It’s been a busy week. In the lead-up to Easter I needed to refresh and shuffle the artwork at the 100k North @ Marmalades gallery. There’s always loads of tourists at this time, hence potential for sales. We also had an enjoyable dinner party with friends and I did some singing and catch-up with the Wild Chai girls. Woven throughout these activities – and through work, too – have been many conversations about our departure. Word is starting to get around, so every phone call and each person I run into at the supermarket, leads off with “I hear you two are moving overseas”. Then it’s twenty questions time.
I’m not complaining though. This whole venture has acquired a sense of pre-holiday anticipation. Each time I tell the story of our most recent trip or the latest little step we took, it’s just heightening that excitement. I’m really, really looking forward to being there and no longer being here.
In the midst of all this activity I also spent a day with my parents, then had to return for a while the next day because I left my laptop behind. We live about 90 minutes’ drive from their very suburban home and don’t actually see each other all that often. Dad sends emails when he wants something or when there’s a major family event. Mum’s not quite up to emailing yet, but it might happen now that I’ve got her set up with a desktop computer. The parents are outwardly quite supportive of us heading to NZ – Dad has very positive memories of living and working over there for a time in the late 50′s. I wonder, though, whether they’re dreading me being so far away. They’re in their seventies now and quite mobile, but they’re both at the stage where age is starting to catch up with them. Mum’s back is going to give out at some stage; she’ll probably become wheelchair bound. Dad, meanwhile, tends to drive Mum to distraction with his dodgy memory. We had good news this week when we learned that he doesn’t have dementia of any kind … although the joy of that news was leavened somewhat by the discovery that he had had a stroke sometime in the past, and that it would most likely be responsible for his memory and perhaps some of the behaviours around that.
There are certainly signs that Mum and Dad are thinking about some of the implications of me leaving. During my visit we got to talking about wills, solicitors, preference for cremation over burial, that kind of thing. A jolly conversation, that. I’m co-executor of their wills, and they asked whether I still believe I’ll be able to carry out those duties when I’m living in NZ. “Sure,” I said, “I would expect I’d come back for a week or two at a time to deal with things.” The subtext to all this was of course the question of whether I’ll ever come and visit them after we leave. The answer is yes, I’ll come back and see people from time to time, maybe one or two trips a year. I don’t want to lose touch with everyone.
As for the signs of movement that gave this post its title … there were two things this week that buoyed my hopes. The first was that my beloved completed her awesome CV (it’s her experience and skills that are awesome, not just the wordsmithing of the CV) and then lodged her first NZ job application. That felt like a big deal, a really substantial step toward departure. The second thing was that I received a phone call from a gallery in Whataroa that we visited a couple of weeks ago. We’d just been driving through town, stopped at the gallery and were impressed by the quality of the work. Talking to the woman behind the counter we learned that she was thinking about putting together a very simple website. We got her email address and were able to send her the easy steps to creating a site. Since then she and the owner had apparently been thinking about what a website might do for them … and so they called and asked me to put together a proposal for a fully-fledged e-commerce site. Very exciting. There’s a big smile on my face from having been asked.
Imagine how unbearably jolly I’ll be if we actually win the project.