I’m trying to imagine you there, working out at what point it happened. Would it have been when you were nineteen and you cruised out to the outer bays, in some way attempting to blend in to life on the peninsula, merging with the shades of deep tan and brown of the bracken and tussock of the hills that loomed large over your life? Or was it as you drove the road over the tortuous twisting hill, the raging summer sun beating upon you as you returned to your sanctuary on the flat with the cabbage tree outside the back door and the sound of the sea just past the pines where the campers gathered in the summer? No matter, somewhere, sometime, in that continuum where you loved and lost and loved again, the beautiful sun, which sometimes glistened upon the water far beyond where the land’s fingers dipped into the Pacific, danced upon you for just that minute, that hour too long and left its destruction.
A fair-skinned, fiery redhead, Ireland may have been a natural fit but you made your home among the locals and they would tell you of their day’s tales as you pulled a beer or nudged two nips into a spirit glass. The truth is I can only imagine the prior years. My friend John breathed the same peninsula air for a while as he (and I, for one summer in 2005) did the rounds of that same camp amid the pines emptying rubbish bins and taking bookings. That’s when I came to know you, larger than life, the complete hostess who introduced me to the concept of roasted lemons and the addition of Thomas and Bob the Builder into the November fourth alliance. That beautiful and serene bay where you made your home but a place not unknown to the provocation of the crust’s disruption which had been known to send the Pacific cascading up the valley.
Right from the start you had insisted that I meet your good friend; the two of us in separate spheres, each dealing with our own problems. Meet we did, and our journey rises in an eager and hungry five-year-old whose life thrives and thirsts as your own wanes; him cruelly unaware of his existence owed to your insistence. The cruelest of ironies.
We’ll return to that bay again and again to draw pictures in the sand and stare out at the ocean. He will be the kid under a campervan-adorned sunhat, coated in zinc, whiter than a seagull’s breast still wondering what all the fuss is about.
For Sharron.
Andrew Hawkey
A fair-skinned, fiery redhead, Ireland may have been a natural fit but you made your home among the locals and they would tell you of their day’s tales as you pulled a beer or nudged two nips into a spirit glass. The truth is I can only imagine the prior years. My friend John breathed the same peninsula air for a while as he (and I, for one summer in 2005) did the rounds of that same camp amid the pines emptying rubbish bins and taking bookings. That’s when I came to know you, larger than life, the complete hostess who introduced me to the concept of roasted lemons and the addition of Thomas and Bob the Builder into the November fourth alliance. That beautiful and serene bay where you made your home but a place not unknown to the provocation of the crust’s disruption which had been known to send the Pacific cascading up the valley.
Right from the start you had insisted that I meet your good friend; the two of us in separate spheres, each dealing with our own problems. Meet we did, and our journey rises in an eager and hungry five-year-old whose life thrives and thirsts as your own wanes; him cruelly unaware of his existence owed to your insistence. The cruelest of ironies.
We’ll return to that bay again and again to draw pictures in the sand and stare out at the ocean. He will be the kid under a campervan-adorned sunhat, coated in zinc, whiter than a seagull’s breast still wondering what all the fuss is about.
For Sharron.
Andrew Hawkey
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