Oh my old blog.

I've been away in crazy Facebook land.

But I found you.. And a few old friends..

C Christmas day

What a lovely day

Autumn in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Beautiful days. 

White fluffy clouds and in our small city

The balloon festival begins.

I've been totally enchanted and in love with my little granddaughter home from the UK 

For her uncle's wedding.

Spending mornings with me

We're getting to know one another.

Two year old magic.

Every moment an adventure.

Every morning she checks out the ants In the garden, 

Along with the gnomes and ladybirds.

Being a grandmother 

Is like nothing else.

A new year ... a new start.  

 Starting small. Small can be beautiful.  These tiny wild flowers require a mindful eye.
Tiny and perfect and unnoticed.

Travel is amazing. 

I've had five seasons in one year.

I left spring in New Zealand and in a day, flew to autumn in Japan.

A day at the Craft Show with Pat.

There were so many gorgeous quilts but I must say

I was drawn to the simplicity of 

Quilts made with secondhand fabrics.

And some of the more wobbly ones

If you know what I mean.

I enjoyed meeting up with friend Raewyn,

A master ( mistress ?) wet felter. 

All up

It was an inspiring day. 

Now

To get those 

Unfinished quilts at home 

Finished.

I sometimes wish I could visit the house of my childhood.

To go back in time, open the door and see this house 

just as it was from 1944 to 1956 when I lived there on the farm on 

Matakawau Road.

The house has long gone

and the  farm is no longer an entity of its own but part of a much larger holding.

The sheltering pine trees from behind have gone too.

 

 I imagine I would be surprised at the simplicity of this house and it's contents.
Three small bedrooms, the living room with its fireplace, the tiny kitchen and the dining room and extra bedroom that Dad added for big sister Shirley.
Dad also added a bathroom and a back porch.  The 'lavatory' was outside behind the shed that housed the copper and concrete tubs for washing clothes.
I have no memory of it being wanting. Small children are more aware of love and happiness and security, or the lack of it, than of the absence of material things.

 I came across this image of a little girl scaling a doorway.

It could have been me in the house on Matakawau Road.

The door is exactly the kind of door I remember.

The activity is just the kind of thing I used to engage in.

I see myself running, crying to my mother, with a bleeding scratch that ran from below my tummy button up my chest.

I'd been riding on the top of the door, swinging too and fro.

Dismounting  by standing on the door handles and sliding down, I hadn't taken into 

consideration the sharp edge of the lock.

Needless to say,  the riding of doors was forbidden ever after.

Oh my goodness!   I have just worked out how to place photos from my phone to my blog.. I think! 
I have not been blogging for such a long time because I use my phone as my camera these days.
I have missed blogging friends!  Joyous day ..

                                             Dear Blogger Friends..

That is .. if I still have some Blogger Friends.  I have been absent for so long, I doubt you will be still here.  I have been in a foreign land called Facebook.  How ridiculous is that!

2013 was a year with a difference.  The year I walked The Camino.
I promised to share with you how it was to walk 500 miles of pilgrimage.
Will you be surprised I wrote hardly anything while walking.
I believe it has taken me ever since to absorb and think about what the walk has meant to me.

I have decided to share with you my strange little journal
written immediately after the walk.

I was staying in St Albans, a beautiful pilgrim place in England, and every day I would pop into the
Medieval Abbey with my little journal, to think and write.
I wrote only on the right hand page.  I added photos later when I returned home.

You may have a problem making sense of it.
Whatever...  here it is.   The first part of a Journal of a Pilgrimage..