The Braided River by Diane Comer

Author:Diane Comer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Otago University Press
Published: 2017-03-11T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

The Second Cup of Tea – On Belonging

‘Where you are understood, you are at home.’

—JOHN O’DONOHUE, Anam Ċara

The poppies are deep pink with lavender centres, Papaver somniferum, opium poppies, gorgeous transient flowers waving on silvery-green foliage. A friend in the United States gave me the seeds when I admired these tall poppies in her garden. The original seeds came from her Danish mother-in-law, who had brought them from the old country. I was thrilled the first year they flowered in my American garden, their beautiful pink petals and green leaves harmonised with everything in bloom – the orange and yellow calendula, the English roses, the purple, mauve and white cosmos, the deep indigo delphinium, the sky-blue flax. They made me so happy, those pink poppies, and even though they were short-lived, I knew they would come back season after season, seeding themselves all over the terraced garden. So prolific were they, I gathered dozens of seed heads that autumn and let the stalks dry in several vases around the house. Inside the pods, thousands of seeds rattled like tiny rain as they shook dry.

And then we moved from the United States to New Zealand in January of 2007. Our garden lay under a foot of snow. Two men came and packed everything up, including the dry poppy stalks – accidental stowaways in their Swedish crystal vases. The seeds came unaware, as seeds often do, migrating by whatever means, from place to place. When the shipping container arrived we unloaded it, wading through the chaos and unpacking endless boxes for what felt like a month. I still cannot fathom how Matt, the lead packer, managed to pack the entire kitchen in a day when it took me a week to put it away.

One afternoon in late February, antipodean August, the sunlight so sparkling it looked rinsed, I unwrapped the seed stalks to find dozens of tiny poppy seeds had shaken free into the paper. I sprinkled them around our rental garden in Christchurch that afternoon. They did not come up the following spring. No permanent residency permit for these migrants. Maybe they knew they came into the country illicitly, although I had completely forgotten about that when I scattered them on the garden. Still in the throes of my resistance to living in New Zealand, I took their failure to germinate as a sign that they were not meant to be here, any more than I was.

As happens for many migrants, working that first year proved difficult because my skills went unrecognised. I worked at one temporary job after another around the university where I had hoped to be teaching, as I had done for years in both Europe and the United States. I was missing something that had defined me: ‘Work provides a sense of agency, purpose, and worth that is gratifying on deeper levels of the psyche.’1 My husband had all that plus a social milieu through work, as did my children with school, while I, freezing in an uninsulated, single-glazed house, was becoming ever more depressed.

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