A fleeting visit

She was in town for a fleeting visit. It was that old classic of the university student coming home for the holidays, but this was my first experience of it and I really can’t say I'm much of a fan.

- Steve Braunias

The whole way through I was fixated on the word “fleeting”. It comes from the Olde English word fleotan, which means “float, swim”. Merriam-Webster dictionary used it in a nice alliterative sentence: “Like a ghost ship floating by on a foggy night, fleeting things disappear as fast as they appear.” My daughter, the fleeting thing in fog.

She was in town for a fleeting moment. There were many demands on her time. I was very demanding and easily ignored. She had friends to catch up with, papers to work on, temperatures to adjust to – to travel from Dunedin to Auckland is to travel from winter to summer, even in autumn. The season went by fast, 10 days and she was gone. Another dictionary claimed “fleeting” dates back to 1200, when it was defined as “to glide away like a stream, vanish imperceptibly”. It took on darker tones in the early 13th century, when it was taken to mean “fickle, shifting, unstable”. It still does feel like that.