Our vacuum cleaner used to belong to a man whose name
was something like Reg. Ten years ago we happened to
be walking past this man’s room on the day that he was
leaving to go into a Rest Home and, eyes full of unshed
tears and mouth pulled tight, he offered us his vacuum
cleaner. We said yes and quickly put it in the car because
it was a European make and much better than we could
afford. The vacuum cleaner still sucks well but it is heavy
to carry around, you have to plug in the cord in each
room, and its little round body is held together with duct
tape. Recently, when I suggested that we get one of those
new stick vacuum cleaners, you said no, you were quite
happy to keep using the one we have; and since you keep
me too, despite certain inconveniences, I have nothing
more to say about the vacuum cleaner.
Taken with kind permission from the new poetry collection The Gum Trees of Kerikeri by Lynn Jenner (Otago University Press, $25), available in bookstores nationwide. Many of the poems are set in Te Tai Tokerau Northland, where the author thinks “about my own situation as yet another new arrival in Northland, just the latest in a long line of colonists”.
