Wave and blue – by Beth Kearney
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY
On the side of a road, beneath a crown of trees, the woman in the photograph is waving. She’s an old woman, but strong and upright, her long legs supporting a proud stance. Her arm is high in the air, higher than most old ladies tend to raise their arms, and she smiles at the camera. But her eyes appear unfocused, directed somewhere above the frame of the image. It’s as though she can’t see the person taking the photo, but it’s clear that she feels warmly towards them. Her smile seems to say, ‘I’ll see you next time, and it won’t be long. In the meantime, take care’.
*
In January 2015, I took the InterCity bus from Gisborne to Auckland – from a quiet town on the east coast of New Zealand all the way up north. I remember my reflection in the glass blending with the verdant scene outside the bus, the leafy growth lulling me into reflection.
During that Kiwi summer, like the few that came before, I had begun to sense a shift. Leaving my mum’s hometown felt like the very last of something. I had been an adult for a few years already. I was responsible, independent, serious. Paying rent and having a balanced diet were now a matter of course. For some reason though, while leaving the vineyard-strewn coastal valley that Mum grew up in, departure felt like a valediction to the last moments of my childhood. I still experienced these trips as carefree holidays camping on the beach, but something was shifting.
The weeks in Gisborne were a kind of parenthesis from real life. Stripped of my routine in Australia, I felt flung into a different kind of familiar. My wise mum turned into a bouncing, giggling, fun-loving girl, keen only to hang out with her sisters and cousins. She was still my mum, but sometimes I felt as though I was with her adolescent self, with whom I wanted to be mates. Eating the last piece of food on the table and giggling at her own cheek. Scooping spoonfuls of Maltexo barley malt syrup from the tin. Swinging between her cousins on a three-seater, wine in hand, talking excitedly about I don’t know what. I watched her laughing uncontrollably, her shoulders shrugging fiercely, her eyes disappearing as they scrunched up. My cousin and I embodied big sisters to our younger cousins, our responsibleness contrasting with our mums’ juvenile spirits. Amidst all this, there was my grandmother holding the whole thing together.
Meandering through the gorge on the InterCity – earphones in, eyes directed to the landscape, gazing at the textures of fields and foliage – I was probably mulling over the beachy summer now swooshing behind me. We’d slapped together sandwiches for each other, made Christmas trees from driftwood, sat in rock pools until our fingers were like prunes. Everyone jumped from the highest rock into the surf except for me. We lay in our sleeping bags on the beach, and this is how we greeted the New Year. These images blended with one of my grandmother: her strong stance, her fluffy grey curls around her forehead, her pointy nose, her slender figure, her whole self etched into my mind as she waved goodbye. I think she was wearing blue. Blue like the coast, or the deep hue of a flower embroidered on her best tablecloth.
What I didn’t know on the bus that day was that my grandmother was somewhere between 12 and 24 hours from her death. Did she know that the day of my departure was also the day of hers?
I wonder this because, on that holiday, she appeared to me more distant and resigned than I had known her to be. I would ask her ‘how are you?’ and ‘what do you think you’ll do today?’ She would tell me that she didn’t really do much these days. Not true. She was incredibly busy all the time, with games of bridge, with her garden, with her grandchildren, with her long and fast-paced walks. She delivered Meals on Wheels and planned a multi-day tramping trip through the North Island’s Waioeka Reserve. ‘I don’t do very much these days,’ she said. Perhaps the home felt empty without the booming voice of my grandfather, the towering figure that made the bamboo in the floorboards creak like home, like nostalgia. Were her words a symptom of her near departure? Her unconscious withdrawal from the business of matriarchy, her role for so many decades?
In the photograph, she smiles warmly, looks towards the tinted windows of the bus. She looks at me as I look at her by the side of the road. The trees above frame the whole thing quite neatly. I recently went looking for this photograph. I asked my mum, my aunties. I trawled the digital archives, and most thoroughly our shared family Facebook group – through the hundreds of images we share when there are quakes and floods, birthdays and anniversaries, get-togethers on whatever side of the Tasman family happened to be. I described the image to my family members. They didn’t recognise it.
What happens to the mind when we look at something we love? How do our feelings infect our brain chemistry, our ability not just to see, but to hold on to the scene in front of us? When I think about the past, I struggle to conjure up a linear thread. The train of life doesn’t appear to move from A to Z, from beginning to end. All I can grasp are snapshots: punctuated fractions of time, stills bloated with feeling. These moments are full, and they spill over to obscure the banality of other times. When I think back to the summer of 2015, all I see are snaps of sand, rockpools, driftwood, Maltexo, and my grandmother waving goodbye. To hold these images in my mind is to stretch the seconds, expand those fractions of time as long as they go.
But I couldn’t find the photograph.
The truth is, when the InterCity was pulling out of Gisborne, I looked out the window to my grandmother and snapped my eyes shut like the lens of a camera. I stole the moment and stored it in the depths of my brain. And it was lucky I did, because I never saw her arm in motion above her head again, her wave, her goodbye. The next time I saw my grandmother, she was as cool as Gisborne’s coastal breeze, her skin like rubber beneath my fingers. The photograph wasn’t – isn’t – a photograph at all.
Why did I believe it was a photograph? I guess it allowed me to suspend disbelief. If the photograph existed, then everything about that summer would be distilled into a 4 cm x 6 cm rectangle. Distilled, but also fossilised. If the photograph existed, it could be preserved, like a document sitting in a box, slotted in an album, perched on a mantelpiece, or tucked in a wallet. If the photograph existed, my grandmother would always be stilled in motion, always and forever farewelling me. She would continue to look at me as she did – with recognition, acceptance, protection, and a love that seemed absolute. And to be looked at like that would mean, surely, that I would remain that person, and that a part of me – of us – would stay in those summers, in those ways.
Those summers. When my cousin and I pretended that we weren’t only children, when our younger cousins still enjoyed our unskilled storytelling, when they could still sleep while we drank wine and played cards with our Auntie in her van. Those summers. Almost always covered in sand, stewing rhubarb from the garden, walking two blocks to the ice-cream store, not really worrying about sun damage.
Today I look at my hands, typing at this keyboard. The nails are stubby, the fingers are long, the wrist is tiny, and a carpal bone protrudes. Olive skin with a sprinkling of brown freckles. These hands are familiar and foreign to me, because they’re mine and because they actually belong to my mother and to her mother. Perhaps photographs and memories are not the only things that we carry with us from the past. Perhaps I am the past. Perhaps I can remain the person that I was while I become the person that I will be. Perhaps goodbye doesn’t exist. Perhaps one day I’ll be the woman in blue. ▼
Image: Sian Nelson - Unsplash
If you liked this piece, please share it. And please consider donating or subscribing so that we can keep supporting writers and artists.