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.