Everything is turned upside down.
Seasons, constellations, the length of days, what we wake up to in the morning. There is green everywhere. Birdsong so loud I have to wear earplugs to sleep. It is early summer here but storms are still unrelenting. Above our bed is a sun roof made up of thick, grooved plastic, where we can see the southern cross and see the rain pelt down, sounding like gunfire at midnight. John and I walk down with the compost pail, Jessie strapped to him in the front-pack, eyes bright, as Fiordland stretches around and below the long, winding driveway we are on, the flax bushes rustling beside us. We dump it in the pile, just a corner of a big, sweeping garden sprouting rhubarb, zucchini, green onions and new lettuce.
It is December 25th in New Zealand’s South Island. There are no gifts, other than Hospice shop books and a 50 cent stuffed bear and a straw rattle for our daughter, but Jessie is enraptured by her toes, the sight of a spoonful of food coming at her, by a crumpled up piece of paper, zippers on jackets and trees flying by when we’re driving down the road. The packaged gift years will come, but not yet. Our gift to her this year is summer. Green grass to learn to crawl on. The sight of sheep and wapiti in the distance. Of a horse being ridden along a ridge line at 9 pm in a still-light sky, its rider stopping to leap off and open a gate, then remount in a swift move, like a gymnast, then they race away. Of avocados for breakfast. Stone fruit – apricots, plums, peaches – from orchards just over the mountain. I take a bite out of a cold nectarine and Jessie gingerly grasps it, pulling it to her face. Her lips quiver as she tastes it, decides she likes it, then goes whole hog gnawing on the juicy sphere in her hands that also soothes her gums.
Jessie rolls like a champ, wrestling with wrapping paper like an athlete as she turns over, but is stumped by crawling still. She lifts her arms and legs in a complex yoga move, resting completely on her torso, and squirms, looking like a stuck sea turtle, head craning to look around as if to ask Am I there yet?
John is fishing, just as he’d dreamed, catching beautiful, elusive rainbow trout, exploring the rivers during the days. They are high and murky right now with the heavy rain, water levels almost up to the bridges we cross in the ‘94 Honda Accord we bought last week for $800. We picked it up from a farm at the end of a long gravel road above the ocean, where the owner had lived her entire life. When we came in out of the rain, and into the kitchen to make the purchase, she was icing a Christmas cake. It was one of the traditional English Christmas cakes that are everywhere in a Commonwealth country, soaked alcohol then covered in a layer of thick, white, smooth icing that is rolled over the cake like pie dough.
It is as smooth as the snow in the hills outside our windows in Montana, I think, holding Jessie on my hip, her eyes on the artificial tree in the corner of the room, lit up with twinkling lights, wrapped boxes underneath. I remember back years before, of hikes into the woods to find the perfect pine, it’s needles filling up our tiny house with its scent. There is a distinct twist of homesickness that comes over me.
We will have other Christmases like that, ones with all the trappings, as we have before.
But for now, we are in another kind of wonderland.
