With you I feel my blood changing
- Hera Lindsay Bird
I wasn’t in the best of moods when she arrived. It required an early start to get to the international arrivals hall on time, made even earlier by insomnia. I had woken up at 1am and that had been that, sleep spooked away by the deadline of the 4.45am alarm and too occupied by embarrassing flashes of the event I had been at the night before. A lot of us are rusty at big events. Chit chat and ceremonial proceedings can be uncanny - pleasant likenesses of a former life we took for granted which, upon resumption, never quite returned to normal status. I make it sound like a trauma, but it’s maybe more to do with the uneasy feeling - acknowledged or not - that we are living inside an attempt to hide a plague.
Surprised to find the usual ease of our companionship ruffled by the occasion, my mum and I shifted from foot to foot as we waited for my sister to pass the test of the biosecurity sniffer beagle and glide out the frosted arrival doors. We’d brought the same giant sign from four years prior, carefully rolled and stored away in an attic. Welcome home Martha. We argued about when to unfurl it and how best to optimise visibility while minimising the potential to obstruct the sightlines of our sleepy peers awaiting their own reunions. Even at the start of 2022 this hall had been redundant. Homecoming passengers like me were funnelled out a side door and bundled onto quarantine coaches, no welcoming committees allowed except for hazmatted health workers. In the packed hall mum and I debated whether our sign was even relevant for our returnee. Was New Zealand still her home? I gave a premature yelp for a sister who was not my sister but a girl of similar height and hairstyle, in a trench coat. The real sister later said, I would never wear a trench coat.
My sister saw the sign and I saw her and (of course you would never wear a trench coat) she was just the same and I was just the same (wearing a trench coat) and, though we hadn’t been together since all of this mess started, being back together was not a rusty thing, and not a chit chat thing or a ceremonial thing, but maybe just a normal thing, with the ability to feel normal with each other. The first sight of her face provided more vibrating peace than any therapy or drug. There could be no anxiety with her around. Already the night’s intrusive social replays seemed absurd, impossible for someone like me, whose confidence was renewed by the confident materialisation of my sister. Our first spangled conversation on the walk from the airport terminal to the carpark was enough to re-compose my brain, each neurotransmitter assured its right place in the symphony, diminuendo just as welcome as crescendo, yet capable of more peaks than before.
Being together generated a propulsive power, ideas begetting ideas, laughter affirming laughter. Of course, of course, of course! All with the unspoken caveat that none of these ideas need manifest themselves anytime soon, life being less a research and development lab and more a merry-go-round of observation and theory, theory and observation, spinning too fast and understanding not guaranteed enough to interject too many interventions. Mum in on it too, or maybe she was just watching us. We have always performed well for an audience. Yes and—! This was us, and this was normal. I grieved for her departure inside the happiness of her presence. Moving countries ruins your life. But it has also been her making — a whole life she could encase in a snowglobe and know to be a beautiful scene — so I can’t resent it.
On Boxing Day we went with our mum and uncle for a swim at the rocky beach with the little memorial to our grandparents, their parents. The cove has a steep drop-off and it was high tide when we reached the shore. We made jerky progressions across the sharp stones with our soft feet. Our mum and uncle waded in then spun 180 degrees to break the water with their backs, as always. Mum challenged us to swim out to the buoys and I joked about not wanting to swim too far for fear of stingrays. But the joke was a summoning. A large black shape appeared in my periphery then slid between the shore and me, wings rippling in the refracted green. Another big yelp. I lunged toward our mum and clung to her back. Martha did the same. Strong mum treaded water with two big babies until the great ray had passed and we could return to shore.
Fear in the presence of safety was was more like play. It was fun to be a big baby again, for a moment. It was everything to be a sister again, for a month. December brought not only new stories and ideas, but extended experiential capacities, new (or old, normal) ways of experiencing the world after such an invisible kind of year (or three), and a restored perception of life as something profoundly good, or at least good-stupid. I remembered being a new teacher and wanting so badly for my students to feel the goodness of their own silliness and brightness, instead of the version of themselves distorted by an oppressive school or difficult time in life. The extent to which human life has been devalued in these pandemic years has had a distorting effect on our senses of ourselves and our relationships. Spending time with my sister is a huge clue in the treasure hunt to feeling normal.
Christmas is not a normal time but a borrowed time designed for feasting and lighting up the darkest rooms of the longest nights of the year. It’s a suspension of work and toil, and a time for mood boosts of rich food when all about is grey and forbidding. New Zealand Christmas is doubly not normal thanks to the jamming of these winter survival rituals on top of an existing southern lifeworld. The imposed calendar year is snapping closed just when the skies are most open. Summer feels like a foolish time to be making resolutions. There’s so much harsh light that the sun immediately shows up the cracks in our reckless pledges. We need time to reflect and feel around in the damp grave of winter before punching out for spring. We need time to be tiny wet nothings, sliding through time, remembering and hoping.
That’s why Matariki was so good this year. 2022 saw the first down-tools public holiday of this era, held for the ancient mid-winter new year festival of the stars of the south. It made sense for this place. Creepy for the Crown to fashion itself as legislative arbiter of the Indigenous calendar that it had tried to erase, but in that dark time of year most turned away from the Crown — so violent, yet such a side-show in the long past and future of this place — and toward the fires and feasts of offering. But today it is high summer and tomorrow will be 2023. A man walks past our house playing a guitar on his way to the village. A tūī hears him coming and alights from the sturdy flax flower that she has been exploring. Propulsive little legs think first, then wings take over. Her take-off leaves the flower swaying long after the bird has gone — almost a metronome to keep time before the next visit. Welcome home Martha. I will treasure this December and its ecstatic resuscitation.
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Thank you for reading this survival ritual of a newsletter. I need small containers in my life, and this is a glad one. It is a steady place of address at the end of each month, no matter where I live. Your support means the world and I’m wishing you good cover-of-darkness contemplations and the best bright graspable things.
Until next month,
H x
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P.s. The summer issue of Metro Magazine is out now, with a Best Books of 2022 section (including some of my picks), edited by Tendai Mutambu. New isn’t always best, but there were so many goodies this year: The Age of Goodbyes by Li Zi Shu, Meat Lovers by Rebecca Hawkes, A Great Hope by Jessica Stanley, The Invisible Kingdom by Megan O’Rourke.
"She's such a talent," says my husband, as I crow exclamations of delight while reading this latest missive. Hannah, this is the finest piece of writing I have read, anywhere, in as long as I can remember. Thankyou, hallelu for your nourishing sister-time, and the best of new years to you 🧡
What a delightful commentary. It feels so familiar and helps me understand why Christmas seemed so complicated this year. So many layers - connection, covid effects and south-north calendars. Thank you. 👏