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…