Refuge

In Rarotonga walked on the beach for multiple hours every day, went for two dives and three snorkels, got a rather embarrassing sunburn on my butt, ate coconuts fresh off the tree, wore flowers behind my ear, and rode around wearing jandals and no helmet on motorbikes around the island.

I saw: hermit crabs, beach-colored sand crabs, rock-colored rock crabs, snails, sea cucumbers, blue starfish, puffer fish, a lionfish, giant clams, herons, sandpipers, and more reef fish than I can name. My bed faced the sea through the open doors of the room I was staying in and I could walk out onto the deck and see fish jumping right below me. I wore my bikini and my sarong I got in Australia every day and the calluses on my heels are smooth now.

I spent three hectic days in Wellington and didn’t get much sleep. Alice and Kath and I put together Alice’s new bed and celebrated its construction by jumping up and down on it as hard as we could. Cherie came over to give me a haircut on the deck and I walked over the city every day just like normal, as if I hadn’t left it at all.

At Deirdre’s parents’ house in Picton there is a big lollopy chocolate lab called Beren, a sheep called Bob (but that’s just his nickname, his real name in Santiago), a big garden from which most of our dinner came last night, interesting conversation, and stacks of back issues of lifestyle magazines. “This place is a refuge,” her mother said to me last night as we were polishing off the last of the apple-pear crumble with cream, “and you are very welcome here.”

This is wine country and so we’ve been to several vineyards, where I have managed to taste various wines without making too much of a squinch face. So far, for whites my favorite was the Chenin Blanc (“This tastes like water…in a good way”) and for reds my favorite was the Pinot Gris (“This doesn’t make my teeth hurt as much”). I also liked the cheese plate that we had for lunch today and the fact that I was eating it at a dive in Milford Sound for my thirty-third birthday. Buying things and giving things away and posting things and losing things and finding things where I least expected them to be. Worrying about money. Feeling tight and sore because I haven’t stretched and haven’t danced. Wondering whether I will ever see my friends in Wellington again after April. Wondering if my friends in the States will remember or recognize me.

“I’ll be in Raro for ten days,” I’ve explained for the past two months, never really believing that I would leave my flat and my flatmate and my job and my life in Wellington. “And then six weeks in the South Island and then six weeks in the North, and then a week in Samoa, and then back to the States and then–ha ha!–I don’t know what will happen after that!” Raro, Phase One, is over now, and I’m in South Island, Phase Two. It will go quick and slow all at the same time and the States get bigger and closer and more imminent and I still still still don’t know what will happen after that.

Tomorrow I’ll get the bus to Kaikoura and, I hope, get a little more into my trip. I hope to post my Raro pictures soon and to start posting entries about the fun things I’m doing (hands up: who thinks I should try to swim with dolphins?) I hope to meet some nice new people and to spend some more good time alone. I hope not to worry too much about the future. I hope to soften my mind, open my heart, be right here right now, right here where I am now.