On Winter's Term

There is such a simple joy in walking the children to school.  It feels so quaint and familiar.  Before the days of charter schools and fear-based indoor living, we all felt like we grew up in a neighborhood.  We played with, went to school with and were on teams with the kids in the houses around us.  While it could be stifling, it also gave us a secondary family--for better or worse, you had to figure out how to work things out with these ubiquitous mates.  I'm not sure if that model is superior to the present, more isolated model, but we definitely feel some nostalgia about it all.  That is what we pass on our walk to school---->

After living in one kind of paradise, isolated up in the wild of the Rocky Mountains, Mike and I felt like we needed to be in a 'normal' neighborhood.  I loved the folks around us in NM, but there were not really any kids without a significant drive, no way to learn how to ride a bike or a skateboard, hard to kick a ball without it rolling away down the mountain.  We were basically the young folk on the road.  So now, perhaps over-correcting, we have moved to a little sea-side burgh, where the kids can walk/bike/scooter or catch a little bus to and from school.  They play on soccer teams with the same kids that are in their classes.  At their first games, heaps of parents came up and introduced themselves because they knew we were new and that we needed some guidance and help.  There were offers of rides and playdates.  The house we have rented is on a small flat block with 3 cul-de-sacs and, I've heard, 23 other children.  We counted 6 trampolines.  There are open grass lots that a retired guy on the road maintains and mows so that the kids can play on them.  There are sidewalks.  We have a garage.  We can see into other houses' windows.  I think it's going to be great...I'm actually looking forward to the day when I want more privacy for living in a fishbowl.  

Even though that all sounds like suburbia, the town is surrounded by estuary, sea and New Zealand bush.  The community school is set between the water and the trees, both an integrated part of the curriculum.  The boys are all settling in with such ease and resilience, the way children can.  Thank. God.  I'm so enchanted with the littlest things at the school:  the shells set into the cement walkway, the green sports field (not dry brown dirt), the bush classroom.  The first day of the winter term, when we joined the school, there was a welcoming ceremony called a Powhiri (pronounced PO-feary with a rolled 'r').  It is a Maori tradition:  the new people to be welcomed walk in together to the singing of an elder Maori woman--women in front, children in the middle, and men in the back.  You all enter together, sit and a Maori elder welcomes everyone.  This involves acknowledging the past, people who have passed before you and the history of the place.  More singing amongst the welcome-ers.  Others speak.  Then the men of the incoming are invited to speak a bit about their family, their history and give thanks for the welcoming in.   The new folk sing a song.  Then you move along in a reception line and either shake hands, do a european cheek kiss or a Hongi (Maori touching of foreheads and noses to share air).  Then, you are in.  It. Was. Awesome.

The boys went off after that to join their new classes.  Fionn is in Year 2 with Mrs. Tuahaka.  She is a bad-ass middle-age-ish woman descended many generations from the second signer of the Treaty of Waitangi (the founding document of NZ).  She has a sassy asymmetric haircut with streaks of magenta and wears adorable skirts with candy apple red patent leather Doc Martins.  She calls all of the children "lovey" (pronounced LAH-vee) and has incredible classroom control.  At our parent-teacher conference the second week of school she had it all so together, and had each child working at exactly where they were supposed to be working depending on their skill.  It was so reassuring.  

Seamus trotted off with his Year 4 mates in Mr. Ford's class.  His teacher is an energetic 30-ish year old jock and new father.  He loves Ngunguru, grew up here, traveled the world, worked in Auckland, and came back here to buy his grandmother's home and have his family.  He and his wife have an 8 month-old baby.  Cully, now wanting to be called by his full Cuchulainn, blended into the Year 7 class with Mrs. Taylor.  She's a Kiwi, mom, and seems to really like peri-adolescents.  Bless her heart.  Her younger son, Reef, is one of Fionn's new mates.  

The kids are picking up cute things, like calling trash "rubbish."  They run barefoot at school.  They can walk down the road to the local dairy to pick up a snack or some milk and check the "letterbox."  The kids in their school are Kiwi, Canadian, Indian, Irish, Scottish, Brittish, Maori, Chinese....  A woman on our new block, though, is American.  She was born--can't believe it--in Gallup, NM and is an alumni of UNM.  And we can appreciate the interesting parallels between the dry desert and the green sub-tropics:  wild and beautiful land, long-indigenous and displaced peoples.  

Their first weeks, all of the boys had projects around the Commonwealth Games and the countries of the Commonwealth.  Cully made a powerpoint presentation about Gibraltar and Seamus on Scottland.  Fionn colored in pages of books on sports like netball, lawn bowling and field hockey.  I know we are in our honeymoon with NZ, and all the things we lacked before seem so incredible now.  Such a major shift.  Someday things won't be so novel or magical.  Someday.  But we'll all just enjoy not taking anything for granted for the moment.  And now that we have a school and a neighborhood, jobs and schedules, we'll just settle into living in this present.  And walking to school.