Notes From My Visit To Golden Bay With My Mom

First Night

After the ferry, after the six hours in the car from Picton to Takaka, after a dinner of goat cheese and crackers on the tiny little balcony looking out over the bay, I walk down past the outdoor tea house and the Buddha in its lavender bed, to the beach. It’s my birthday, it’s the largest full moon of the year. I walk up and down, under the moon, along the water, singing first under my breath and then louder and louder, the same two songs, back and forth, up and down, louder and louder.

Brunch In Town

We sit outside, under a shade structure, and eat fancy eggs on toast, drink hot chocolates. My mother orders extra mushrooms with hers, I get spinach. The café is next to a garden centre where white butterflies flit around the lettuce plants (surely it’s a bit late in the season?) and there is a fat gray cat that slips through a hole in the separating fence to chase them when it’s not begging from the other brunchers. I catch the cat’s eye and slip it a bit of buttered toast. It sits at my feet and looks up expectantly, so I give it another bit, and and another. My mom nods sympathetically—philosophically we don’t believe in giving people food but we always do it anyway—and we discuss, for twenty minutes at least, various cats we have known.

Holiday Romance

Since I’m with my mom I’m not really participating in the backpacker shenanigans this time around; we’re not staying in the main house as I’ve done before but in a series of smaller cabins up the hill, which have their own kitchen. While I’m heating water for tea, I meet a friendly German girl and we chat amiably, in English and Italian, until the water boils. Later she comes to the tea house where I am applying more sunscreen and drinking a fruit soda and reading a book, and we chat some more. An American guy, from Seattle, comes up to give her something (a shirt? A book?) and when I refer to him as her partner she says, Oh no, I just met him yesterday. I nod. They go down to swim naked at the beach, and the next time I see them is the next day when Mom and I have returned from riding horses near Wharariki Beach, sitting on the kitchen balcony. He is telling her about the layout of his apartment in Seattle, it seems, (“it’s open plan”) his hand on her thigh. He doesn’t mention the neighbourhood but I guess Queen Anne, maaaaaybe Capitol Hill but probably not. Her hair and skin shine gold, she looks at the sunset, as his accent carries across the native New Zealand (second growth) bush.

Backpacker Shenanigans

I don’t spend much time in the main house on this trip–I’m there primarily to be with my mom–but on two of our four nights there I go to bed much earlier than she wants to, so she takes her book down there, just to be social. She gets up a bit earlier than I do one morning and goes into the kitchen for breakfast, where I find her talking to a Dutch woman and a Kiwi woman, about her age. They are giggling when I walk in but hush up as soon as I walk in, as if I’m an overly strict teacher in a particularly rambunctious classroom. I boil water for tea and chat, politely, I think, to the two other ladies, asking where they’re from and how they like Shambhala—no, we all agree, it’s not like any other backpackers. My mom smiles a morning smile at me. I make my tea in my reuseable cup and take it and my yogurt out to the balcony; as soon as I do the three of them burst into laughter again.

At The Meditation Hall

I sit, newly thirty-six, outside on a cushion on the briefly sunny porch of a meditation hall overlooking the beach’s low tide. Insects shrill and buzz and my top layer is on and off, off and on, four times in fifteen minutes. I feel vaguely guilty for wanting to read my magazine—I never buy them—and remind myself that there are educational and inspirational articles in between the fashion spreads with their thousand-dollar shoes. A few more sandfly bites on my ankles, a few more gray hairs. End of season shorts from a sale at Glassons, with unflattering thigh pockets big enough to hold my cell phone (right leg) and four ginger nuts (left leg). Today we counted up the birds we’ve seen since we got here: pukeko, fantail, silvereye, black swan. Gannets, gulls, oystercatchers. A lot of hawks whenever we drive anywhere. I did some sun salutations, earlier. I made some lists, I drank some tea in my reuseable made-in-New-Zealand plastic cup.

There is the sun, fading redly and pinkly. There is the beach and the outgoing, outrunning, outrushing tide; there are the snails and the hermit crabs, the frilled tube worms. There is my empty cup, my mostly-read inspirational magazine, my running-out-of-ink pen, my nearly-complete notebook, my half-full, half-empty heart.