Incredibly, our marriage turned 30. (That’s a pearl wedding, someone said, which explains the huge pearly shell R found on our outing.) That day we walked over headlands and trudged raw gold-sand beaches and marvelled at southern ocean rollers pounding ashore. We talked about why we’re still together; why we’re glad about that; why it’s sometimes hard; what we yet aspire to, each and as a pair. The most important aim seems to be towards suppleness, of mind, body and spirit, for our own sakes and for the sake of the other — so we don’t hinder, frustrate or burden the other unnecessarily before circumstance or age make incursions on our freedom of choice.

Well, that sounds a bit heavy-handed, even compulsory, negatively phrased as it is. Let’s just say we mean to go on encouraging one another and playing at life in every way we will for as long as we’re allowed to.

Bonnie M's sandals

The dog we walk is big.

The houses on the beach are small.

Not all dogs have the chance to get sand between their toes. Over coffee we observed the downtown sidewalk cafe dog.

I had a sudden craving for one of these last night: sweetcorn empanadas, or corn husk wrapped around creamed corn and cheese and steamed. Comfort food.

In Valeria del Mar on the Atlantic coast, we pushed our work aside for lunch. With a little wine for the stomach’s sake.

Hongos harvested from under the pine trees were made into . . .

… risotto and ratatouille that were tasty and  just the tiniest bit slippery.

On buses, we ate miniature cracker biscuits out of packets that matched our clothing.

Pink stuff.

In cafes, the morning medialuna with coffee.

Out for dinner: varieties of pasta.

In Ushuaia, king crab from the Beagle Channel.

In the Humahuaca Valley, quinoa omelette.

Back in Jujuy, trout. Fresh.

And in the country where beef is king of the table and the barbecue holds pride of place in the garden, the opportunity to try a some kind of gland and a blood ball (aka black pudding).

You may have met the pastelitas already. The neighbour made them and we ate them still warm.

Okay, we're full now.

 But you can find a little more of Elena here.

It’s been a lovely, Indian summer, Easter. We walked the beaches and the dog whose biopsy results this week seem to indicate that fifteen or a little under will be her life span. Meanwhile, she’s still perky and bright, but needing to wear a coat of my devising to stop her gnawing at irritated skin.

The second batch of hot cross buns I made was worth eating.

We attended a Tenebrae service on Friday night — readings from the gospel of John, exquisite part singing, and candles extinguished one by one — and greeted the dawn on Sunday.

I’m reading Nicholas Nickleby, very slowly; NN’s altercations with Squeerses have marked my fallings-asleep several nights running.

There are two Peasgood Nonsuch apples left dangling on the extremity of one branch, and an entire crop of raspberries (the first ever) holding their breath at the very ends of their long wands, hoping the warm weather will hold long enough for them to plump and redden. Meanwhile, today there was A Loganberry.

Someone should have set up a video camera beside one of the deep little pools that had formed in the lee of the rocks. Polly wasn’t the only dog we saw that expected to go flying through knee-deep water.

The sun shone. We lunched by the Waihi River.

It couldn’t have been nicer. C laid out the lunch; B gathered firewood; K produced goats’ cheese and fudge; I poured the tea. C had thought to bring a knife. B had thought to bring a proper (not an iphone) camera.

K had thought to bring walking shoes. I had thought to bring sunscreen, which we all applied since none of us had thought to bring a hat. We walked upriver, gazing at the blue hills — past the 1000 sheep and the 500,000 bees, under the trees, over the poop, past the one sheep stung on the nose by one bee and running in circles, through the gully and back — thinking all along, how wonderful to set up camp here till the end of summer.

But we didn’t.

We said goodbye. Until next time.

Niños jugando en Santuario de Tres Pozos, Arlen Buchara 2009

My friend Elena Bossi has edited a book called PUNA, that she’s giving away in PDF format. She lives in Jujuy in the north of Argentina, and recently tackled the day-and-a-half drive from Salta into the high Andes, where locals had been interviewed about life in this high and spare environment. Elena edited the interviews to bring alive the voices, mostly of farmers and harvesters of salt.  She’s included in the book folk tales, poems and literary offerings from the region ‘to make a universal idea of the souls of the people’.  The photos are stunning, too.

Photo: Michele Giacomelli, Valtellina, Italy

There’s only one drawback for the fools among us who haven’t taken their Spanish studies seriously enough: it hasn’t been translated into English. Not yet. But I know it will have been beautifully written.

Anyway, if you read Spanish, or know someone who does, help yourself here. You’re in for a treat and I’m envious. Elena would like to see this book ‘diffused’ (I love her wonderfully apt English) so please consider posting it on your own blog, especially if you have a Spanish readership.

And of course if you’d like to translate PUNA, that’d be fantastic. I’d put the English version on Rosa Mira Books, perhaps not for free, but for a small sum so I could reimburse the translator in due course.

I held my course as I realised what a clever ploy it was, to trick a woman on her own into pulling over on a wide and lonely stretch of road . . . a toy pistol, a threat, and she’d probably hand over her wallet in a flash. I looked at the oncoming traffic. Would any of it stop if I pulled over and jumped out, waving my arms?

At the same time as I finally heard the wee-woo, I saw the driver pointing at the verge. I pulled over and he did too.

For a moment I considered telling the handsome young police officer that I was on my way home from a funeral (true) — but I was feeling far from glum after a rich and happy time with whanau. I suppose I was mildly relieved to see him, too, even if he was telling me off for ignoring him and his siren for so long as I sailed along at 113 kph.

I told him off for creeping me out in his bright green, unmarked car.

I accepted the fine and 20 demerit points without a murmur.

My first-ever speeding ticket.

Clouds stream overhead from north-east to south-west, dissolving and morphing as they go.

Lilies in the tub outside the window have begun to brown and curl and drop their skirts.

The peasgood nonsuch apples cling to their branches and fatten, and silver bean-slivers emerge from fiery flower sheaths.

Clouds, lilies, beans and apples do what they do, no questions asked.

Only humans wonder whether what they’re doing makes any sense. Sometimes, when I’m feeling more than usually sense-less, I come back to what God is reputed in the book of Exodus to have said when Moses asked for his identity: ‘I am that I am’. Another rendering of ‘ehweh‘ is: ‘I shall become who I am becoming.’ And if it’s good enough for God . . .

Perhaps it doesn’t matter whether I choose this course of action or that. Is it possible that, in the way of apples, beans and clouds, the human organism goes inexorably on, growing and auto-correcting until it resembles a well formed . . . human being?

Settle down, puss.