A Little Bit of Happy

We left New Zealand, a 1am Singapore Airlines flight, on this day a year ago today.

The days leading up to leaving were full of the things I love best.  Solitary early morning walks, the beach, good people, and sunshine at Christmas.

The clothes- line pictured is loaded down with swimsuits after a swim in the river at Cooks Beach.  And the little hut at the end reminds me of the much-hated longdrop toilets that occasionally featured in my  childhood memories.  This was was decommissioned and could therefore be  defined as picturesque.

It's a blue-sky 5.2 celsius day in Antwerp as I write this.  It reads colder than it feels.  I have the bedroom window open and we've already been out for a short walk.  Coats and scarves were involved but we still haven't even had many serious frosts.  There was blossom out there.  And there was that one evening of snow that didn't settle a while ago.

Gert was cautioning me, explaining that the Belgian winter kicks in in January and February.  Last winter was simply brutal and long.  December through into June, more or less.

Anyway, from the backyard of a New Zealand crib (South Island) or bach (North Island), holiday home (rest of the world) ... a little bit of simply happy.

The Jandal of Joy ...

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.

Rain, by Hone Tuwhare

I love rain.  The heavy stuff ...the kind that used pound down on the iron roof back when I lived in Te Anau.  That small town located in Fiordland, a region of mountains, massive lakes ... a national park that is 1,260,740 hectares in size.

Heavy rain on a gloomy Sunday can actually rescue a Sunday.  It's when the day crosses over from 'lifeless and dull' into cosy and delicious', somehow. 

Real rain is joy-filled.  Drizzle is drab.  The stillness of a grey day, energy-sapping.

I took rain forgranted in New Zealand.  It simply was.  I realised I missed it in Istanbul.  My apartment was 5th floor and the closest I got to hearing the glorious sound of heavy rain on the roof was when the rain angled in and hit the big useless metal air-conditioning unit attached outside my apartment.

Belgium doesn't really do torrential ... although these last two years there have been downpours that have caused cellars to flood, due mainly to the problem of a massively concreted landscape that lacks drainage capabilities.  Te Anau was built on glacial moraine.  Rainfall is massive, drainage is fast.

Genova does rain that makes my heart sing although there have been some tragedies in recent years.  I think it used to be October for the real downpours but these years seem less certain, less defined.  Change is afoot.

I was caught in a Genovese deluge one night.  Unbelievable rain ... like a huge bucket of water pouring down from the heavens and it was so unexpected, so crazy, that I ended up laughing out loud as one of the umbrella-selling guys from Pakistan offered to sell me an umbrella.  It was beyond umbrellas.

What was it about that experience that made joy well up like a bubble.  I have no idea but we were laughing like fools in the impossible rain. 

Anyway, favourite poem ever ... just about.

I can hear you making
small holes in the silence
rain

If I were deaf
the pores of my skin
would open to you
and shut

And I should know you
by the lick of you
if I were blind:

the steady drum-roll
sound you make
when the wind drops

the something
special smell of you
when the sun cakes
the ground

But if I should not
hear
smell or feel or see you


You would still
define me
disperse me
wash over me
rain

The image that follows ... I took it on the east coast of the South Island of New Zealand last year.  I'm looking down on Tautuku Bay, scene of more than a few school camps.  The rain there was flavoured by the sea and the beech forests.  Sweeter rain you couldn't know ... except in Fiordland ... or traveling up the West Coast of the South Island.

Actually, scratch that.  Rain in New Zealand's wilderness areas is usually sweet.  I was rapt to see some of these favourite places in rain when I was showing the Belgian bloke home.  There are places I just don't want to see blue skies and sunshine in ... it's like that.

Friends Around the World.

I just had a rather special experience, one that couldn't have happened without Facebook ... that social forum I'm not always convinced about.

It was my birthday on Tuesday 22 October and while we were still back in the evening of 21 October, 11 hours behind New Zealand, friends there woke up there and began wishing me a happy birthday via Facebook.

It was lovely.

Midnight my time, rolling over into the European 22nd October and up popped birthday wishes from this side of the world.  And in the morning I woke to some more beautiful wishes and emails came rolling in too.  I was feeling pretty special by now.  Bemused by the role Facebook was playing but special anyway.

And it occured to me as American friends woke that these greetings rolling in from various time zones seemed like one of those great big Mexican Waves you sometimes see in stadiums at sporting events.  The Americans arrived in the afternoon of the 22nd, some 6 hours behind Europe.

And on it went.  There were photographs sometimes ... and so many smiles were inspired by these people I love and adore, all over the world.

The photograph below ... there's a story.  I met Jason in Istanbul.  He was my colleague in both private schools we worked at there.  He became honorary family and I adored his beautiful soon-to-be wife, Beste. 

They took me home to her parents and sister ... a family to surely adore.  I loved the times I was invited home to the Asian-side of Istanbul city.  And Beste's parents insisted on meeting Gert before he was allowed to take me away to Belgium, standing in for my absent parents, making sure that Belgian bloke was okay.

But the story didn't end there.  I met Jim, Jason's old history teacher, when he came to Istanbul.  We struck up a friendship that continues to this day.  He's a much-loved facebook friend of mine too.

Then came Cloe.  Cloe was moving to Belgium.  She was an ex-girlfriend of Jason's and had worked with Jim on a political campaign.  Both Jason and Jim wrote to her and I, telling us of one another and yes, we became friends ... as you do.

There are so many stories about how I met those friends I have over on Facebook.  It's not about numbers, it's about staying in touch when you're 16,000+ kms from home, when you're a woman who moves countries, when you simply enjoy talking with people.

But imagine, there were over 100 messages that rolled in over 36 hours and the photograph below is just one of those that made my soul feel like it was full to overflowing with the pleasure that comes from knowing some really excellent people.

And yes, I did ask permission to post.  You can see why I love them.

Awake ...1.29 am in Italy

I did the crime ... an Italian espresso at 5pm in Venice.   And although it was in celebration of finding our way out of the maze that is Venice, it seems I must do the time.  It's 1.29am and I'm still awake.  Wide awake!

Today has been all about leaving Trieste, then impulsively stopping for an hour or two of wandering through Venice, and driving on afterwards, another million miles towards Milan then Lake Como.

An impulsive couple of hours in Venice that became 4 hours when we were lost for a while on our way out of that ancient city. 

And Venice ...!!!  I'm not even sure how to write up the experience.  Not yet.  But tonight, once we found our way to Bellano, Italy, there was this dinner consisting of this divine smokey cheese, provided by our lovely Air B&B hostess, and a bottle of Italian red wine we had been carrying since Budapest.

Julie made herself pasta but it felt too late for me to be eating something so serious and anyway, I was still recovering from The Most Delicious pasta dinner I had ever tasted ... the previous evening, back in Trieste.  Something to do with mushrooms, a cream sauce, and pasta at Al Barattolo.

If you find yourself in Trieste, I can only tell you that you must eat at Al Barattolo because the food is divine. The house red wine is also delicious but that's a whole other story.

That said, tonight's pasta did inspire Julie to write up a blogpost about our roadtrip so far.  But our journey is almost done and tomorrow we're off to the airport.  I'm heading back to Antwerp while she's continuing on her long journey home, with Athens as her next destination.  

I will miss that cousin of mine after almost 2 months of living and traveling together.  We do have the most excellent adventures though.  Always.  Last time we wandered all over England, wondering about speed limits and road rules as we went, occasionally phoning home to seek wise counsel on these serious matters.

We drank wine with mercenaries on that journey.  I actually went through a stage where I met 3 different groups of them socially ... by chance and yes, I found it bizarre.  We also managed to accidentally walked out of a cafe without paying, realised, then found a branch of the same chain in another town over there, confessed, felt the love ... well actually, their surprise that we were so honest.  I think they might have been stunned but anyway, they'd written it off, much to our relief.  And so much more.  It's never sedate when we get together.

Anyway ... tonight finds us in a lovely Air B&B in Bellano in Italy.  It seems to be located on one of the arms of Lake Como, not Como itself though.  Everything we've viewed online tells us it's lovely however ...spending time lost in Venice complicated our arrival here and made us some hours late, in fact, after darkness had fallen.

The light was fading fast when we began driving the 50 minutes alongside Lake Como to Bellano.  Darkness AND there were masses of tunnels, some as much as 5kms long.  And while The Homer Tunnel experience in New Zealand last year, seems to have cured me of my previously intense dislike of tunnels, I wasn't the happiest creature when I realised we had driven an extra 16kms beyond our destination exit road, due to our troublesome GPS losing its satellite connection while in those very same very long tunnels.

But arriving here, meeting Laura - our lovely B&B hostess, settling in, drinking the last bottle of red wine Julie and I will share in a while ... somehow everything took on a rosy restropective glow and voila, we were happy again.

We are fortunate, it doesn't take much to right our sometimes wonky worlds.  Well ... I could have done without the whole 'sleepless in Bellano' thing but you wouldn't have this post and nor would you have this small glimpse of a scene I spotted in Venice.