Finding favour

Concrete is the last thing Wendyl Nissen wants on her country property, but when her defences are felled, she finds it might not be so bad after all!

Ialways find it interesting that the things you thought meant absolutely nothing to you end up meaning everything. The unwanted crystal wine glass you see in an op shop, for instance, and buy because you feel sorry for it sitting there all alone – with just a faint memory of its glory days, when it glistened next to five siblings on a kauri dining table covered in a crisp white cloth, awaiting a pour of fine claret.

You pay a few dollars, throw it in the boot of your car and find it there weeks later, again forgotten and discarded. You bring it inside, give it a clean, pour a crisp white wine into it and then it happens. Suddenly this is the most beautiful wine glass you have ever laid eyes on, you sip from its fine rim and realise that wine never tastes as good as it does from this glass, and there it is… your favourite glass to be used on every occasion from then on.

It may seem obscure to put concrete in the same category as a crystal wine glass, but stay with me… At our house in the Hokianga I definitely did not want more concrete. Ever since we bought the place my father has subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, urged me to replace the gravel driveway with concrete.

“It will look much better,” he would say. “Tidier and more reliable,” he would continue. “And you won’t have to keep ordering in new gravel every time there’s a wet winter,” he would finish.

“No,” I would reply. “It will just crack in the dry weather and look yuck.”

So the conversation would draw to a close at my insistence.

Then we decided that my parents would move up to join us at our home in the country, taking up residence in the adjacent cottage. But between their place and our place was a lot of gravel. And that would make it hard for my mother to navigate, as she is quite limited in her movement.

“I would like to suggest,” said my father in his most temperate voice, “that in order to save your mother from any falls, we should pop in a bit of a concrete pad.” Then he added, “And we’ll pay for it.”

Presented with the dual justifications of not allowing my mother to have a fall and hurt herself and the fact that it wouldn’t cost me anything, I could hardly say no.

So the concrete pad was created after quite a lot of mucking around, literally.

The earth was dug up, a big concrete truck arrived and the stuff was poured. I poked my head out of the front door a few times, and kept the dogs inside, but that was my total contribution. I was happy to let it happen, just not that happy that it was happening.

While it hardened, my parents were isolated from our house in their little cottage, and vice versa. So why did my father turn up at my house the next day?

“Oh, they always say to wait two days for it to set, but I tested it and it was fine.” He had walked across it with all the confidence of

Jesus on the Sea of Galilee, without leaving a mark on it.

The next day I looked out at the big grey slab and thought that at least it would stop a lot of mud being trampled into the house by the dogs. Then I looked out the next day and thought how lovely some flax would look planted along its edges. And the day after that I looked out and thought it all looked rather good.

Then I realised I had never loved anything quite so much for its usefulness, its tidiness and its reliability. My dad was right, and in future I will take his suggestions much more seriously… especially if he’s paying for them. AWW

He had walked across it with all the confidence of Jesus on the Sea of Galilee.