Where did the last year go?

I can’t believe it’s been so long.

I’ve missed writing and using this site. Seduced I guess by the immediacy of Facebook and Instagram. This is much more my own space. Sometimes the others are just a cacophony of sound and sadly have many loud discordant voices. so I’ve crept away and left the noise for a while.

There is always the ocean, the tide rubbing away yesterday’s footprints. It’s a five minute drive from the house. I like to observe it from the beach. Occasionally I’ll dip my body into the cold waters but I’ve always been a bit afraid of disappearing under the waves. A childhood memory of being caught in a rip and no one noticing. After what seemed like forever and being dragged out of my depth it let me go and I could swim sideways and then back to the beach.

I splashed with a dolphin family here more than a decade ago with my children. They swam joyously close to our bare legs and twisted sideways to observe us watching them.

The sea marks my time here in New Zealand. The tidal clock ticks away daily, yearly, for more than two decades. I thought it would be a temporary visit, five year plan. That I would return to my country of birth and my brothers and sisters. Our parents left the earth and we were not there. My elderly mother gasping a few words down a telephone line before dying a week later. My parents came out to visit us on their first long haul flight of their lives in their seventies. They loved New Zealand and even at ninety my mother was contemplating another trip.

But it is home here. Familiar. My children are grown and living their lives as we must live ours, measured by the tides, the seasons and if we are fortunate then a few more years.

Of course this has always been a blog about woolly pursuit and despite the strangeness and global mayhem of 2020 there still is weaving, spinning and dyeing happening. A shed full of fleece waiting to be spun. So I’ll be adding more of my craft work here now I’ve rediscovered my blog again.