire of the hills, or that I'll ever be able to see other landscapes without holding these in my mind. They are classically New Zealand, strong and magically beautiful but not showy or loud. They hold me like the clouds on this grey day, and help me remember that this is an island risen from the sea where water and land meet, where waves in the sea meet waves in the land. In my liminal, between-everything space, there is structure and solidity in the zone between the hills and the sea.

Pictures from the weekend

Monday, 8 January 2007
10:45 pm
Today has been an at home day. The sunny warm day promised by met service (the weather folks), has turned out to be a lie, and we’ve had a grey chilly day. Lousy weather notwithstanding, I’ve had tea and scones with Trish, a Skype with Paul, and a lovely visit with one of our next door neighbours. The house next to us, the one that faces the sea, is owned as a retreat for the Sisters of Compassion, and introduced ourselves and been neighborly-- brought them baked goods and said we’d look after their house in the stretches when no one is there (as it’s a retreat house and they do their work elsewhere, primarily Wellington). Today one of the nuns brought us a cabbage and stayed to have the most magical conversation that ranged all over-- about helping people, the soup kitchen (which she manages), compassion, and US politics, and NZ politics and teaching—a lovely mix that brightened my day. Then, when Michael got home, we all walked up the beach to Marianne and Gabriel’s, and had a lovely dinner in the finally-clear evening.

Yesterday the weather was more beautiful, especially in the afternoon, when it was hot enough to put on shorts. I took the major step of putting on my wetsuit and actually venturing into the sea. The water was shockingly cold—I’m not sure I’ve ever willingly put my body into water as cold as that (except briefly, and then only when I’m recovering from a burn). But Naomi and I went out in it anyway (wetsuits are a Very Good Thing) and we stayed for longer than I ever thought possible. I felt cold but not so uncomfortable, until I came back to shore and found myself with feet that started to itch and tingle—they had been numb with cold and I hadn’t much noticed. Ah, life in sunny New Zealand in the summertime.

Here are pictures from the weekend. You'll see Naomi with horses (she spent all day Saturday and Sunday in an "own your own pony" program at the stables nearby), two crazy people in the freezing water, and one really lovely dinner at home, last night.

PS

It's worth watching the video of Aidan reading one more time. This time, just watch Naomi. As you watch her watching him, you can see some of the sweetness in their relationship, I think. And, FYI, the green tree with red blooms at the end of the driveway is a famed pohutukawa, and the bird with the funny call in the background is a tui. These are the sounds and sights of New Zealand...

Aidan reading

Here's our boy who is learning to read quite beautifully. That process is like magic, isn’t it? (He’s sort of a liminal zone reader, too.) You’ll also see our house on a grey day…

Finding furniture for the neutral zone

Friday 5 January 2007

I think my mood flows with the weather, which is a shame, because the weather here is the worst in years. Yesterday, on the first day that felt like summer with its vivid blue skies and warm temperature, all seemed possible. Today, grey and windy again, I’m pensive and moody. (An aside: Raima, who is glorious and who has come today to help clean the house, said that yesterday was “shockingly hot” and apologized for it (kiwis are constantly apologizing for the weather). Mind you, I was in a fleece and light sweater all day, and was sometimes chilly, so “shockingly hot” scares me.)

I am in what is called by the writer William Bridges the “neutral zone.” This is the space after the endings have happened but before the new beginning has taken shape. It's a fertile, but uncomfortable, ground for growth. And that’s the space where I live: 3 Ocean Road, The Neutral Zone. I know what my old life was like, and know that it’s behind me—house sold, all things on a ship, job on hold, the four of us here in a new country and in a new season. And I have some sense of what the new life will be like: kids in school here, me working in Wellington a little and writing my book more, living in this house by the sea. But most of that hasn’t happened yet, and I don’t know what it’ll be like.

The house itself is a perfect metaphor for this time. I see what it looks like, but it’s got none of our furniture in it, has other people’s chairs and tables and beds. That makes it both strange (it’s not our stuff) and also tentative (you have to be careful because it’s not our stuff). The kids have to be gentle with the furniture, we agonize over a broken cereal bowl, and we try to be vigilant about holding pens while sitting on other people’s upholstery. We can’t get used to this because it’s not permanent, and we can’t replace it with things that are permanent because we have things coming on a slow boat from Baltimore. So the drafty floor won’t get its rugs yet, the dining room chairs won’t match, and we’ll have to try to remember what colors our actual furniture is so that we can match the walls to a sofa still on the sea.

My life is like that, too. I have work to do but I can’t quite get to it yet with the kids home on summer vacation. I assume I’ll be able to get connected and make friends—both through work and also through activities at school or in the village, but school, work, and yoga won’t start until February. And so I live inside a life that’s furnished with temporary things, things that don’t quite belong to me, things that I need to get used to, but not attached to. And just like I can’t quite imagine what this house will look like once it’s filled with our things, I can’t imagine what my life will be like once I settle in some. This is the time for unsettled-ness.

And I don’t quite know who I’ll be at the end of it, either. How will I make sense of myself in this new land? Right now, Michael takes the train to work each day, and I stay home with the kids. Right now, when people ask me what I do, I stumble and stammer. What do I do? I came here to write a book—but I’m not even sure which book I’m talking about when I say that (the book on my own that’s half finished with a long overdue contract or the book with Keith that I’m more excited about?). And I came here to do some work, but I don’t have any idea what I’ll actually do at NZCER. I know who I am when I’m the college professor who lives in the middle of Adams Morgan and takes her kids to bilingual school each day—or JCC summer camp in the summer. I’m a workaholic, someone who travels the country to do my Kenning consulting, someone who loves the work she does at George Mason University (fantastic new website, Mark!), someone who gets up too early to write and stays up too late working. There, I’m someone who feels guilty for not spending enough time with the children. But that’s not who I am here. Here my kids and I bake together each day, walk on the beach each day, grow frustrated with each other each day. My Kenning and Mason Colleagues hardly know what to do with me in this new phase. And I don’t know what to do with myself. Here I am the new American woman in town. I am the wife of the guy who is in charge of leadership development at DoC. I’m the one who walks with the two blonde kids in the wetsuits, picking up shells. There is no knowing yet what is possible for me inside this context. There is no knowing who I’ll come to be. There is no furniture to borrow to make the neutral zone of my psyche more lovely or comfortable. When do you think that ship will come in?

In nature, I love liminal zones, the spaces in between one form and the next. My favourite parts are often the wetlands where the land meets the water, the tidepools that are neither part of the shore nor part of the sea. I love the richness of those spaces, love to watch the hawks soar or the crabs scurry for cover. I live in that space now, neither here nor there, but somehow in between here and there. I haven’t given lots of thought to how dependent those spaces are on the weather, though. Too-high tides, and the tidepool shellfish will drown; too low and they’ll be seagull food. Now I’m like that, too, so much in the liminal space that tea with a new friend has me feeling like we’ll settle in to this new home with ease and delight, and a grey day at home makes me feel bereft and alone. And so I try to be like the tidal creatures and just flow with the tide, to notice the shifts in the weather and not believe that any of them are forever. This is all temporary, all just what life feels like in this space, and eventually the pattern will emerge and I’ll find my way to a more stable place. And until then, I (and you, Gentle Reader) will have to find the liminal space beautiful and fertile, if somewhat unfurnished.

Ah, summer at last

4 January 2006

9:30 pm

Today was a magical day, one of those days we imagined as we went through all the misery of moving. When I woke up this morning, I could see cobalt blue cloudless sky through the French doors in the bedroom, and the air sparkled. We got a morning phone call from Marianne’s friend Sarah, who invited us to tea and to meet her daughter’s horse. We had been planning a trip to Wellington to go to Te Papa (the NZ national museum there) and perhaps revisit the bungee jumping world, but when Naomi called from her sleepover to check on our plans, she voted for a trip to the paddock to meet the horse, Taz. I put Christmas cookies/biscuits in the oven, and when Naomi came home, we went over to Sarah’s.

Lovely tea with Sarah and then walking with her and her daughter Annie to meet Taz, whom Naomi first brushed and then rode (well, sat on, bareback, as Taz munched on the lush grass). Then home to eat lunch, put on sunscreen, play in the yard, and then off to the beach (after a stop at T & K’s to feed the cat). When the children actually played in the water, I was vigilant, and somewhat harried. The tide was so out, and the kids were extraordinarily far away from my squinting eyes as I sat on the first patch of dry sand I could find. How do the life guards do it?

But then the kids tired of the cold water and came and sat on either side of me and built castles in the sand and decorated them with sea shells. And I put my floppy hat over my face and dozed in the warm sunshine. Perfection. Then Michael caught an early train home, met us on the beach, and we all struck up a conversation with the fellow who had been dozing next to me (a local who had moved with his family to the UK for 2.5 yrs and has just come back). Then the magnificently beautiful stroll down the wide open, low tide beach to our block, and up into our house to have dinner in the slanting evening light, with the front French doors wide open to actually cool off the house.

Today, on the second real day of our January vacation, I watched the kids together in all kinds of settings. One of the things moving across the world seems to do is create new and different kinds of relationships inside the family. This is one of those blindingly obvious happenings which is also totally uncertain until we get on with it.

I’m not quite sure why things feel so different in our family than they did when we were in DC. I suppose it’s the total foreign-ness of these surroundings, the fact that we are among the only Americans we know here. We are a unit, the only ones who have been together any length of time, the only ones who share memories and quirks, who can remember what our usual New Year’s Eve dinner is (Sea of Love) or what my cookies taste like with American butter or what it was like at Naomi’s preschool. And we are all going through these changes together, reminding one another that you throw out rubbish rather than garbage and that you eat biscuits rather than cookies. It brings a family together, like Laura Ingalls Wilder’s family, only without the famine or the fear of hostile natives (there could be joke here about the family we bought this house from, but it would be in bad taste).

So somehow, the move has brought Naomi and Aidan closer than they were, and it’s brought me closer to both kids, maybe especially Naomi. I watch them play together in the yard, concocting elaborate made up stories that require circuits of the house on tip toe. I listen to them building dueling sand castles on either side of me (whose will be the biggest or the most elaborately decorated?) or collaborating in a joint project where they scurry around the river bed searching for the perfect piece of driftwood. Today, when Naomi saw Aidan’s new injured knee (he had hurt it playing with the new elliptical trainer that was delivered yesterday), she fell into deep sympathy. She took off his old bandaid, used water to clean the cut, carefully dried it, then covered it with antibacterial cream and a double layer of bandaids (because we were going to the beach). She seems to have a new kind of love for him here, a love that also has genuine liking inside it as they make up new worlds together and carefully climb the big rocks on the beach. And he adores her. This is not to suggest, mind you, that they don’t still fight like real siblings. They go from creating castles together to slinging sand at each other rather quickly, and there are still lots of those “maah-aaam, Naomi was mean to me…” that waft up the hall. But the relationship they have with one another seems to be more tender than it’s ever been before, and I have to believe that has to do with being the only ones of their kind in a new world.

And the relationship I have with them is changing, too, and I’ve been amazed at how different a relationship can become in just a couple of weeks. But this entry is long enough as it is, so that story will wait for another day.

Where ever you are reading this, you have got to come and visit us. We may live a long plane ride from where you are, but this is paradise. Here there are high hills and warm sandy beaches and friendly people. I see more beauty in my walk to feed our friends' cat than I would in several months in my old life. And the beauty seeps into me and slows me down and makes me breathe differently and sleep differently and think in different ways. And now I'll go outside before bed and check out the milky way and the southern cross. That's what you do before bed on a good day in Eden.