the pohutukawa polka plays on

(more dancing with an old friend)

It’s December 6th and I’m down to my last few days “in residence” on King Island. Sixty years ago on this day I woke to find a small bundle wrapped in red cellophane tucked into the shoes I had buffed to a shine the night before in the hope that “der Nikolaus” would approve of the tidiness of my bedroom (how are the mighty fallen :: he’d become entangled in the floodrobe and then trip over the dog bed if he dropped in these days). When I was a little older I realised it was actually my mother, and not a stranger entering my bedroom. This was something of a relief. Until my enlightenment (not until I was nine years old) I would retire to my bed in the evening of December 5th and wrap my blankets as tightly around myself as possible and try to breathe very very quietly so as to pretend I wasn’t really there at all. Inevitably I would fall asleep anyway and given I have been a noisy sleeper since I was a baby my presence would have been noted anyway. Fortunately the bearded chap in red robes is a myth, though why it took me so long to work out that “he” and my mother used exactly the same cellophane wrapping (and the gingerbread biscuits inside the wrapping were identical to the ones we had cut out together) is a mystery. Though perhaps not, when I think back to my childhood I experienced much of it in a dreamy kind of fog.

The only bundles here this morning were those I had wrapped myself.

The last one is cooling in the rice cooker as I type. It’s a piece of silk sandwiched between two satisfyingly solid pieces of steel that I found while walking by the coast last night. They are slightly curved and spoon into each other perfectly. I’m going to leave them with a sculptor friend here when I depart, rather than simply abandon them. I’m sure they will put them to good use.