We were buying a Christmas tree on that particular day but guided by some wicked and mysterious impulse, I raced off inside while Gert was watching the tree being loaded onto that trolley, and asked Dieter if I might buy one of his beautiful bouquets. Just flowers this time, I told him.
And this is what he did.
Last year was the first 'real' Christmas I had had in 9 years.
I left New Zealand mid-2003 and experienced my very first northern hemisphere non-Christmas in Istanbul that year. Living in a predominately Muslim country meant that life didn't stop for Christmas. The weather was rubbish. It was winter.
That year I was given the day off to celebrate Christmas because I was considered a 'christian'. And my Turkish boss took me home to her family that evening, generously celebrating Christmas for me and with me. The next year I was teaching English conversation class at the university on the day, then raced off to English friends to experience my first-ever English Christmas (in Turkey).
Then came Belgium and the next few years were spent attempting to get used to the whole Christmas-in-winter thing. But the traditions here have simply moved Christmas so far from my New Zealand origins that I don't experience Christmas as Christmas. It's just this strange holiday that people mess about with over December, beginning on the 6th - that day when Sinterklas comes, leaving gifts for the children who then, more often than not, have to head off to school after present-opening.
This time last year though, I was home in New Zealand and it was magnificent. With a little bit of terrible thrown in too. I was trying to do that final organising of a lifetime's worth of possessions. I needed them to fit into just a few boxes so I could store them before shipping them over to Belgium. I think I arrived at 4 medium-sized plastic containers ... giving the rest of my stuff away or throwing it into the rubbish.
Christmas Day, 2012, in New Zealand was so familiar and delicious however throwing out most of my previous life and trying to pack two 21kg suitcases to fly in the morning ... it was difficult despite being the best Christmas day I had had in a long time.
This year, I seem to have misplaced Christmas. I haven't bought any presents (except for that gift organised for Miss 9, shared between 4 of us. A gift she will love because it is simply marvelous). Nor have I sent any cards. I haven't even managed to organise Christmas Day but perhaps that's because it's not really Christmas Day to me anymore. There is none of the excitement of summer, of cherries and strawberries, of finding a box of new potatoes ... it's just so different.
It will come together on the day, we have children around and I'll make sure it's marvelous for them but I am suspecting that Christmas just is that thing I don't get excited about anymore.
Let's see how it goes. Meanwhile ... my people, last Christmas in the land Downunder.
When I changed my jandals for something more sturdy the plump and middle- aged dog was seized with a puppyish urge. He pounced on a jandal, ran to the lawn with it, tossed it high, pounced again as it landed and shook it to death like a rat. Then he looked at me with both ears cocked and the jandal pinned and I had to smile at his joy. Don't let anyone tell you that beasts don't feel.
Indeed, as I tied my shoe I asked myself when I was last as happy as the dog was now. And the answer was Wednesday.
Joe Bennett, extract from, Happy as a Dog.
This captures something of what my New Zealand life was like sometimes. Although I only fished off the wharf and out of a lake. No fly-fishing. But it was possible to live so much closer to Nature than it is here in Antwerp. And lately I've found myself attempting to weigh up what means more to me ... the proximity of Genova, Paris, and the rest of Europe, or quiet moments spent wandering on an empty beach with my dog.
I loved the morning hours back then ... dog-walking, or dreaming over breakfast coffee taken on the steps of some house I was living in. I lived in so many houses between 1985 and 2004. And all over the South Island of Home. Each place I lived would be added to my list of places colonised by my soul. Mosgiel, Dunedin, Cromwell, Blenheim and Te Anau, before circling back to Dunedin.
I had one dog for most of the years of my first marriage. She and I had so many places we loved. She knew the joy of jandals although we were happiest with stones or sticks, a tennis ball, a lake, river or beach. We needed so little to be joy-filled.
Joe Bennett's article set my soul singing a song of longing this morning. I'm just in from zero celsius and horrific pollution. Miss 9 and I headed out into it at 7.30am, mostly laughing our way across the city. We're both very amusing ... we tell ourselves. We shared Gert's big old woollen gloves. She wore his left glove, I wore the right glove, we held hands with the hands left bare and were warm enough out there in the mist and the frost.
She's wearing the cutest little bear hat these days, with long sides that hang down as pockets for her hands but more effectively, those long bits can be worn as a scarf. I hand it to her some mornings saying, what did the fox say?' It's our signal to begin ... she says, 'It's a bear!!!' but we can't help singing that bloody song. 'Bloody' as explained in this interview with the guys who created it (the language switches to English quite quickly, if you haven't viewed it already).
And here I am, still smiling over the long answerphone message I left for my baby brother over in Perth. It's Kim's birthday today. He's surprisingly old, not the 17 year old I still imagine him to be. There was that surprise of time moving on when I picked up our Nana's ancient birthday book, looking for the year he was born.
I'm nursing a pollution-inspired ache in my head, putting off beginning the work I know I must do. My Genovese friends are in Brussels today and I'm cooking them dinner tonight. The skies have been clear since they landed, this morning's mist is already gone ... 10am. They'll never believe me next time I'm in Genova, when I tell them I'm fleeing the grey grey skies of Antwerp. They just haven't experienced those skies, and I'm torn between glad and compromised. They leave on Monday.
But anyway, today's quest ... I would like a small jandal of joy moment like Joe's, like his dog too. I looked through my this time last year photographs from New Zealand and found this one. It was taken on a beautiful sun-rising morning while out wandering Cook's Beach in the Coromandel.
It seemed I only needed to roar a little and voila, the words came bubbling up afterwards.
I sent the advert text away before rushing out and across the city on the Thursday school pick-up. It's a half-day, like Wednesday. So now I just need to do the bio and locate some photographs of Genova.
But the happy news from today was that Miss 9 and I stopped for lunch at the new New Zealand shop located in the heart of Antwerp. Pies ... Buzz bars, L&P, and etc. We love it.
Miss 9 is a fairly radical vegetarian at the moment and so she chose the vegetarian pie which, to me, seemed like a very big waste of 'pie'. I had the Stoofvlees pie ... a pie filled with the rather divine Flemish beef and beer stew.
L&P was our choice of drink. Miss 9 because she finds it delicious and me because it takes me straight back to those childhood days where it was always summer.
Fortunately, before devouring too much pie, I remembered to stop for a photograph. An imperfect image but I was far more interested in eating it.
Meanwhile, a 4th day of sunshine! The frost is thicker every morning though and -3 celsius in Antwerp today. Still, sunshine ... not to be sneezed at in December, here on the northern end of the world.
I was out with Miss 9 recently. She took this photograph of me after we had worked through exposure and composition while wandering. She trotted off and worked on framing then signing it. She presented it to me to add to my blog. My youngest photography student so far ...
I posted, over on Facebook, that some friends in Genova will no longer believe me when I tell them I go there to escape the grey skies of Belgium. Roberto and Doris flew in from Liguria on Monday, just as a high pressure weather system stalled over us. They have enjoyed deep blue skies these last 3 days ...
We have had our first frosts here but a lot can be lived with if deep blue skies are involved. I mentioned the fact that I had laundry drying on the clothes-line outside ... not completely drying but still, it was out and it was drying some, and she asked if I had photographed my lovely December clothes-line.
The thing is, once I pick up my camera, the difficulty is in putting it down again. So rather than simply photograph sheets and duvet covers drying on my clothes-line outside, I wandered round our little pocket-sized garden. I noticed the honeysuckle has been fooled into flowering again and that the raspberry leaves look rather divine in their autumn state.
And so, a collage ...
I've been standing still since Paris, 13 October 2013. It feels very odd. A little like sleeping, or perhaps napping.
As a result the house is looking pretty. My bedroom/office space has been refined. I like it. And Gert's building me a 2m wide corkboard ... so that I can hang the photographs I'm using for the book. Apparently he was inspired to create the corkboard when he arrived home and discovered my lines of nylon thread, filled with many pegged A4 colour images.
We negotiate this office space that we share here in our big old L-shaped Belgian bedroom. He is a very organised man. I am a chaotic-while-preferring-to-be-organised woman. I have my little nest of books and papers, photographs and paintings, memories and all kinds of other things too, tucked away behind a small shelf-wall. I'm in the corner, next to a window, where the predominant colours are deep red and terracotta.
It's winter here. I am in need of colour.
In the end I can't resist playing with reflections ... even in Venice.
Or maybe, most especially in Venice.
Or so it seemed, especially when we were lost in Venice.
I would like to go back one day, with more time, and be out wandering very early before the city wakes up. Sunrise in Venice might be rather special.
Getting lost is the only place worth going to.
Tiziano Scarpa, author Venice is a Fish
And we did get lost, Julie and I. We were on our 8-day roadtrip through Italy, Croatia, Hungry, Austria and back into Italy. We were driving past Venice on our way from Trieste to Como and Julie said, as you do, let's pop into Venice for a couple of hours.
She had been once and wanted to introduce me to that mythical Italian city I had never seen. So we parked and caught a bus across the long bridge into Venice. And we were confident, for a while, that there was no way we'd get lost but ... oh we did.
So lost. But the sights we happened upon were worth it in retrospect.
There were sights I had never imagined before, around every other corner ... like this.
“We think of creative people in a heroic manner, and we celebrate them, but the thing we celebrate is the after-effect,” says Barry Staw, a researcher at the University of California–Berkeley business school who specializes in creativity.
Jessica Olien, extracts from her article, Inside the Box - People don't actually like Creativity.
I’m looking up and in the sky there is the shiny glint of a jet airplane caught in the sun’s grasp, pushing silently east; I’m thinking there are four hundred people going somewhere else. I’m hoping that most of them realise the freedom of being 38,000 feet up and headed somewhere new.
Anik See, from A Taste for Adventure
I've been noticing the vapor trails jets leave behind lately. So many planes pass over Belgium on their way to someplace else. So many.
Last night, a sliver of a moon showed up early, the sky was blue but with a rose-tint, the one that appears in the sunset hours. I pointed my camera up from my seat here by the window and took a series of photographs.
I think I captured something of what was out there ...
Sometimes, I write a blog post and it hits a wrong note. If it stays wrong in my mind, I delete it. Sorry about that ...
Nice news today is that the new Lovin Genova Blog, created by the Office for the Development and Promotion of Tourism of the City of Genoa, has one of my posts up. It's titled, From The Outside Looking In.
Davide Chelli has written a beautiful post that takes you inside the Oriental Market, on Via XX Settembre in Genova.
The desire to go home, that is, a desire to be whole, to know where you are, to be the point of intersection of all the lines drawn through all the stars, to be the constellation-maker and the center of the world, that center called love. To awaken from sleep, to rest from awakening, to tame the animal, to let the soul go wild, to shelter in darkness and blaze with light, to cease to speak and be perfectly understood.
Rebecca Solnit
Lately I've been asked, more than once, what would my ideal life look like ...
I was asked to describe it today. I was quite lost. How many people know how to answer that question? 'If it could really happen, how would your ideal life look?' And so I stumbled and bumbled around, wanting to be nice, to be gentle ... but no, there was no nice gentleness allowed.
What would my ideal life look like?!
And it's interesting, to me, because I've quietly been working through Danielle LaPorte's book, The Fire Starter Sessions ... in lieu of having colleagues and friends wandering in and out of conversations with me. I live an oddly isolated life here in Antwerp. Maybe I even create some of the isolation myself, needing so much space to write and make photographs. To think. To read enough books. And to maintain the family and home we have here.
Danielle almost beats me over the head with her repetitive, direct questions regarding my professional life. Initially she set off a protective response in me ... protective, resistant perhaps.
How much money would you like to be making? Earned a tentative I would love to simply make some money ... became I would love to be financially independent.
Her questions focus you down on your business, your self, and your needs. The last question on her recent worksheet, as follows, was another invitation to dream.
So ... what would you like to do with your life and career? (Money is no object. Dream.)
This morning, a similar question, different requirement. Tell me how your ideal home life would look. Dream. And we're talking 'ideal', if it could be as you wish it to be.
I think I'm getting it. We need to go in the direction of our dreams. In fact, Henry David Thoreau tells us to Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.
And as we step out, we increase the quality and satisfaction in our lives and so influence the lives of those people around us too. We're here to live our lives and become the best we can be during that time. To do the 'right thing', to be eaten up by guilt for not doing so, to conform to the outline of today's 'ideal citizen' ... often these things don't respect who we are. It seems a bit like a wing-clipping to me.
So here I am, writing a book, spinning a web of planned future actions that will spark financial independence. I'm having some off-the-wall ideas that just may work. All this simply because people are inviting/demanding that I dream my ideal worlds, both privately and in business, into reality.
I have no idea how it will go but let's see it.
On this day last year I was posting photographs of Mount Tongariro erupting because I was back home in New Zealand and had recently driven past that North Island volcano. On December 1st I had arrived at my sister's house, down in Dunedin, and was catching up with her and her beautiful family for the first time in 8 years.
Eight years can go by in a flash ... and they did. I was always coming home soon but getting home was a hellishly expensive business. Fortunately I lack a sense of time passing and, while I longed for home and family something fierce sometimes, I got by. I was even more delighted when I discovered everyone still there, where I had left them.
Old friendships had survived, babies and toddlers had grown, and there was enough good New Zealand pinot noir to make sure I survived how old all the babies were now, and laughter too, making every day there so very special.
I was talking to Dad tonight, harassing him in his 9.30am Monday morning from my 9.30pm Sunday night. Since I stopped traveling so much I've made a point of startling him with a phone call far more regularly. He's stopped with his startled, 'Is that you Di??!' and is no longer surprised when he hears my voice from some 16,000kms round the world. I used to disappear for months sometimes. It's that time passing problem ... no sense of it.
So anyway, all this to say ... this time one year ago I was home in New Zealand.
I may have even taken the photograph that follows today, precisely one year ago. Sandra popped us all into her car we wandered off down my beloved Otago Peninsula. This view, on the way home via the high road, is one that I had always loved.
I believe, very strongly, in informing myself. I can't just read one newspaper or follow one news source via the various forms of media. I don't believe in standing in one place, claiming I'm left or right-wing, or a particular religion. I can't state that 'these are my beliefs and everything else is wrong'.
I believe, very strongly, in Nature and the fact that we need to take care of it to survive. But I see too, that there are fundamentalists and extremists everywhere. There are fundamentalists in every political religious group, extremists any place you can imagine and I would be naieve if I thought otherwise.
I was intrigued by this documentary. I haven't yet researched it properly but watching it here, I was thinking it's something to share ... leaving everyone who cares to watch it to make up their own minds.
My mother would have turned 70 today ... but she died back in 1999, at age 56. I remembered her birthday as it approached this year. Maybe I have always remembered but this year I have carried her with me for days.
70. I can't even imagine how that might have changed her. I don't think it would have. She was one of those women who grew more beautiful as she aged. I think women do that sometimes. Their authentic self comes shining through and they finally allow it. They have grown into their skins and they're comfortable. She was surely getting there if she wasn't already and people who spent time with her in her final months simply loved who she was.
She was always a remarkable woman but I'm almost sure that she never knew it. Nobody really knew how to say things like that back then. What is it about us that makes us write of these things, talk of those remarkable things about people we love, after they're dead? I have come to believe that we should tell people that we love or admire them while they're alive. I learned it the hardest way.
My relationship with her has changed through the years, despite her absence. I've thought of her often, sometimes writing a note that allows me to remember her for a while.
I knew she would have flown over to Istanbul and loved being there. She would have adored Beste's mum, just as I do. She would have charmed everyone. She had this quiet loveliness that I didn't quite understand when I was young. And Belgium, I could imagine her so easily, out on the balcony at the first place, resting with a glass of white wine after completely designing and planting a balcony garden.
Genova ... she wouldn't have left. She would have found an apartment next to the sea and spent the rest of her days there. And I think the Italians wouldn't have minded. She had this innate goodness that you could see in a moment. She was brave, and as strong as she needed to be. She was kind too. She should have traveled but she didn't really.
So there it is, on the last day of this commitment to blog everyday of November, I wanted to celebrate the woman my mother was ... a remarkable woman I still miss 14 years after we lost her.
She planned her own funeral you know. We were all there in the church and I had just given my first speech in front of a 'packed house'. My two brothers, my sister, my dad, her sisters, and so many who loved her, were sitting there feeling so sad and which song roared out through the speakers of that lovely little Catholic church in Mosgiel?
Laughter and tears ...she was a truly remarkable woman. And she loved Queen.