Very early morning. The sun was not yet risen, and the whole of Crescent Bay was hidden under a white sea-mist. The big bush-covered hills at the back were smothered. You could not see where they ended and the paddocks and bungalows began. The sandy road was gone and the paddocks and bungalows the other side of it; there were no white dunes covered with reddish grass beyond them; there was nothing to mark which was beach and where was the sea. A heavy dew had fallen. The grass was blue. Big drops hung on the bushes and just did not fall; the silvery, fluffy toi-toi was limp on its long stalks, and all the marigolds and the pinks in the bungalow gardens were bowed to the earth with wetness. Drenched were the cold fuchsias, round pearls of dew lay on the flat nasturtium leaves...
Katherine Mansfield, extract from At The Bay.
I love the above extract, more than any other, from New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield. She was a rather remarkable modernist writer, the one who caused Virginia Woolf to write, after Katherine's early death from TB, that Katherine's writing was 'the only writing I have ever been jealous of'.
But back to tales from New Zealand ... yesterday morning I woke to what I've been known to call a Katherine Mansfield kind of morning. All of the above was out there. It was truly stunning at 7am, as the fog began to burn off.
I wandered along the walkway and down by the river and on to the beach where spotted these two, in conversation with one of the boats leaving via the river mouth.
Did I mention how much I love New Zealand ...
