It is nice to be known. I have been known to sheep. I have been known to chickens. I have been known, though often ignored, by cats.
At my best, I have been known by respectable people I respected. And in my lesser moments, I’ve been known by various people who possibly didn’t want to know me.
And now, Michele realised this week, she and I appear finally to be known among the denizens of downtown Masterton.
Climbing back into the car after shopping at the excellent FishSpot van, which visits town from distant Woodville every Friday, Michele informed me she didn’t even have to ask for our order.
“The lady just said, ‘I’ll get your Bluff oysters’ without me saying anything,” Michele told me as she pulled the car door closed. “Do you know what? I think we’re almost locals – we’re ‘known!’”
As we drove home for lunch – by law, Bluff oysters must be eaten immediately upon purchase with loads of buttered, crusty sourdough bread – we counted up the other places we thought we might be “known” as locals in these parts.
It made for a pretty decent list.
We’re definitely known at Betty’s, where we have yum cha every month and where Betty has been known to tell Michele, “Don’t be stupid”.
We are also known at the town’s finest purveyors of comestibles, Moore Wilson’s, particularly by the lovely Claire in the booze section.
We are “known” by some at the chemist shop, the library and the dry-cleaners, too. We’re very much “known” by June, the postie. She has been known to tell me, “Don’t be stupid”, but June also knows us so well she has on several occasions delivered mail addressed simply to “Lush Places, RD, Masterton”.
At a guess, I’m also known by the bloke who repairs chainsaws, the two chatty women who take turns manning the payment booth at the local tip – one always likes to guess what I’m carrying – and I’m now even known at the local branch of a big, nationwide roading contractor by a top bloke who has cheerfully and efficiently helped sort out our metal driveway on more than one occasion.
Michele is right: we are known. And being known about town, at least a little bit, makes us “almost locals”. It’s about time.
It is seven years this month since we, a couple of not-very-practical townies, washed up in Wairarapa like so much forestry slash.
So it is right and proper that the place we adopted should now have started to adopt us, even if to the born-and-breds we will always be just a couple of Auckland blow-ins.
We’re happy to still be here. To outsiders, Masterton isn’t the biggest, doesn’t look the fanciest, isn’t the most famous. But, as a woman I met at a do once told me about Invercargill: “There’s nothing wrong with it.”
So it is nice to be known here. Though not to the police.
And just like that, our garden was (almost) green again. A couple of days of steady rain a week or so back – by some miracle, it delivered about 40mm – also delivered us from the almost daily watering of the garden and watching the lawn turn to dust.
It seems churlish, after two dreadfully wet summers, to bemoan this one, which has delivered endless days of clear skies and almost no rain at all.
Yet too much of a good thing soon becomes a bad thing. The fine weather now seems oppressive, monotonous, a bit of a drag.
With our paddocks barely able to feed the ewes as tupping season begins, Miles the sheep farmer is feeding out what we call “stinkage” – otherwise known as bailage – daily. And as the Big Dry continues (mostly), the worry becomes a shortage of grass for the sheep in winter, and spring as well. It will take much more than a couple of days’ rain to revive our fields fully.
But not the lawns. As they magically went from brown to green this week, I quietly rejoiced. I felt like a bald man might if his hair started growing back.
