Moonset

Now I’m past Porirua on the train home Monday afternoon. Slanting fall evening light through the flax plants around Porirua Harbour, sailboat masts at tall attention, prickly in the sky with the soft hills beyond. My favourite St. John Christmas carol is at full blast on the i-pod (I love shuffle). So far on this ride I’ve been working on the powerpoint deck for a seminar, but now the ride is too pretty to look down, so touch typing is the way to go from here. I am anxious about my trip to the US, anxious about the teaching I’ll do, about some of the meetings I’ll have—and most anxious about how it’ll feel to be back in the motherland. This anxiety (perhaps) is giving me the longest and most miserable headache I’ve had since moving here, but today it has been better than the last several days.

Michael and I went out on a date on Saturday night. We do that more often here than we did in DC—there are more babysitters and we have more free time than we had before. We generally go out to dinner and then for a walk on the beach. In some ways, this pattern shows a lack of creativity; in other ways, it shows the astonishing wonder of a life living at the beach. (For those of you who are worried about the lack of creativity, we’re going to a choral concert tomorrow night—the Durufle Requiem.) Now that the time has changed, we couldn’t go out to see the sunset on the beach after dinner as we always did before, so we picked our way up Raumati beach in the dark and marvelled at the stars and the sliver of the waxing moon.

We sat on the chilly sand, looked at the increasingly-familiar southern sky, and talked about the impossible odds that had led us to living on a beach in New Zealand. There isn’t a day that I’m not amazed about that. Wonder how long that wonder will last. Michael and I talked about love, about friendship, and parenthood, and family across the sea and what it meant to be starting from scratch in a new land. And as we talked, the moon grew larger and redder as it slipped down into the hills of Kapiti. We talked until it was a shark’s fin crescent over the island, and then watched it turn into a smudge and then a dot and finally disappear into a vague halo of light in the distance. We sighed with delight, realising that for both of us it was our first moonset so many decades into our lives, vowing that we would honour the setting moon in our heads the way we hold the rising and setting sun. And then, chilly, we got in the minivan and headed home.

Turning up from Beach Road onto The Parade in Paekakariki, I gasped at the sight over the sea. The crescent moon, big and orange now, was there, setting towards the ocean. Our first moonset was not to be our last—even for the single evening—it would seem. Michael and I pulled over, marvelled at the difference in angle that would make the moon set low over the sea and not high over the island, and settled to watch the moon set one more time that night. Somehow the odds of the double moonset were quite like the odds of our living here in New Zealand in the first place—precious and magical and also with a logic and reality of its own. There is a logic of nature that it’s easy to forget in a city, a patterning of wind and rain and sun and rising and setting. It’s not my logic, but it comforts me and holds me somehow, and lets me let go of my anxieties and sadnesses.

And now this train is moving past shags on the rocks and gulls sweeping over the still sea. The tiny curve of Paekakariki is brightly illuminated in the early-setting sun. This is home, the home I come to after a day in Wellington. And next week, I’ll get on an airplane and fly high above the waves and gulls and go to another home. There’s a logic there, too, only I don’t yet understand it.

(The pictures today are still from the weekend. M and G's dog Brinco meeting Perry for the first time, and our Sunday afternoon walk on the beach and up the hill by our house.)