snowy june

I think of preparing for my birthday party in the hot of Georgia, the lovely warmth of DC, the first summer delights of Cambridge. Here, though, as we have cleaned and chopped and prepped, it has SNOWED here, which is a rare and wondrous thing. So, some pictures of nearly-June to cool off my northern hemispheric friends...

Pictures are of snow on the hill near our house, and kids reading on a cold day--and one of Aidan outside, scooping snow off the car (which is the only place to get snow when it's all melting away). I hope where ever you are, it's toasty and lovely.

(Un)American

It has been a time of odd and lovely experiences which show us the expat life in stark relief. In this week of shockingly bad weather, with near-freezing temperatures, gale-force winds, and horizontal rains, we have been clear that we are not in Kansas (or, er Washington DC) anymore.

One of the things expats do is get introduced to other expats in the same way that single folk are always getting fixed up by their partnered friends. “Oh, I know another American couple! We have got to get you folks together!” Or there’s the I-know-someone-in-New-Zealand thing that gets us lovely new connections from Americans who have never stepped foot in this country but know people who are making the long journey across the sea. We have had two such meetings in 8 days—with two different couples from Chicago who have been introduced to us by different mutual friends. The ones last week were a quirky surprise. Our friends L and J had invited us to meet an American couple here for six months on a fellowship. When we walked into their kitchen, I was not shocked to see that I’d seen the man before, but I couldn’t place where. Was it at a meeting or conference in New Zealand’s small education community? At an event in New Zealand’s tiny education community? It was more of a shock when he placed us—we’d met in the US, sitting next to each other at the dinner at the New Zealand Ambassador’s house two years ago (you can read that blog here). To have a connection to someone from a New Zealand context is one thing, but to meet an American in the US and then bump into him here unexpectedly seems very unusual indeed. He’s an exec in the foundation that funded my doctorate, so I’d remember that dinner conversation for a long time. But I never imagined that the next time I’d see him would be at L and J’s house! It is a tiny world, criss-crossed by international threads.

The other thing expats can do is drink deeply of their new lives. In the last couple of days, we’ve had a deep drink. Sunday the kids performed in their first kapa haka. Some long term blog readers will remember the kapa haka we went to nearly two years ago, which astonished us (and rather terrified Aidan). (You can read that one here from 16 October 2007.) Now it’s my kids in front of the room with their feathers (Naomi) and beaded skirt (Aidan), swinging pois and beating chests. The house has been filled with Maori singing and chanting for the last 10 days in preparation for this, and Aidan stomps around the house with vigour while Naomi tries to get the singing, swinging, and stepping all aligned (makes me dizzy just to watch it). Seeing them in front of the group was so disorienting I could hardly process it. It is for experiences like this that people move to foreign countries, so their kids can have a bigger vision of the world. Watching my kids—Americans? immigrants? Expats?—participate in this magnificent indigenous ceremony was so moving that I could hardly make sense of it.

Somehow similar was last night when Rob had a party celebrating his permanent residence visa, which has been hard won and a long time coming. It was on a Monday night because that’s when folks in the restaurant industry are free, and so I rushed home from work to finish glazing the triple chocolate cheesecake and cleaning the house for the onslaught. It was a very Paekakariki event, with a full band setting up in our living room, the couch and chairs all pushed aside to make way for the drum kit and the amps. The sax player played in the doorway to the study; the bass guitarist next to the fireplace, and the singer in the centre of the new stage (formerly, the “living room”). We ate soup made from fish Dave had caught on the weekend, tortillas from masa Carolyn had brought on her last visit, and cheesecake I first made on a lovely Cambridge evening. The glass baubles vibrated, the children watched movies on laptops, and Perry barked to the most energetic beats. Now Rob is planted here in a different way too.

There is no hint of Memorial Day here (although we had Anzac Day so recently that the wreathes are still stacked in front of the memorial on the harbour), but next Monday we celebrate the Queen’s birthday—a commonwealth artifact that even the Brits themselves find quirky (they don’t celebrate her birthday). It happens that Monday is also my birthday, and that’s a day that crosses the oceans with me. It has marked the coming of summer and of winter, nearing the longest or the shortest days of the year. Still, there is something stable and grounding to know that wherever I happen to be now, I will always have been born on June 1st and to hope that wherever I happen to be on that day, I will have people I love around me. I am American and unAmerican. I am here and not there, granddaughter of immigrants and perhaps mother of immigrants. I have been on this tiny and fragile planet one more year, and I am grateful for all the perfection and paradox in my life.


pics today from kapa haka. I'll post party pics too (so you can see living room band) and try to upload video when I figure out how to do it on my mac!)

Happy birthday baby bro

Ah, now that I'm blogging at work (on shiftingthinking.org) AND working hard on my book, it's harder to show up here. If there were particular things you readers wanted to know about life here, or particular things we wanted to talk together about, it would help to hear them. In the absence of that, here are a couple of stories and pictures, and I'll lead into them with this picture of the brick path I put in the back yard a couple of weeks ago. Pathways and new prospects for our garden...

First is Naomi at netball. We put up a hoop on our new back deck so that she could practice shooting. And she shoots and shoots and shoots. Last week our back corner neighbour, who has a daughter on Naomi's netball team, joked about how he had heard her shooting when he went down to collect the eggs on the corner of their property closest our house. He went back and reported to his daughter, still in bed, that Naomi was practicing. Instantly his daughter was up and shooting in her bathrobe on their deck, while Naomi shot baskets in her bathrobe on ours. At Naomi's first game, she got about 7 goals (=baskets) and had about a 50% shooting success rate. At her second game, she got about 14 and had close to 100% in the first three quarters. Gladwell tells us that practice is everything, and Naomi shooting baskets on the deck bears that out.

Second is my writing shed. The most recent WWOOFERs, who should be back in the US now (write to me and let me know you're safely home, ladies!), became part of the family effortlessly and made lovely changes to the house with their hard work. The best change was the painting of my writing shed, pictured here in all its periwinkle glory (and pre-WWOFERed in the picture above). It makes me happy to use my lovely little space, and it makes me happy to stand in the kitchen, deck, or garden and look at my lovely little space. So far I haven’t done heaps of WRITING in my lovely little space, but the WWOOFERs can’t be faulted for that!

Finally is Mother’s day. Here’s the breakfast Aidan made for me all by himself. I have read stories of women who cry when their kids bring them an unpalatable blend of non-breakfast items, but I’ve never actually BEEN such a woman. This year I came down from a morning workout to find Aidan spreading honey on toast for me. He picked the cherry tomatoes (ripening on our window sill) for colour, the breadstick as a treat (because those are uncommon at our house and we’d served them for dinner the night before), and the toast as the main course. I held him for a long time, tears rolling down my cheeks as I tried to figure out what was so moving about it all. It was his initiative to do something nice for me, the attention he paid to detail (the aesthetics and the food selection), the way he wanted me to be celebrated and happy. All of it done with such love and devotion, with an almost unbearable sweetness of spirit. Ah, the love of a child is shockingly precious.

I close with a picture of an ordinary night with an ordinarily extraordinary sunset. I hope all of you have enjoyed this day, my baby brother’s 21st birthday. I love you, little bro, the first child I ever loved so hard I thought my heart would break with the sheer scale of the love it had to contain. Now you’re taller than me, but my heart has grown to keep up. I hope it was a magical day.

springing into autumn

It’s funny, people who read this blog see all kinds of things in it. I’m always surprised at the different interpretations of me and my mood I find reflected back at me. Some people tell me how hard it all sounds, how unsettling, how worrying. Others tell me it looks like I live in paradise and am blissfully happy, one perfect day after the next. And each of these interpretations makes me think, and in its own way, each is probably true.

I have come to a new era in my New Zealand adventure, though, a markedly different place since the US trip in March and April. I have been reading old blogs to make sense of this new place I’m in, and watching the old places I’ve been from the distance of a new vantage point. It’s been more than a year since we moved into this house, nearly two and a half years since we moved into this country. I walk through my house—now really finished at last—and into my garden which is emerging through our hard work and the help of our lovely WWOOFERs. I wander on the beach at lowish tide, throwing a ball for Perry. I rush to the train, panting, grumbling about its potential to be early (which a train should never be). I hear the tuis back in the trees, home to Paekakariki from wherever it is that tuis go when they’re not here. And in this new era, I don’t mutter to myself about how surreal it all is that I live here. In this new era, it feels like home.

Keith and I have been doing fantastic work this week in a leadership development programme filled with leaders I respect and admire. Our work with them is making a difference in their lives and in their organisation. I have not had this sense of satisfaction in my teaching since the days at IET when I could see that I was making a difference in the lives of the students whose teachers I taught. I am making a difference again. I’m writing again too, working on two different blogs and plugging away at my book. I go into the fairy cottage that is my new study and I look into the magic back garden and I think I have never felt so rooted anywhere. Somehow, I have moved out of the neutral zone in which I’ve spent these past three years, and I’m blinking into the sunlight of the new day. I have a stronger sense of what I’m doing and why, can look forward to a future that builds on this present (no, I still don’t know which country that future will be in), and can make decisions from a different space than has felt possible for a long time.

It’s autumn here, the leaves already fading and falling on the South Island, even though there are far fewer deciduous trees here at the beach. But the feeling welling up inside me is something more like sap running in spring than the full fruits of the harvest. In my internal season, this new beginning is the pale gold green of new growth. I can feel the tingling of these new possibilities, the buds bursting to flower, the beginnings of fruits so young it’s hard to tell what they’ll become. These images may strike northern readers as seasonal, but here with the howling wind and the crackling fire, they are in sharp contrast to the fresh snow on the mountains and the mittens tucked into coat pockets.

Many many months ago I talked about the neutral zone, that place where the old world is gone and the new world not yet emerged. I talked about moving furniture in and setting up house in the neutral zone because I thought I’d stay there a while. Turns out that the moving truck, which inhabits my dreams nearly every night, was here to take my furniture out of the neutral zone and into the beginning of the rest of my life. It is an autumn spring here in Paekakariki. Wonder what summer flowers the winter might bring.



Pictures today are of the dawn at the workshop Keith and I ran this week, and of my new cottage study. More pictures of this new life coming soon.