The First Holiday

I’m pretty well over my jet lag, now, thanks for asking, and I have very much enjoyed my long Labour Weekend back in Wellington, after only 24 hours in transit from Miami the other day. I’ve clicked right into being here, after the initial weirdness and when people have asked me how it was being on holiday back in the States I’ve been all “Huh? Oh. Oh! Right! Yes! Good! The States were great! My sister and her partner were really happy to be married, and it was good to see my family and friends, and I was warm for the first time in nine months. It was great!”

I didn’t take many pictures, though, and I can’t really figure why not. I’m no great photographer, by any stretch—I mean I can hardly pose for pictures, you know? but I’ve been known to point-and-shoot my way through various events relatively decently. At least to give my extensive global blog-reading public a little bit of a sense of what it was like, this thing I was doing, this place I was staying: eating tamarind gelato with my cousins at midnight on South Beach, seeing my grandmother when I never dreamed she would make it to Miami when I was in town, doing simple things like going to Target with my mom, saving a poor beached-up puffer fish from the sand. You know? When I travel, especially, I like to keep some sort of record.

Here are the ones I did take, though. See? I really was there.

First of all, the happy couple! They seem to have really enjoyed their party: friends and family and delicious homemade food and the Beatles on the iPod speakers and a big gorgeous cake made by one of their awesome friends. Because they enjoyed it, everyone else did too.

That’s them and their little cousin, who was very taken with the bride and kept asking, hilariously, where the after-party was.

It’s sort of shadowy in this photo but here’s the aforementioned wedding-cake-made-by-their-friend. It’s a carrot cake with, apparently, thirty-three pounds of cream-cheese frosting. I was not, personally speaking, that it was lega in any state to put thirty-three pounds of frosting, regardless of flavor, on a cake, but BEHOLD! There it is! It was, if possible, even better tasting than it looks.

I feel like I was running around a lot during this reception but there was a little time to get at least one shot of (some of) the family: here’s three generations’ worth, my mom, grandmother, and me. I can’t tell you what it meant to have my grandmother there at this party and to be able to see her there—I saw her last year in Michigan of course but I had no idea until like two days before I got on the plane that she would be coming down (with my uncle and aunt) so it was this big huge bonus to see her. I see a little resemblance between her and my mom but not much between either of them and me, although to be fair pretty much all I see in this picture is how shiny my skin is and how humidified my hair is.

Here’s the only one I got with my sister the bride. She was very low-key at her wedding reception: we’re standing in line for the buffet here, which her brother-in-law very kindly made. I did like that about their wedding, very much, that it was very much a family-and-friends type thing. Nothing remotely related to the Wedding Industrial Complex, as they say. Her friend made the cake, his brother made the food, everyone helped set up and break down the tables and chairs and decorations. A lot of people were barefoot and would stroll over to the beach when it got too hot inside. Nice, you know?

When I wasn’t hanging out with various family members in various states (because, you know, I went to New York in the middle there, thereby bringing the total flights I took in a thirty-day period up to eleven, which: eeesh, I was trying to take advantage of the weather. I felt like such a tourist because it would be seventy-five degrees (that’s about 23, Celsius users) and I’d be strolling along Lincoln Road Mall on South Beach in short sleeves with a cone of gelato, enjoying myself immensely, thinking about everyone in Wellington who was shivering in the cold and the rain and the wind, and everyone who actually lived there would have, like, jeans and puffy vests and knit hats on. I didn’t carewho laughed at me though, I was just so glad to be back in my native habitat where I could run, as nature intended me to, on solar energy.

Yay! Warm water! I am seriously so happy in this photo. I wish I could have smuggled, like, a screwtop jar of that seawater in my carry-on bag.

And here is a picture of a beach sticker thingy between my toes—I’ve never been to any other beach that has these, not even in other parts of Miami, just the one at home. They’re these sort of burr-like things, super sharp and owie, and you are guaranteed to get one on your foot if you walk around barefoot on the sand—which, you know, is the whole point of the beach—and they hurt a lot. (Okay basically no one who didn’t grow up on the island cares about this, but those of you who did: I KNOW, RIGHT?)

I saw some decent creatures on my various walks during the week I was there: several puffer fish, gars, a blue heron getting its feet wet and looking really annoyed when we got too close to it, and a couple of pink and white jellyfish (though not, thankfully, any man-o-wars). Unfortunately I didn’t have the camera with me during any of those beach walks, so what you get is a picture of some endangered sea oats instead.

Here we see a poor washed-up beach chair, flopping about in the surf as it attempts to get back to deeper water.

And here is my mom and me, right before she took me to the airport to start the journey back to New Zealand. When I finally got back to my own bed in my own room in my own (um, rented) house in Wellington, there was still a little sand from that walk between my toes, I am not even lying to you. I can kind of see our resemblance here a little bit, can you?

So that was it, the first time to go back to the States for just a holiday from New Zealand. I did not anticipate how exhausting it would be, or how difficult it would be to leave so soon after arriving. I was there last week, very focused on making the most of every limited moment I had, and now I’m here, doing my normal things, not caring so much about time: seeing friends, going to lunch, taking a walk, going to the Warehouse, cleaning the bathroom, making dinner. I’ll be on the bus tomorrow and I’ve got a birthday party, Julie and Julia, and yoga this week. I got my tickets for the Coromandel for Christmas and for Golden Bay for New Year’s. Life keeps going on the way it does all over the world, and I keep going with it, but all along is the divided heart, beating ever so slightly out of time. How long, I wonder, this whole year, how long how long how long.

This was outside my balcony today, waiting for me when I got back. You know?