It's Tuesday। Not usually my day off but Ciara & Youjae are having a family day with baby, so I take the opportunity and head for the country. Avoiding the main highway I trace a back mountain road (we call them hill roads) to the west coast beaches north of Wellington. I stop for a few moments at the roads highest point, 205 meters above the small township of Paekakariki, overlooking Kapiti Island just a few miles off-shore: the winter sun, filtered by high cumulus cloud casts a steely gray huge across the Tasman Sea, making its calm shiny waters mysterious and murky looking.
To my left I can clearly see the rugged outline of the the South Island and to my right, gray sanded west coast beaches stretch endlessly before me until they vanished into the distant nothingness of the horizon। Just looking down from the sheer cliff beneath my feet to the rocky coast immediately below gives me an uneasy churning deep in my stomach. It's been several years since I came this way and as I have forgotten this view more times than I care to remember, so this time I pause a little longer - to enjoy it.
What I don't know at this time is that in an hour or so, my dear aunt, Bea, will tell me of her increasing blindness, and her need to move to more supervised accommodation as her world closes daily around her.
A stark and sudden contrast to the endless vistas I enjoyed from the top of the Paekakariki hill road just a few minutes earlier. I will not forget it now.
He that is strucken blind cannot forget
The precious treasure of his eyesight lost.
- William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
Romeo (1.1.162)
A letter to my unanswered question
7 years ago
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment