Feb 8

Feb 8 Homeward Bound

My father drives me home, where softly the rolling hills of South Otago, freckle flecked with bleating sheep, unfurl the single-laned highway up ahead. We travel in silence, my gaze as always drawn to landscapes slipping quietly past; drawn to the leanness of the main-street townships of my youth – Waihola, Milton, Balclutha, where my parents still reside. Each town made fast below hills burned bare of bush and beech; each paid for in kin, whose bones now nourish the land they toiled. We pass sweat bleached farmers yakking on the highway-side.

Strange that I only feel homesick when coming home. The journey is long overdue, and brings with it ever more shuttered windows, mills and meat-works closed down with a sombre finality; the fabric of these towns fraying in uncertain times. And yet, the lamingtons in the Black Swan Tearooms remain stoically cheerful with their billowy cream inners, and coconut snowflake casings. We choose to divert through Lawrence, leaving lighter of pocket and of heart after afternoon tea at The Wild Walnut. Further south, the rickety two-car Tuapeka punt ferries us across its namesake tributary river, with all due solemnity befitting a vessel launched in 1896.

In Balclutha, the supermarket shelves are stocked with familiar faces; old neighbors, teachers, and family friends packed in tightly between packets of Timtams and the morning’s issue of the Otago Daily Times. The movements of friends and relatives in and out of the community are dissected in the dairy aisle; a perennial topic of conversation. As with every prodigal child I am quizzed mercilessly – who have I seen, in which city, in what land? My generation might be scattered to the wind, but email and social media mean that we are never pulled far from the fold.

I walk the Blair Athol pathway, starting early morning from the turnstile on the Naish Park flood-bank. Following the river upstream through wandering rhododendrons and willow trees, I remember the afternoons I spent skipping school to dive into the leafy enclaves of the Clutha; the loamy smell of silt in the lagoon; the pull of the current in this largest of all rivers on the mainland. Sometimes I dip my toes in. Mostly I don’t.

Occasionally, time between obligatory family visits allows for a drive inland. I harbour an enduring love of ‘Jimmy’s’ meat pies, available fresh only in Roxburgh, and their procurement necessitates that we travel through Ettrick, fruit-filled nirvana of my childhood. Here, many summers past, my brother and I gorged ourselves on ‘Roxburgh Reds’, great juicy giants of the apricot kingdom, and ‘Dawson’ cherries, taut and shiny as any ruby; pleasure made painful in our gluttony, bursting point surpassed with youthful vigor. They are hard to find, those sun-kissed jewels: sprawling orchards now replaced with rows of grapes, for fruit too goes out of fashion. I spit pips out the car window as we drive.

Months later in Oslo, fishing for house-keys in my bag, I find instead an errant seed, and a glimpse of summers past.

It falls into the snow as I step inside.