Bookend

(Posted by Jennifer)

Suddenly, against all the forecasted weather (which, ok, means very little here), the bright blue skies have darkened, the clouds have rolled in, and the winds have picked up. The warmer days which had people talking of spring are hard to even picture in the grey and bitter wind.

Oh, and my book got rejected from the press where it has been under consideration for these last 10 months. It had made it past every hurdle but one, but that last one proved too tough to get over. K and I have poured hundreds of hours into this project and were reasonably confident we had a good shot (the editor thought it was 75% likely to get through); the news this morning is a blow to the gut.

The book is, in some ways, the main reason we moved to New Zealand in the first place. We came here to live in this village so that I could get this book done, and I had been slowly marching towards its success over these months, through ups and downs of great variety which surround the relocation to a new home on the other side of the world. The sense of the first real failure of that project plunged me into deep misery about the whole thing—what was all this about, anyway? Where do I go from here?

Where I went, as it turned out, was for a walk along the beach, as Michael and Perry and I do every morning. The last few days the walks have been magical—white clouds turning pink in the dawn and then back to white as the sun rose over the hills. Today the wind was bitter and, in the particularly exciting gusts, came with pelting rain. As a consolation prize, there was a lovely paua shell on the beach—the most revered of all the sea shells and often used in Maori carvings. I picked it up and slipped it into a bag and trudged on, only to discover, at the end of the walk, that while the bag had lots of holes, it had no shells in it anymore. I went home and couldn’t even bring myself to make it to both soccer games (made it to Naomi’s only—which, in perfect keeping with the day—she lost). Then off to do my very least favourite activity of late—errands (at a mall) and grocery shopping. The day unfolded in front of me with drizzley, windy dread.

Then, driving along the coast towards Porirua, the rocky shore of Pukerua Bay called out to me, and we detoured to the spot that I think of as the best family fun I’ve ever had (better even than picking blueberries outside JW’s house in Nantucket). We tumbled out of the car and into the wind, and picked our way over rocks and tidal pools. I’d find a perch and stare at the pool of water, watching the anemones wave in the water, the crabs scuttle. The sea offered amazing gifts. Naomi set off to replace the lost paua, and came back with a half dozen in different shapes and sizes. Aidan found a rock that was shaped like a whale. Michael turned over rocks and found hermit crabs in lovely periwinkle snail shells.

Did I come to New Zealand to write a book for a press that has finally decided, Thanks but no thanks? Or did I come to leap from rock to rock over tidal pools, the sea spray winter-cold in the grey August day? On this Saturday, my children roamed over rocks and splashed through saltwater puddles. They crunched dried pieces of kelp and then marvelled at the tiny shells underneath. I found myself lost, not in my own angst and misery, but in the universe inside each tiny pool, the ecosystem of plant and animal and sea and rock. There’s no way to hold this sense of sorrow and misery while holding a six-armed blue starfish.

And the deep watchfulness continued after the tidepools were behind us. Apparently this is the time when the lambs begin to be born (who knew?). And so, suddenly, the hills, always wonderfully sheep-studded, are punctuated by tiny lambs, generally moving much faster than I’ve ever seen a sheep move. Naomi left her book closed on the seat, and we had lamb-spotting contests all the way to and from Porirua. How unhappy can you be when you’re in the midst of a lamb-spotting contest?

Now we’re sitting in front of the fire, all of us in the lounge after a yummy dinner. Aidan’s birthday cake is cooling (his party is tomorrow—long after his birthday). Naomi is reading, Aidan is making cake designs (his birthday party is tomorrow) out of paper, Michael and I writing on laptops. Perhaps I didn’t come to New Zealand just to write a book, but to discover new ways of being in the world, to find new ways to play with my children, to wake up and go to sleep each day surrounded by beauty. So I’ll live in beauty here today, and figure out the book thing tomorrow.

ps the pictures today are worth clicking on so that you can get a bigger glimpse of the landscape. Can you find Naomi and Aidan in the last picture?