Celebration

Today the sun came out and we shed our fleeces and gardened in t shirts and sandals. We flung open the doors of this beautiful house we are readying for the market, and we planted and weeded in the hot southern sun. A coincidence that it rained the whole time Michael was in Australia and today, his first day back, it was sunny? Or perhaps the sun was shining on my tenure portfolio, now sitting closed and finished next to the door to be copied and then mailed to the US in plenty of time for the end-of-October deadline. I finished it this morning to the cheers of my husband and children. Every tab is now cross-referenced and double-checked, and the three inches of letter-sized paper (all imported from the US) nestle snugly between covers with pictures of colleagues and students I love (and, er, me teaching).

We celebrated this accomplishment by going to dinner in the village at Finn’s, the new café. Downtown Paekakariki is booming now (in the way you boom when you get a second café to add to the first one), and Finn’s is open for dinner—which the regular café is not. It was delicious, too, fantastic vegetarian food for me and assorted carnivorous bites for others. After dinner, we walked across the street to St. Peter’s Hall, a the same place where we have yoga on Thursdays (or did, before my life exploded into busyworld). Tonight it was packed with people coming to see the film archives presentation of Paekakariki in film—old snippets of movies from the 20s to 2007 which took place in Paekakariki. There were road races up the steep Paekakariki Hill Road (lots of pictures of that here on the blog—beautiful and treacherous in our minivan but terrifying as a dirt road with circa 1920s cars), three-legged races in Campbell Park, women in odd 1940s bathing suits lying on the beach, their children splashing in the waves or eating ice cream near by. K had told us to look out for our new house, and there it was, in the clip of a 1940s picnic, the backdrop to all the races high on the hill. The house next to it wasn’t there yet, nor were the houses up the hill behind it, so it stood at the top of the hill, newish and gleaming in the grainy black and white. The first half of the montage was from the days of silent films, and, like those films, ours was enlivened by a piano player. It was like stepping into another time in that hall—people on ragged and unmatched chairs (my family perched in the back on an old sofa) watching a silent movie in the dark as a piano player followed the mood and the texture of the movie with his music. It was such fun!

Then the newsreels started to talk, and lots of what they talked about was war. Paekakariki was home to US Marines training—and resting—during World War II, so there was lots of footage of US soldiers marching up country roads and setting up camp in what would become Queen Elizabeth Park. There was a really moving newsreel of the ship’s arrival in NZ, the homesickness of the California troops upon seeing topography that reminded them of their landscape, the pure joy of drinking fresh milk for the first time since they took to sea (and who knows how long it would take to get to NZ by ship from the US!). And somehow in that footage, all the juxtapositions of my life swirled around me. I was watching a movie in New Zealand about an American coming to New Zealand. I was celebrating my finishing of the tenure portfolio 8500 miles away from the university at which I seek tenure. I felt myself watching these boys on the beach who would have been my dad’s age, and searching for my dad, who still hasn’t ever been to a New Zealand beach. I was watching New Zealanders watch Americans who were talking about coming to New Zealand. It all swirls around.

We raced home along The Parade because the tide was too high to walk on the beach, and because Naomi’s summer outfit—chosen when the sun was warm—was too light for the night time winds. Aidan and I held hands and laughed and talked about the little children who had played in the park before Papa and Grandma Catherine were even born, and we found that we stayed warmer if we jogged all the way home.

So, to continue the unreality of my life, tomorrow we’ll carry on with our task of making it look like magazine people live in this house—because people will pay more money for a house inhabited by fake folk. We’ll display things carefully instead of our usual careless clutter, pack up half the books and half our clothes, and make this beautiful house feel polished and perfect. And every once in a while I’ll think about soldiers who walked these streets, so far from home, and what life must have been like for them. And I’ll think about me one year ago, packing boxes to prepare another house for market in another world. Wonder where I’ll be next October.

ps I see from the blog map that my cousin Michael--who has just been posted to Alaska after a few years in Miami--is checking in (unless there's someone else in Alaska checking?). I thought of you a lot Mike, watching these soldiers so far from home. I hope your new life is fantastic.