For Liz and Fiona ...

There were 3 of us way back then at the beginning.

Tonight I'm over here in this northern hemisphere and two of my best friends are together back in New Zealand.  Sending you guys so much love and wishing I could be there too.

In the Quiet Time ...

I'm resting these days.  Not lolling about in bed but taking it easy, staying at home ... living quietly. 

And it's been interesting for me to see what has risen to the surface.  I have had no heart for real work, instead I've been content to read good books, sort through all those unsorted photo folders, and keep the house clean.

I usually go out on the bike once a day, just to the supermarket, respecting my body's needs ... just for a change.  I've stopped coffee, tea and red wine.  And I'm not eating anything I know my body can't tolerate. 

I'm quiet.

The photograph.  I missed it somehow.  I have a particular fascination with Genova's fountain in Piazza De Ferrari.  The image was yet another slice of the fountain.

A Little of This, a little of that ...

I feel like I've been quiet here but perhaps that's simply a part of my idea that some days are longer than 24 hours.  I have spent the last few weeks quietly nose-diving into the ground with very low iron levels.   Not that I knew it.  Suspected it but wasn't sure. 

And I have to admit that I have never been so glad to have a diagnosis of anemia.  I left New Zealand with terribly low levels, 10 years ago ... imagining, perhaps, that moving countries would magically fix them.  It turns out that this was wrong-thinking and these last few weeks have been so very difficult. 

Ignoring the problem didn't work either.

I'm on my second day of serious iron medication today and, although it's probably some kind of placebo effect, I feel stronger this morning.  My testing ground is the stairs to my office.  They've taken on an

Everest-like aura of late and while I was reading 'Summit Fever' I really got a feel for the high altitude, thin air feeling.  Puffing my way to the top.

And so I am back, tentatively excited about all that is ahead.  There's the photography exhibition at the end of the month but before that, a much-loved old friend is coming to stay next week.  Murray was one of my favourite people back in those days when I was an officer's wife and living on the airforce base in New Zealand.  It will be good to catch up with him.  We have Flanders Fields plans and I hope to introduce him to some of the special people I know there.

Then I'm turning 50 next week but the big party is happening in November although ... I haven't sent out all the invitations yet.  The anemia exhausted me organisationally, and I'm already not superb in that area.  I hope friends forgive me for being so late.

Logistically I've had a lot to do and no energy to do it with.

I'm back in Genova at the end of November, with much planned. And then a lovely friend has offered me her house in another part of Italy early in the new year and so, I need to organise flights and plan that too.

But mostly I've been exhausted and unable to think.  Here's to a return to 'normal', or perhaps something better than normal, if I fill up on iron :-) and Vitamin D (so the blood says).  The doctor also prescribed daily antihistamine for allergies to dust mites and grass.  I think I'll take a rain check on those pills though.  My body, the one that was formerly only familiar with mild painkillers, is taking in enough that is new.  I'll keep the allergy pills for emergencies ...

So that's my news.  I'm sure there's more to follow as the energy returns.  The image that opened this post was taken back home in New Zealand.  I used this path often when I lived in Dunedin.  It led to my favourite beach and I was most often found there following my dog as we made our way to and from Long Beach.

Leonie Wise & Waves

Leonie Wise lives in New Zealand these days, on an incredible heartbreakingly beautiful island called Waiheke Island. 

And she blogs, sharing small pieces of that country I love, allowing us all to drink in images ... text too.

I visited that island, once, long ago.  All indications are that it has improved over the decades since and that it offers lifestyle ... on steroids.  In a natural nature-enhancing way.

And she posted photographs today, and a song too, by Mr Probz called Waves.

So I went and found some waves I had photographed while we were out on a boat exploring Mercury Bay, up in the Coromandel, when I was back at home too.

a country girl again, by Kay McKenzie Cooke

The black-and-white photo goes back

to '67.  Taken around Christmas.  Perhaps a Sunday

drive out from Gore.  A bit of a breeze parts Nana's perm,

her own steady caution holding down hands

that shine below the folded-back cuffs

of her bri-nylon cardigan.


Grandad's road-worker's hands lie relaxed

over the roof of the car, taking ownership

of its dim-blue.  Both of them

caught by me at fourteen, when I press

the slow shutter of my Brownie box camera

with a pronounced click.  Just a moment ago.

Kay McKenzie Cooke, a country girl again.

I love this poem, so much.  It captures familiar scenes, people I almost know ... from my childhood.  And Kay's descriptions seem better than a photograph because I know the way her Grandfather's road-worker hands would have looked on the roof of his car.  I saw my Grandfather make that same gesture, so many times, back when I didn't know I was even looking ... or remembering.

3 sets of Kay McKenzie Cooke's beautiful poetry books have arrived in time for my 'Home & Away' Photography exhibition, soon to be mounted here in the New Zealand Shop, Antwerp. 

Kay has signed and written a small message in 6 of her books, the other 10 came straight from the publisher ... hot off the press and her new poems are just delighting this New Zealand girl so far from home.  

The new collection is titled, Born to a Red-Headed Woman, and the Otago University Press tells the story of it more fluently than I can: Using the extraordinary capacity of music to revive the places and people from our pasts, this poetic memoir springs from over 50 song titles or song lines and spans more than four decades.
Laconic, wry, subtly philosophical, Kay McKenzie Cooke’s new collection carries us from her rural Southland girlhood in the 1950s and 60s to the bitter pressures of adopting out her baby as a teenager in the 1970s, and to her present as grandmother, mother, wife and author. A plain-spoken honesty, a sensitivity to the natural world, a gentle humour, a deep sense of how the richness of our relationships lodges in ordinary rituals and routines: all combine in a quietly moving autobiography.
Born to a Red-Headed Woman is documentary, vivid, ever grounded in the workaday detail of farming, the changing decades, family, city life and job. Yet at times the language peels right back to the tender nerve of major, formative losses.
If Cooke’s observations of the daily are the simple melodic lines that seem to coast on the surface, beneath that runs a rich bass line of meditation on time, on meaning, how to live a life true to oneself, and to familial love.

I love Kay's poems.  Not the least because they take me home.