I had planned, this week, to write about ice cream — but then something unexpected happened and I can report that we have ! a real address, which seems, after fifteen moves and four months with a suitcase in our car, like something worth writing about.
It’s been a jumbly few months. We have accumulated approximately 35 tote bags in which are stored our ramshackle lives: four pounamu, a Bodleian Libraries keep cup, two sets of electric beaters, fox socks. We rely more than is wise on a bulky travel adaptor. We have woken to so many different views: rafters and cinderblock and sea and dog. Today’s view was of a small and sparkling Harbour Bridge beyond two wavering masts.
Somehow, we have not paid any rent since we arrived home in late June. I can report that this has been Highly Excellent on the finance front and Decidedly Less So on the sanity one.
For the last three weeks, and many incidental days before that, we’ve lived at my parents’, sleeping on a flatulent airbed in my dad’s office. During the day, we moved upstairs to work, amid Mum making chocolate mousse, and Dad indulging a new passion for tango music, badly, on the piano, and my brother moseying around eating cereal at 1pm. Nowhere could we close a door and be left properly, insolubly alone, but the sun greeted us each morning above the curtains, and the chocolate mousse was excellent, and at one point the Denver Nuggets still looked like they had a chance in the NBA playoffs (this last point is Rhys’), so things weren’t so bad.
We also spent time with Rhys’ parents in New Plymouth, five hours’ drive away: time filled mostly with swimming and cover letters and apple pie. My primary takeaway from staying there was that I have cruelly underestimated New Plymouth my entire life.
Mostly, though, it has been four months of animals, while we housesat across the North Island. We looked after Nina, a honey-coloured labrador who put a protesting paw on you when you stopped petting her. We looked after Obi, a ten-week-old sheepadoodle with several adorable qualities — his tininess, wet-furred, after a bath; his love of laps and arms — but the kind of bladder that had us up at 3am each night. For a quiet and perfect week up north, we looked after Ruby (calf) and Mac (dog) and Blue and Sox (velvet cats) and three cows and a plush swarm of chickens. And earlier, we looked after Hari, an almost unsettlingly mild border collie cross. (It emerged after our stint that we had accidentally been feeding Hari a quarter of the food she was allowed. She never once so much as looked accusing.)
Before all the animals, though, before all the borrowed love, we emerged bleary-limbed from quarantine to stay with my grandma. We slept in my grandparents’ room, on the tiny double bed big enough for two small Chinese people but not a Maddie and Rhys, beneath the black-and-white photos of my grandparents’ wedding. The house is dated and lovely: peach-walled, wifi-less, and every room full of dustless, unself-conscious kitsch — green glass grapes, porcelain figurines, enamel tea cases. I spent many hours drinking the faces in a cupboard of photo albums before anyone else woke up.
My Por Por is moving any day now from her big empty house, once home to seven people, to a glass-and-chrome apartment. It strikes me that her move to an apartment marks the end of an era, whereas ours has no sadness in it. I am still getting used to the idea that moving might be tied up with mortality; that change of place is as much about closing as opening. I am still accepting that you could travel halfway across the world and need to look further for someplace to settle — or, in my grandma’s case, that you could travel three kilometres to a new home that feels several worlds away.
Outside the window where we live now, the traffic flickers all day and all night. Two streets away, the Viaduct is full of hundreds of dipping sailboats and cranes. An enormous billboard advertises home loans and falafel on rotation. Inside, where we have unpacked my sewing machine and a kettle and every single pair of our shoes, we are at the still point of the turning world — or as another part of the poem has it, “Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind. / Cannot bear very much reality.”