This is my stop

Why do people escape to the country? People like us, or people entirely unlike us, do. It is a dream.

- Michele Hewitson

We have lived here in the country for eight years now. It feels utterly like home and still utterly foreign. I grew up in the country, or on the edges of country, really. There were calves to pat across the road in Whakatāne. In Ōhope, we lived in a shack across the road from the beach and made sand castles and paddled.

We were country kids.

Later, we moved to Kaitaia. A gang of us kids from Kaitaia Primary ran ragged and wild after school. We were accompanied by friendly fantails through a patch of native bush. We slid down the bank bordering the cow paddock, inevitably landing in the cutty grass.

My best friend Linnie and I joined the school’s Māori club. We were the only two Pākehā. She had beautiful and, incongruously in the context, bright blonde curls. We were allowed to speak only te reo, although it wasn’t then called te reo. We spoke Māori. It wasn’t called immersion. If you didn’t learn to speak Māori you didn’t understand anything. So we learnt.