Seamless

Ye maun make me a fine Holland sark,
Without ony stitching or needle wark,
And ye maun wash it in yonder well,
Where the dew never wat, nor the rain ever fell.

‘The Elfin Knight’

 

The emperor asked the nation-teacher, ‘What should I do after you die?’

‘Build a seamless monument for me,’ he replied.

Blue Cliff Record, case 18

Hundreds of thousands of hectares of country burn on the mainland, in conditions where, in extremity, flames splash and run and form tornadoes, borrowing the properties of other elements. Crown fires explode, treetop to treetop in the forests. Hay bales burn in farm paddocks – surreal installations. Here on the island, we’re still protected, for now, by the spreading skirts of the slowed polar vortex, with the Southern Ocean as a moderator between us and the Antarctic. In this we’re unlike far northern latitudes, where cold gathers strength as it passes over land, and this month has brought ice storms far south into the interior of the US. In cities there, in the midst of the cold, whole neighbourhoods are out on the streets defying Federal forces.

Here, the luxuriant midsummer flowering of garden perennials begins to give way to seedheads. In the raised garden bed outside my window, greenfinches, beautiful bullies of smaller birds, eat the seeds of insect-attracting plants we sowed there. At night, a mother pademelon and her three-quarters grown young nibble weeds that overflow the edges of the bed; every now and then the youngster makes a nostalgic bid to get into the pouch, even though there’s only room for its head and shoulders. Perhaps it still gets a mouthful of milk.

Besides the perennials, other things are late to bloom – the pōhutukawa is still in bud and the lilies flower a month or more after Christmas. Some, like the grevilleas, flower all year, and because they do, once again we hesitate to cut them down, even though they’re a fire risk. When we planted them, they were thought to be fire retardant, but experience in the newly catastrophic fire environment of the mainland has proven otherwise. Among their branches, honeyeaters chase and feed and nest. There’s a hierarchy, with the small but aggressive new hollands tolerating little wattlebirds (which despite their name are chunky and a lot bigger than the new hollands) but seeing off everyone else. Every now and then I get a glimpse of a yellow-throat or a spinebill snatching a mouthful of nectar before the new hollands descend.

A second hatching of pardalote chicks have fledged and gone; a fledgeling hawk goes begging from tree to tree. In the reeds around the dam, the grebes on their floating nest have brought out four chicks like preternaturally buoyant dandelion clocks that somehow hold together through the first weeks despite the swamp hawk that haunts the margins of the water. The ducks have not been so lucky – only four ducklings from the usual hatching of a dozen or so.

The bluetongue lizard that lives in the polytunnel has shed its skin and left it on a garden bed, whole and inside-out, legs still attached. Its new scales gleam, their pattern of dark olive and straw-coloured bands and chequers magnificent. The day after T finds the cast, I see that the lizard still has pieces of old skin around its ears, where I know it has an infestation of ticks. I catch it and pull the yellow rags from its head as it hisses and wriggles and shits, biting, and I tweezer out the ticks – five in one ear and four in the other – the whole canal full on both sides. Afterwards it rushes off under the growing potato stalks and we don’t see it for a day. I wonder if it’s gone for good, but then it’s there again in its usual spots, following the sun. It accepts a strawberry from T but beetles off when it sees me, though not far, and eventually lets me feed it pieces of ripe plum.

Torrential rain sweeps through areas of the mainland that were on fire at the start of the month, bringing flash flooding to coastal towns, dragging summer campers’ tents and caravans and cars out to sea. Later, fires again sweep through these places that burned then flooded. In the north island of Aotearoa New Zealand, rivers also overflow their banks, flooding towns and taking out roads, saturating soils comprising metres of volcanic ash so that hillsides collapse. At a beach where I walked and swam in the surf and played in rock pools all my childhood, a camping ground is buried and people are killed.

A couple of nights after the new moon, a brilliant aurora lights the whole sky from dusk till dawn. It ripples and shifts like water in the wind, or like standing hay, sky and earth mirroring each other. People text back and forth to make sure no one misses it – all over the island and far north onto the mainland, people are outside, looking upwards. We lie in the paddock and let the light wash through us while the cows sleep or chew cud nearby, grunting softly to themselves.

Raspberries, blueberries, boysenberries, cherries. Zucchinis to fry and bake and give away. First green beans, first potatoes, first cucumbers and tomatoes. The hens are still laying and the basil is growing so I make pasta and pesto, and we eat it with passata. Blackbirds are still singing, cuckoos still calling – food to raise chicks remains abundant; I’ve known years when the nesting songs were over by the solstice. A goldfinch flies twittering from its nest on a macrocarpa branch overhanging the shed where I keep the car. Under the blackwoods behind the house, the fresh eggshell of a hatched bronzewing pigeon.

We make our way through summer in the shelter of disturbance, in the once-only savour of this moment; flower passes to seed, seed to the ground or the belly of a finch, interwoven and not interwoven; we find our way in the bright and dark, seamless.

References
Blue Cliff Record. Trans. Joan Sutherland and John Tarrant. Pacific Zen Institute.
Peter Buchan. Ancient Ballads and Songs of the North of Scotland. Vol. 2., 1828.