Sisterchicks Down Under Read online

  “This is beautiful,” I said.

  “I told you.”

  I stopped to touch the thick bark on one of the towering giants. “These trees are so old. They’re ancient. Look at this trunk.”

  “I know.” Jill nodded. “This is a wonderful place, isn’t it?”

  “It’s amazing.”

  “Look how gnarled some of these trees are.” She pointed to a particularly unusual tree. “You can almost see faces in the trunks. And look over there. The moss seems iridescent.”

  “Wow.”

  The farther we walked, the more enchanting the forest became. Sunlight slid through the high canopy of thick branches and seemed to ignite clumps of grass into vibrant green campfires, clustered in the open spaces. All across the forest floor, these emerald patches blazed with a natural glory that hinted at the hidden glimmers still tucked away in God’s imagination.

  “Right here.” Jill stopped, and I tried to see what she was pointing at.

  Jill pointed to where the trail took a sudden dip. An outgrowth of lanky tree roots was exposed by erosion.

  “Try to picture this spot with another tree they brought in and put right here. It was a tree they made in the props department. Any idea what scene they were filming?”

  I sized up the setting.

  “I’ll give you a hint. It was when the hobbits left the Shire.”

  I looked around, and suddenly I could visualize it. “This is where Frodo and his pals hid, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right.” Jill moved to the trail’s edge. “Right here.”

  “I remember that scene! The hobbits jumped off the road and hid under these massive roots. Right here! That’s so cool!”

  “You got it.”

  “And those dark horses came through here on the trail.”

  “The ring on the chain around Frodo’s neck was calling out to the Ringwraiths.”

  “I can see it all. Wow! They didn’t need to add many props, did they?”

  “No.” Jill was smiling. She seemed to be drinking in sweet memories of the place. No evil spirits on black horses were riding through her mind, as she gazed down the trail. “That was the first scene they filmed, and the rest of the project unfolded from that day.”

  We stood alone on the pine needle-padded trail, and I knew where I’d bring Tony the next time he borrowed the studio’s van.

  “Have I made a fan out of you yet?”

  “Almost.” I moved to the trail’s edge, sizing up the hollowed-out spot.

  “Kathy, what are you doing?”

  “Come on, let’s try it out. I’m not exactly hobbit-size, but I think we can fit.”

  Jill laughed. “You have to be kidding!”

  “No, I’m serious. Come on!”

  We were dressed in Saturday shopping clothes, but who cared? Edging over the side of the trail, we grabbed on to the extended tree roots and used them like a climber would use a rope.

  “That looks roomy enough.” I pointed to the largest hollowed-out area under the tree.

  “This is the craziest thing I’ve done since …”

  “Since you went driving with me yesterday? Come on, we can fit in there.”

  And indeed we did. We fit so well that the dampness from the rich, dark earth penetrated our clothes. I twitched at the thought of legions of creepy, crawly creatures jumping on me, as if I were their bus ride out of there.

  “Listen,” Jill said, holding her breath. We heard the steady-pounding of feet coming our way.

  “Joggers,” Jill whispered.

  “Should we jump out and scare them?” I whispered.

  Jill covered her mouth so her giggles wouldn’t escape. “I can’t believe we’re doing this.”

  “On the count of three,” I whispered. “One, two, three!”

  Instead of springing out of hiding like two slender, annoyingly perky cheerleaders, the width of our midlife frames wedged us together at the opening, and Jill’s shirt caught on a protruding twig.

  “Wait! I don’t want to tear this shirt. Hang on.” She tried to pull her right arm around to use both hands to release her shirt. In the flurry, my long hair caught on the buttons that ran up the sleeve of her cute shirt.

  “Ow! Stop! Wait! Now I’m caught.”

  “Are you two okay?” One of the joggers stood looking down on us, his face expressing surprise. It just wasn’t the same surprise effect we were trying for.

  “We’re fine,” I said with my head tilted at an unnatural angle to the left. I groped to find the connecting button that was yanking the hair off my head. “Thanks anyway,” I added cheerfully.

  He didn’t believe me. “Are you caught?”

  “Yes!” Jill confessed the obvious. “Can you see from up there where my shirt is caught on the tree?”

  He gingerly came toward us.

  I didn’t blame him for his caution. Why would two women be wedged under a tree root, appearing to be joined at the hip, with Jill’s right arm suspended in midair and my oddly twisted head connected to her wrist? I’m sure we looked like freak show contestants who never made it to the big time and were forced to practice their talents for the unappreciative woodland creatures.

  “I can see where it’s caught,” he said. “It’s along the edge. If you can back up a few inches, it should come off on its own. In theory.”

  I could smell his sweat as he got closer, and for some reason the unpleasant odor was more of an irritant to me at the moment than our predicament.

  “I think I can back up.” Jill crouched and pulled her arm down. Consequently, my hair and twisted head went down with her.

  “Ouch!”

  “Sorry!”

  “A little more to the left,” the jogger said.

  “Got it.” Jill raised herself and moved forward untangled.

  “Oww!”

  “Kathy, I’m so sorry. Hold still. I can see where you’re caught. There, got it.”

  Crawling all the way out of our hobbit hideout, we stood up straight and smoothed our hair and crumpled clothes. Then, as if we had practiced, we simultaneously brushed off our behinds with the same synchronized motions and turned to our jogger hero with what I’m sure must have looked like clown grins.

  He sized up the situation. “All right then. Looks like you’re clear. I’ll be on my way. Cheers.”

  We stood in place, watching him jog on down the trail.

  “I wonder which one of us he thinks is Lucy and which one is Ethel,” Jill said.

  I didn’t catch on to her joke at first, but as soon as the I Love Lucy connection hit me, I snickered. “You can be Lucy.”

  “I think I was the Ethel in this caper because I let you talk me into crawling under that tree. You were the Lucy.”

  “I promise I’ll never ask you to do that again.”

  “Yeah, right, Lucy. We’ll see about that. You may not be able to talk me into crawling under tree roots again, but I have a feeling you’ll come up with a few more stunts before this sitcom ends in three months.”

  “Three months?”

  “When you go back to California.”

  The thought that popped into my mind was, I don’t want to leave. I was astounded to realize I had experienced a mental turnaround from twenty-four hours ago, when I was making another big X on the calendar inside my checkbook register. That X represented the checking off of another day of exile in New Zealand. Today I wanted a big eraser so I could go back and capture every day of the two weeks I’d lost wallowing in self-pity. What a difference a day makes. What a difference a friend makes.

  “How about some lunch?” Jill asked once we had shaken ourselves off and gotten back in the car.

  We stopped at a deli and ordered turkey sandwiches to “take away” instead of “to go.” The woman behind the register asked if we wanted a bag of crisps to go with our sarnies.

  I turned to Jill for a translation. “Potato chips,” she whispered. “To go with our sandwiches.”

  “Oh, no thanks.”


  I tried to pay, but Jill insisted I put my wallet back. “You can get the hokey pokey later.”

  “The hokey pokey? Does that involve putting my right foot in or my left foot out? Because I think we should coordinate our movements ahead of time, so we don’t get stuck anywhere. I mean, not that something like that would ever happen to us.”

  The woman at the register was not amused, but Jill was. “Hokey pokey is ice cream,” Jill explained. “It’s nice and creamy with bits of honey nougats in it.”

  “Ice cream? Why didn’t you say so? In that case, I’ll gladly buy.”

  We took our sandwiches to the car, and as we drove back to Jill’s house to eat, I thought of how quickly I had come to feel the ebb and flow of friendship with Jill. In California I’d had the same friends for years. We formed a small circle and gathered regularly at church and school events. A few of us got together for lunch to celebrate our birthdays. We were close and comfortable and always there for each other.

  With Jill I felt that same connectedness, even though we only had been doing life together for a few days. It felt luxurious to slip so quickly into the coziness of friendship.

  Jill pulled up to a stop sign, and we waited for two older women to toddle across the street. They wore sensible shoes and matching hand-knit caps and scarves, and walked with their arms linked. The slow-moving women reached the other side of the street, where they turned together and waved at Jill and me with appreciative smiles. We waved back.

  The world seemed to be full of friends.

  No matter where a woman is, she can always find a pal.

  Rolling through the intersection, we drove a few more blocks before turning up an inclined driveway. “Welcome to my humble abode,” Jill said.

  I expected a cottage-style home like Mr. Barry’s, but Jill’s house was closer to the water and looked like a beach house built in the sixties along the cliffs in Laguna. It had a raised front deck that was beautifully decorated with potted plants and sturdy metal lawn furniture. A canvas umbrella was opened over the glass-topped table, and sitting on the table, surrounding the umbrella’s pole, was an elaborate metal candleholder with at least six loops. At the end of each loop was a votive candle in a glass holder. I could image how magical the candles must look when lit at night with the lights of the homes across the bay easily visible from the deck.

  I noticed right away that all the flowers in Jill’s planters were red, white, and blue with a few dashes of yellow added. At my home in Tustin, I used red, white, and blue flowers also.

  We also had the same taste in furniture and decorations. Jill’s home was done in neutrals. She had cream-colored walls, cocoa brown furniture, deep brown wooden table and chairs, and all her appliances were black. Majestic purple and shimmering, soft gold were the colors that accented her neutral foundation.

  I never would have selected those two colors, but they were gorgeous. My accents were in blues and yellows. Somehow taking those shades several steps deeper to purple and gold made all the difference between zippy exuberance and quiet elegance.

  “I love your house,” I said, peering around the open living area and kitchen-dining area.

  “Thank you. Ray insisted we buy it when we first got here. I thought we should rent and play it safe in case the job didn’t work out for him, but he said the market value was going to skyrocket, and he was right. We bought this for a song, compared to California prices. The house was twenty-four years old when we bought it, so we had to make a lot of repairs. That turned out to be a bonus because it gave us a chance to change things to the way we liked them.”

  “You have a gorgeous home,” I said. “So many beautiful paintings!”

  “I taught an art appreciation class in California for nine years. When we moved here, I taught the same class at Victoria University for three years, but then they hired a full-time teacher.”

  “Did you paint any of these?”

  “No, I only appreciate them. Would you like something to drink?”

  “Sure. Whatever you have, I’ll have the same.”

  “Is Fresh Up okay?”

  “Sure. I’ve never had it before, but I’m willing to try it.”

  “It’s juice. Nothing fancy. This one is apple-mango.”

  “Sounds good.”

  As I was following Jill into her kitchen, I stopped in front of a black-and-white photo hanging on the wall. I felt entranced by the beauty of the composition.

  The picture was a close-up of an infant sleeping, balanced on the broad forearm of a tender father. The infant’s head was cupped in the father’s open hand, which was huge in comparison to the newborn yet so gently covering, protecting, blessing the tiny, naked miracle.

  “This is amazing,” I said in a low voice.

  Jill joined me with two tall glasses of Fresh Up in her hands and looked lovingly at the picture. “That’s my son. He’s holding their firstborn. My first grandbaby. Lacey.”

  “She’s beautiful! And this photo is so beautifully done. Who took the picture?”

  “My son’s mother-in-law. Our little Lacey-girl was only two days old.”

  I looked at the signature in the corner to see if I recognized the photographer’s name. “Laurinda Sue?”

  “Yes. She’s amazing. Her work is really taking off. It’s wonderful because her husband is a painter, and for years his work got all the attention. I guess the story goes that she was taking photographs for years but never showed them to anyone. I’m not sure what brought her work out of the drawer, but she’s won a few awards, and one of her pieces is on display at a large hotel in Hawaii.”

  “Laurinda Sue,” I repeated, certain I hadn’t heard of her. “You said she’s married to a painter?”

  Jill hesitated, as if measuring if she could trust me with information that appeared to be a family secret. “She’s married to Gabriel Giordani.”

  My mouth dropped open. “Your son married into the Giordani family?”

  She nodded.

  Gabriel Giordani’s work was everywhere in the U.S. He was known as “The Painter of Hideaways” and had been popular for well over a decade. I owned a box of greeting cards with pictures of cottages he had painted. My mom had a print of one of his garden scenes over her fireplace.

  “This is really extraordinary,” I murmured, trying not to say anything ridiculous about the Giordani connection. Just in and of itself, the composition of the photograph was exceptional. It didn’t need a Giordani endorsement.

  “I love this picture,” Jill said in a wistful voice. “Not just because it’s of my son and my grandbaby, but whenever I look at it, I get a sense of comfort. I think it’s because that’s how I picture God holding me these past few years. I’m the fragile infant, and He’s the strong, Almighty Protector who has held me in the palm of His hand.”

  Jill’s words caused my throat to swell and my eyes to brim with tears. I had no response. I, too, was an infant, more aware than I’d ever been that God wasn’t just looking down from His heavenly throne, the all-powerful judge evaluating all of my actions. He cared for me with such gentle mercy that He wouldn’t allow me to fall out of my empty nest and tumble headlong into self-destruction. He caught me and held me securely in the palm of His hand.

  Two days after Jill and I made our on-line travel plans for Christchurch, it rained buckets. For the first time since we had arrived in New Zealand, I reached for a small devotional book one of my friends had given me as a going-away gift. The reading for that day was from Ephesians 5.

  One verse stood out to me, and I underlined it. “Mostly what God does is love you. Keep company with him and learn a life of love. Observe how Christ loved us. His love was not cautious but extravagant. He didn’t love in order to get something from us but to give everything of himself to us. Love like that.”

  For a long time I sat listening to the rain hitting the garage’s metal roof, sounding like rubber pellets. I didn’t know if I had ever loved anyone extravagantly, the way God loved me. Findi
ng Jill certainly had been an extravagant gift to me from God. I thought of all the people I had loved cautiously over the years. What would my life look like if I started to love extravagantly?

  The next morning the sun was back, Tony was out the door early, and I was ready to trot down to the Chocolate Fish for a morning wake-up mocha.

  I found Mr. Barry already out in his garden. He greeted me with a wave of his gloved hand from where he kneeled beside the mums. He was trying to tie up the drooping stems. I waved back and thought how he seemed the sort of man who, by virtue of his build, was better suited for shouldering a plow and driving a team of oxen than bending low to fiddle with tying delicate knots in gardening twine.

  “How are you this morning, Mr. Barry?”

  “No complaints.”

  I noticed that Mr. Frodo was looking his cheerful self. I also noticed that the blooms on the mums had become so heavy in the rain that they bent in such a way that their golden faces appeared to kiss the earth.

  Deciding that I better come clean as well, I bent my head and said, “Mr. Barry, I didn’t tell you this yet, but a few days ago I was driving a truck, and I bumped into your lawn hobbit. He fell over, but we put him back up. I broke off a few flowers, but that was all. I don’t think anything in your garden was hurt, but I thought I should tell you.”

  “I saw the whole thing,” he said.

  “You did?”

  “The three of you were a box of budgies.”

  I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I guessed it was something positive by the way he said it. “So you’re not upset?”

  “How could I be? Best entertainment I’ve had in a year.”

  Relieved and yet still feeling a bit penitent, I asked, “Do you need some help?”

  He hesitated before nodding and moved back so I could get in there and bolster up the drooping blossoms.

  “My wife planted these six years ago. Every year her chrysanthemums keep coming back.”

  I assumed Mr. Barry’s wife had passed away. After going through all the emotions with Jill when she told me about Ray, I wasn’t sure I wanted to open up any repressed feelings in this gentle giant. Instead, I nodded to the gunnysack marked Narcissus Bulbs. “Do you plan to put those in the garden today?”