On Monday

On Monday there was snow.

My first memory of snow is at Ruapehu. I was still quite little - it may have been before I started school, though I'm not sure. It was me and my brothers and some of my cousins, and we were all wearing jumpers and woollen hats. My cousin threw a snowball at me. I was pretty upset. I think I cried. And he made another snowball and gave it to me, and told me to throw it at him.

It didn't really snow at home, growing up, not in the sunny (dry, droughty, sunburny) Hawke's Bay with an apostrophe because I'm not lazy with my apostrophes (one should not be lazy with such treasures of the art of language). I do remember it snowing once, and I walked with my brothers up the hill in my shorts, and came home with bright red thighs that could hardly feel anything.

On Monday it snowed unexpectedly. Even our scientifically-guided ever-accurate meteorologists did not predict it. I got up - my last morning for a little while in the place I grew up - and informed my mother it was snowing. It fell light at first, rather unimpressive. Snow doesn't really impress me. When it snowed in Wellington I was unimpressed. "Pah," I said, "this snow is a pale novelty for the small minded," and returned to my important volumes by Virgil and Homer. The hail storm the following day, I informed everyone who would listen, was by far more impressive than the pathetic drifts of powdered ice that floated weakly from the sky in a last ditch attempt to exist.

My cows in the snow.

But on Monday everything seemed to go black and white, which was oddly unsettling. It fell harder and lighter - how is that possible? You never get that with rain. It was little bits of cloud flaking off. It settled in a thick layer on the turkeys that were too stupid to move. My favourite cow licked some off the macrocarpas. 

But the best part was shortly after the snow stopped and the sun came out. There were colours again, even before the snow began to melt - which happened quickly. The snow made everything so bright. It just threw the sunlight everywhere.

Look at those trees - the big climbing-tree sycamore to the left, the eucalypt to the right, and a tree turning autumn in the middle. Across the road behind them, the poplars my grandfather planted just from cuttings, all losing their leaves now. And the thick springy hedge that I trim with blunting clippers and climbed on once, only to put my hand on a small paper wasp nest and get stung repetitively on my ring finger. It will be a while before I see them again, these trees, and that big hill covered in rocks and seashells from thousands of years ago.

This Saturday just gone, with the help of my father, two brothers, my boyfriend, and a sister-in-law, I packed up my belongings into a yellow trailer originally bought to transport expensive racing bicycles. I was forced to sit between driver and passenger as we dropped people off, and then it was just me and Dad and the middle sibling driving up to Home. I balanced on the edge of sleep but never made it down. I hadn't been to sleep before midnight for a week, which is a Serious Matter for me these days. I've been missing sleep. I've been thinking too much, and worrying, and wondering what the heck I'm doing even though I know. When we got to the farm, in the dark, it was raining. We parked the trailer underneath the new hay shed made for concerts and weddings.

And eventually I went to bed in the house I grew up in, and it was so very nice to go to sleep there.

There are less than six days until we leave the country.

When I'm in Singapore, I'm going to look for a new phone that has a better camera that will better focus on snowy landscapes in the sun.

We are also going to go to the zoo. Apparently there are no fences, only pits. I hope the pits between me and monkeys are very very wide and deep and filled with sharks that love monkeyflesh.