What the Estuary Remembers

The mangroves at the mouth of the Tūtaekurī have been coming back for thirty years, and the old fishermen who used to curse them — who pulled at the young shoots with their bare hands, who complained the roots strangled the channel — most of them are gone now, and the mangroves remain, patient as debt.

Mere Parata drives this road every Thursday, down from the ridge past the orchard that stopped being an orchard sometime in the nineties and is now just a paddock with elderly apple trees standing in it like pensioners who have forgotten why they came into the room. She drives to collect her mother's prescriptions from the chemist in town, and to buy the bread her mother will accept, which is a specific white bread from a specific bakery whose owner, Hēmi, has been baking since before decimalisation and whose hands are so floury by seven in the morning that he leaves white prints on everything he touches, the counter, the paper bags, sometimes the cheek of a child who leans too far in to look at the pies.

The town is not large. It has the bakery, it has the chemist, it has a Four Square whose refrigerators hum at a frequency that makes certain dogs uneasy. There is a hall that has hosted eighty years of tangi and twenty years of Zumba classes, not simultaneously, though on certain evenings the arrangement of chairs suggests otherwise. The war memorial outside it lists names that belong to families still living here, and when Mere's nephew came home from his OE and walked past it on his first morning back, he stopped and read his own surname three times before walking on without saying anything about it to anyone.

The estuary is what holds the place together, or perhaps holds it apart from everywhere else, which amounts to the same thing. In summer the kids swim off the old boat ramp even though the council has put up signs, and the signs weather and fade and nobody replaces them, which is a kind of policy. In winter the water turns the colour of strong tea and the shags sit on the channel markers looking aggrieved, which is their permanent expression, nothing personal. The smell of low tide is known to everyone who grew up here the way a family member's voice is known — not thought about, just recognised in the body before the mind has time to catch up.

Mere's mother is eighty-three and has opinions about the estuary that she does not share lightly. She grew up swimming in it, fishing in it, watching her own mother stand at its edge at dusk for reasons that were never explained and did not require explaining. The estuary has changed — the mangroves, the sedimentation, something different about the birds — and her mother notes these changes the way she notes changes in a person she loves: without alarm, without acceptance either, just a long-practiced attention.

On Thursdays, when Mere brings the bread and the prescriptions, they sit at the kitchen table that has been in that kitchen since 1961, the year her mother's parents moved into this house and her grandfather banged his hip on the corner of it and swore in a language Mere now teaches to adults on Tuesday evenings at the marae. They drink tea. The window above the sink looks out towards the ridge, not the estuary, but on clear days you can see the glint of water if you know where to look, and they both know where to look.

Her mother asks about the road, whether the slips from last winter have been properly fixed or just patched over, which is a question with a known answer. She asks about Hēmi's hands, because she worries about him in winter, the cold, the early start. She does not ask about the things she cannot see from the window, but she holds them anyway, the estuary, the mangroves, the fading signs, the surname on the memorial, all of it in the way the kuia she descends from held things — not as burden exactly, but not lightly either.

Mere leaves before dark because the road wants attention after dark and she is sixty-one and gives it that. She drives back up past the ghost orchard, the ridge, the paddocks that know her car by sound by now, or so she likes to think. The estuary drops behind her and then reappears in the rear-view mirror as just a brightness, a flat silver thing between the hills and the sea, belonging to itself and to everyone who has ever stood at its edge at dusk for reasons that were never explained and did not need to be.

Read in the app, leave a resonance, discover more stories.