We live here

We’re on holiday. This is a funny thing to say these days, because in some ways life feels suspiciously like a holiday all the time when you live one house from the sea. But we’ve been meaning to take a long weekend somewhere interesting since we got here, and this is the last weekend before school starts. So we’ve gone to Taupo (we’re staying here: http://www.baycrest.co.nz/). We’ve driven the 5 hours north (although it took us 7 because we stopped and poked our way around some of the towns), away from the coast, into the centre of the north island. We passed through little towns that reminded us of places we’d seen before—in the south, in New England. Rural towns, although with a decidedly kiwi flavour. We drove beside gorges with white cliffs falling to rivers deep below, and through a scrubby desert-like area with sand and scrubby olive-coloured bushes. And, on the other side of the road, huge volcanic mountains, one snow covered even here at mid-summer. It is beautiful thing after more beautiful thing in this country. The scenery changes dramatically from hour to hour, and it is always stunning. When we drive through New Zealand we wonder about how many forms of beauty there are in the world (also how many different kinds of sheep and cows there might be).

This trip is rather different from the last time we meandered around this country. Then, in April, we were here for two weeks, and who knew when or if we’d ever come back. Each viewing was tinged with a kind of sadness, a wistful recollection that this beauty would be half way around the world from us in 8 days, in 5 days, in 48 hours. Now, it’s the beauty of our land (and the wistful missing goes in a different direction). Now we have just a tiny little getaway which feels too short, but Naomi keeps consoling all of us with, “It’s pretty close to home—we can come back here whenever we want.” Pretty close to home. That’s amazing.

Just as I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that we live in New Zealand when I’m sitting on our front deck or shopping in the grocery store in Paraparaumu, I have to come to terms with it as we drive through this strange and magnificent country. We live here. As I was shopping for warm clothes in Turangi (http://www.kiwiplanet.co.nz/turangi.htm), the saleswoman assumed I needed the wool because we were going back to winter soon. It actually took me a couple of beats to know what she was talking about. “No,” I told her without thinking, “we live here. It’s been such a cold summer.” And I realised that I didn’t say “we live here” with the kind of shock and awe, the rising inflection of a question (“we live here?!”) with which I usually say it. We live here. We know that we sound for all the world like North American tourists, come to stay in New Zealand for a couple of weeks on holiday before heading back home. But today—driving our New Zealand car, navigating on the wrong side of the road, putting together pieces of stories others had told us about the places we drove through, even shopping at our regular grocery store, only in another town—today it has felt like we’re off on a little holiday close to where we live.

This is not to say that we’re getting used to the beauty. It’s astonishing here at Lake Taupo (http://www.laketauponz.com/). We’re in awe of the sweeping mountains ringing the deep and sparkling lake, of the pumice stones and black sand that remind us that this is all the result of a volcanic explosion 25,000 years ago. We love the novelty of the hot springs, the taste of the thermal water on our lips, the soaring scale of the landscape here. It’s breathtaking. And, for right now, it’s near home, and we see familiar stores, read familiar signs, hear familiar accents. We have an ease about us that we didn’t have when we were tourists in April. After all, we live here.