Lu
Image credit: Emma Te Rina Smith
‘It’s funny, isn’t it?’ She smiled.
‘The way things used to be. Before everything changed.’
She looked over at me. She had wide blue eyes and twice as many freckles on her face as she was years old. Ten years old, going on 11. We lay in that knee-high grass for what felt like minutes, but it was hours.
We guessed what we could make out in the passing skies. I saw a crocodile and a monkey, but Lu said she could see Hermione from Harry Potter. She always was that bit taller, that bit older, and that bit brighter than me.
It must have been October that afternoon. The sun danced through the kauri leaves, the air sweet with the scent of kōwhai. Her hair draped to her waist, the colour of golden sand, the sand we danced on the west coast with Mum and Dad on the weekends.
“Race ya to the bottom field!” And like a tia, she shot ahead. Lu won, of course. Lu always won, but I suppose that’s what big sisters do.
The whenua and the ngahere was our playground, alone in a wonderland, the birds, the bugs and trees. No other tamariki to be seen. It was the school holidays, and the empty fields made it a place to call home.
This one afternoon, Mum was at mahi, and Dad was cutting large colourful shapes out of cardboard for his next term classroom. We collapsed laughing onto a pile of daisies and dandelions, and now and again, Dad would stop to strum his guitar. The dreamy sounds of the chords and his soulful humming floated upon the breeze.
I glance at my tuakana. Lu’s telling another story. Lots of big words I never understand. She’s friends with older kids, cooler, tougher, and braver than me. My big sister is smart.
Whakamahara – I remember.
I’m blowing out my dandelion, so very, very slowly. As slow as I can. I am trying to make as many wishes as possible.
But now that I look back – I wonder how I could have wished for anything more.
The colours around us are bright but almost fading, hazed, like an old Kodak print of film Gran has in her whānau books. It’s like looking through a kaleidoscope, different colours blending, memories twisting and turning.
These days were nostalgic, bittersweet, a can of coca-cola, not yet gone flat.
Lu had a great laugh; it shook the whenua we lay on. She was tough too and reminded me with her pipi muscles and the bee stings she gave me on my thin arms. I was softer than Lu. I cried more, I whined more, and I had more tantrums.
Frequently she would remind me I was a tangiweto. But I knew this big sister of mine loved me and that she would stomp on anyone who dared pick on me. She loved me all right, she reminded me, once a year, on my birthday. The best present of them all.
We were a strange pair, I suppose. Leaves and weeds in our hair, laying in the grass, squinting up at the sun. Opposites in many ways, but despite our differences, somehow it worked. The ngahere, the moana were kākāriki, a deep emerald green. These fields were our playground.
And we had time. So, we ran, sang, climbed, jumped and laughed.
And at night, piled high with blankets, we fell deep asleep to the sounds of stories, ready to wake up to the waiata of the manu.
Tomorrow, we begin again. We run faster, chasing a golden childhood haze, drifting onwards in the space between reality and our dreams.
