Paekakariki perfect

I’m beginning this blog on the train home, Michael still in a meeting in Wellington. The sea was rough this morning and it has been a grey and blustery day in town, which tells me nothing about the weather the kids experienced at home. The Porirua harbour, which I’m passing now, is rumpled but not choppy. The clouds are more white than grey here, big cotton candy pillows. Sometimes there are breaks in the clouds—impossible to see from the ground except for the light streaming down to the sea or hills. The hills hold and shape the weather, so that as I move north from town, the clouds are captured and held back, giving me weather that trends to sunny rather than stormy. In Wellington, from my office window high on the 11^th floor (this is a high building for Wellington standards), I watched the rain move in horizontal sheets, the wind roaring through the rain in the same waves it runs through the grasses.

I love Wellington. It’s a spirited and cosmopolitan city, a city that was washed in hot water and got concentrated into a thickly-knit, almost impossibly small size. The streets are teeming with people and coffee shops and cafes, with music and art and lovely little buildings. I am struck by the generosity of the city, by the fact, for example, that nearly every building has a deep awning so that as I walk through the city in the rain, I hardly get wet at all. This is important because it is too windy a city for umbrellas. I saw hundreds and hundreds of people as I walked down the hill in the rain this afternoon and only about a dozen umbrellas.

On this train home, though, I look forward to leaving behind the lovely city and moving towards the little village where we happen to live. Michael and I came to Paekakariki almost by mistake. Trish and Keith lived here, and we didn’t know how to figure out where else to live, knew we wanted to at least try life in a little beach town rather than a city, and so we sort of happened into it. This is not the way I tend to make these decisions [Big blue pukekos just out the window just then, glorious creatures that make me laugh out loud.] I tend to research and study and plan; I’m not a person who just happens to move to this or that place. And I worried that I would thus find I had made a terrible mistake. I waited on pins and needles for the first couple of weeks we were here (and the last several months in DC). Now, though, as I pass through the other quaint villages up the coast on the train, I become more and more certain that Paekakariki is the village for us.

It is not a fancy place, no chic village by the sea. It’s filled with beach cottages that were thrown together to be a roof and walls to sleep or spend unfortunate rainy days in while on holiday. And now it’s a magical place. As I walked home with the family of one of Aidan’s friends last week, I asked the mom about why she had come to Paekakariki and why she stayed there. She laughed, explaining that she was British, and that she had found that Paekakariki was like “A wee English country village in the 1950s.” Laughing, I told her we often tell people we’ve moved to the 1950s. Only, we decided together, much more diverse and liberal than anyplace got in the 1950s—anywhere. Here, there are houses that cost $180,000 and houses that cost a million. Here the ramshackle houses look curious, all popping their heads up with dormers and additions to look at the sea. And the people seem unusually curious, too. The children of lesbian musicians play with the children of house builders and the children of scientists. And at salsa night in the village, they all dance on the same postage-stamp sized dance floor.

Some of the charm certainly is that it is a tiny place. I think about the parking lot at the Vienna metro station—thousands and thousands of cars, and if you didn’t get there before 7am, all the spaces were taken. The Paekakariki train station holds about 100 cars, and I haven’t seen it ever full. Most of the people who take the train walk home; the village isn’t that big. So in the mornings you’ll see people in all sorts of outfits—students in uniforms, men carrying briefcases, surfers with dreadlocks and pants seven sizes too big—all meandering (or sometimes rushing) to catch the train to town.

Some of the charm, though, is that it’s a broad place. There’s class diversity here, job diversity, racial diversity. There is a higher than expected population of PhDs and of full-time artists. The two tiny town halls and the school gym offer something to do every day: yoga one day, tai chi another, salsa lessons another, and drumming or felting or painting lessons at other times. The café serves fantastic coffee; the veggie shop sells organic everything, and the dairy (=small general store) has a better selection of Indian ingredients than nearly any supermarket in Augusta GA. Karla at the brand new salon cut my hair brilliantly and then charged roughly half what my DC stylist charged—to cut my hair plus Naomi’s. The other retail venues in town are split evenly—two bookstores and two art galleries.

Off the train this evening, the sky now clear, I walked along the high path of the beach at a raging full tide. Dozens of surfers bobbed like black water birds in the rough sea. The stiff wind blew clouds of mist off of each wave crest. I passed two old women walking their dogs—one a puppy and one an ancient, tottering 16 year old. We stopped and chatted about the dogs while the puppy slobbered all over me and the old one looked haughty and disinterested. I came home to Naomi and Aidan playing in the yard, Perry frisky after a rainy morning without a run and a day alone in the house. I walked into a house cleaned today by the spectacular R, who managed to make things look almost neat even though the odds (and the piles) were stacked so high against her. I’m sure this isn’t a perfect village, sure that there are things I won’t like about living here. So far, though, other than take-out food, this village has everything I’ve wanted. I suppose I’ll trade the occasional effortless dinner for life in a diverse and funky village with the ease and safety of the fictional 1950s. There probably wasn’t much good takeout then, either.

(The pictures are the best ones I could find of the whole village. The high high one is taken from the scenic overlook on Paekakariki Hill Road, and the other one is from the house on the hill we're thinking about buying...)