Eden on the Wairoa

That first weekend is full and full to the brim.  Robin introducing me to a life that she has already lived.  Over seeing my induction.  Leading me through the rites of passage.

The orchard walk on that first afternoon.  Bare feet in the grass and the trees heavy with hanging fruit.  Apple and pear and plum.  Ripening on the limb and some of them ripe for the picking.

So pick.  Pick the one that you want, pick it off of the tree, pick your teeth when it’s gone from your hand.  O!  How easy it is to pick fruit from a tree.  From a tree giving fruit.  From a giving tree giving.  How easy it is to pick fruit from a tree and feast fast beneath rustling leaves.  O!

And who do I thank for a feast such as this?  Tell me for I am so thankful that such a transaction can exist at all.  From the laden branch to the empty hand.  The fruit passing passive and perfect.  So?  Thank you.

Bare feet in the grass and over the grass to the garden.  Through the unplanted lanes between beds.  The grass walkways between wooden-box frames.  Walk.  To see the myriad faces of the vegetable portrait.  Beans and beet root.  Zucchini and cucumber.  Capsicum, potato, onion, and garlic.  Tomatoes fat on the vine and bloated in the afternoon sun.

And sunflowers on the other side of the tunnel house.  The tunnel house that tickles the nose with the smell of fresh peppers.  And the wild flowers bursting with color and growing at the edge of the gully-drop.  Among weeds: a color fire burning by the veggies.  In homage to a fallen friend.  These fire flowers in bloom and blooming, the flame petals always alight.

Bare feet in the grass and over the grass, and this is the life for me.  Living on the fat of the land.

Dinner and a movie and halfway through the movie the father-son duo arriving late and heading straight to bed.  And we following soon after.  Robin and I in “Robin’s Room.”  This South Island orphan child adopted by Carolyn and Wayne and Thomas, and she sprawled in her own queen bed in her own room and cracking jokes in the almost-dark with the boy on the pallet on the floor.

And we act like children, the two of us invited to this strange house perched above the Wairoa, and Robin already a family member and permitted with permission to ask friends to sleep-over, though neither one of us seems bent on sleep as we crack jokes and recount the highlight reel of the previous weekend and wonder aloud to each other if anyone else would think that we were funny.  And the answer is no and then no.

And neither one of us can remember the following day when or why we fell asleep and the only part of that lamp-light bed-time conversation that stands out in either one of our minds is the story that Robin told about the 2009 commencement speech at Carolina when Desmond Tutu—the archbishop of South Africa—made an out of character comment about “no one wanting an orgy.”

What?

But on to the new day and the day unfolding in the sunshine sky.  Wayne serving hot drink after hot drink after hot drink to anyone and everyone who cares to keep pace with him, this caffeine junkie, and I’m on board for the ride.

Robin gives me a tutorial on weeding a vegetable garden, and I collect apples that have fallen from the trees.  In the afternoon we navigate the gully drop down and down to the river to paddle in the crystal clear.  Now seated and floating on top of an open-boat kayak.  Now submerged in the Wairoa River.  Green.

We attempt to pilot the tandem boat down a shallow rapid.  Scraping along the stones until we are into deeper water, and gaining speed, and gaining speed, and gaining speed, until we collide with the bank opposite and topple—the two of us—into the wet.  Ego Check.

But the dot at the bottom of the exclamation point is this: that while trying to gain her footing after the sinking of the ship, Robin slips with a warbling “wooah,” and disappears beneath her straw hat—her straw hat floating on the surface of the water.  The scene played out like the flip-frames of some ancient cartoon.  “Wooah.”

So we splash around in the too-cold water, in the crystal-clear green, before docking the plastic boat and scrambling up the switch-backs to the house.  Following the family.  Into the car—like actors in a Toyota T.V. commercial—with the sun riding its descent line down.

For a feed of fish and chips at Rabbit Island and a walk on the beach afterward.  A fried food waddle on the sand.  The sun like a bobber half-submerged, and holding some celestial bait on the other end of the line.  Tossed in to the ocean’s horizon and then gone, caught by the catch of the following day.

And the following day the boys are back.  Lemonade ice blocks for lunch and dinner.  And I am galloping through the garden with shoulder saddled cowboys.  Giddy-up and get going.  For once the fun starts they do not want it to stop.

And then dinner with the gathered family.  Most of the food coming straight from the garden.  And after dinner with the gathered family, Robin and Wayne depart.  Lumberjacks heading back to where the wood is.  Into the car and onto the road.  Back to Picton.  Back to Picton, trailing a dust cloud out of the gorge.

And then it is Carolyn and myself.  Carolyn the long and lean.  The blonde-headed hostess of the week to come.  Caorlyn of the lank legs.  The legs sprouting from the armpits and reaching.  And reaching daily in long strides across the green grass to the garden.  Carolyn in the black dress perpetual, with the legs falling out of the black dress as if they are not attached to the body at all.  Fluid.  She is born of the earth—Adam’s rib be damned—this dirt woman, whose home is between the rows of beet root, beneath the soil and hidden among the hearts of potato plants.  She who is always reaching toward the sun with the red tomatoes, hop-scotching between the empty squares of the trellis screen.  A gardener in the garden and a cook in the kitchen.  A teacher, a mother, a wife, and a friend.  “Aunty Carolyn” to the lemonade ice block boys and a woman who is proud to be woman.