From the category archives:

commentatrix

Salvage

27 June, 2011

in commentatrix,in Aotearoa


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The southwestern rattler that came through a week ago has kept us all humble and blank of mind here on the edge of town. The broken windows reported in Hei Hei (which the NZ Herald reported as “Hai Hai”, overlooking one of the last vestiges of mid-century Pākehā pronunciation) served as a reminder – if we needed it – not only of what must continue to be endured but also of what our friends in the East have been through rather more thoroughly than us.

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A year of us

20 June, 2011

in at home,commentatrix,we are family

My daughter turned one this week. What I have quipped many times remains largely true: that my experience of the past year has split, depending on who is counting, in one of two ways. The first is between the first eight weeks – after which harvestbaby no longer needed my inexpert help to burp – and the remainder, and the second is between the first eleven or twelve weeks, after which came the September earthquake, and the rest. Either way, the greater part of the time has gone quickly.

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Delta Blues

19 June, 2011

in at home,commentatrix,in Aotearoa,we are family

Just as the eye of the New Zealander finds the printed “Z” all over the world, so my local eye travels always to the west-south-west in maps of my city, that corridor of suburbs west of Hagley Park that goes Riccarton, Upper Riccarton, Sockburn, and then the exit-town cluster of Hornby, Hei Hei and Yaldhurst. Within that cartography I can pinpoint my family as though markers on a board and, for the last nine months, much of the culture and commerce of our lives.

These neighbourhoods are also one of the long strips of unliquefacted land at present, meaning that our present experience is not like that of so many of our other friends and family around the city. Our daily habits are chiefly to shake, fortify and worry, without the heartbreaking insinuation of silt into land, home and hearth.

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Little Boxes

20 May, 2011

in commentatrix,in Aotearoa,teaching & learning

There are nine boxes stacked in the garage, their contents the sum total of my ten-year work archive. They took perhaps ninety minutes to pack up, under the instruction that all our goods were to be packed for storage then shifting, then another ninety minutes across two different days to shift into my car, when the instruction changed to culling all but an under-desk set of drawers and two further drawers in the communal filing cabinets. In a large institution, inside which we are all in varying degrees of displacement, the instructions change frequently and sufficiently that the same task gets done over and over again, minor variations on the same theme. Even with the majority of buildings cleared for occupancy, there is not enough viable space, and a hierarchy of needs sees many of us moving or ready to move.

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On not grumbling

15 May, 2011

in at home,commentatrix,in Aotearoa,teaching & learning,we are family

Life is busy and heavy with both utility and novelty, but in a manner that borrows all the time and energy that was used, before February, for what seems now to have been easy leisure and creativity. The pleasures of the old life have been marginalised by the duller demands of getting through each day in a city that is itself all margins, no centre.

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