Tuesday, March 28, 2006

A Recipe for Dreaming

Distance is relative ...
There was a time when I thought nothing of driving 60 kilometres just to reach a favoured spot next to a river or lake, or to walk on a beach. Back in New Zealand I spent varying amounts of time living in four very different regions ... hills or mountains were usually involved in the backdrop of my South Island life, and then there was the water option ... lake, river or ocean.I never met anyone else with a need to slip away from an ordinary everyday kind of life, so I mostly wandered alone with my dog after everyone was gone for the day. My fictional scribblings were about women who rowed into the silence at the centre of lakes and dreamed of places like Africa, or of a woman who lived with a dog by a lake in the mountains. New Zealand encourages this kind of dreaming ...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You have no idea how homesick that photograph of the road towards the mountains makes me. I must have driven hundreds of times from Christchurch to Arthurs Pass and the view on the way towards Porters Pass always looked like that. And the snow... and the climbing and skiing... thank you. I wrote about it in the memoir - with tears in my eyes.

Di Mackey said...

In one way I have no idea how homesick the photograph made, you another way I suspect I have every idea ...