Rosé Colored Glasses: I am a gardener

Well, well, the time has come. I leave New Zealand in a heart-wrenching 5 days, and the entire trip has flown by much much much too fast. I have been savoring the first few sweet flavors of unemployment and so far... well, I didn't know what I was missing. It's sort of like being a kid again and relishing the first two weeks of summer when school gets out. Before summer camp starts when you're still getting up at a reasonable hour (before noon) and life is just so beautiful. You can do no wrong because everyday is your day. Except that it's winter here and I don't have a car so I've been doing a lot of walking and asking for rides, which i guess is actually quite like being a kid again. But I digress...

My last two weeks I joined "the gardeners" aka the vineyard manager and assistant vineyard manager out in one of the winery's contract vineyards. It was glorious. The sun was shining and the weather was beautiful and clear and warm once the morning's frost cleared off. I worked out there for about two weeks doing odds and ends and just enjoying being outside after the previous two months in the cellar, which can be a fairly cave-like experience. Lowlight: three days pulling large metal staples (more closely related to horse shoes than actual staples) out of shitty wooden posts. Highlight: getting to take the ATV to pull out said staples on the last day. Woo! Don't worry, Dave (head gardener) took a delightful video of me. He used his creative license and made nascar sounds at the end.

Everyday, promptly at 10am, we stop for morning "smoko" (break). This was fairly uneventful and straightforward at the winery, but out with the gardeners it is a fantastic and sacred "15 minutes" (read: close to an hour) of hot tea, delicious biscuits (cookies) and an amazing opportunity to hear Rick "spin a yarn" (tell a story....more like an epic tale). I really wish someone else could have been a fly on the wall for these smoko breaks because it's quite a wonderful hysterical little production. Rick and Dave are both talkers and both have the most ridiculous stories about the most ridiculous things. Each story reminds the other one of something else and half the time they are finishing each others sentences and the other half of the time i don't think either of them is listening to a bloody word the other one is saying. The best by far was when the neighbor stopped by to tell us about his pig hunting weekend and offered to take me out pig hunting and teach me how to shoot the pigs at close range. Oh goody! I then learned the entire history of pig hunting in New Zealand and a bit of the history of farming and how cities and farms have changed over the past 50 years. This typically will lead into something about native wildlife, which is always where Rick shines. The man knows LITERALLY the latin name for almost every plant we came across. Also what purposes it serves and how to best utilize it. Did you know that papaya has healing properties and is sometimes just cut open and wrapped around a wound? Me neither! And when clover is mowed or cut, the plant releases nitrogen into the soil acting as a natural fertilizer to everything around it? Who would've thought? So all in all, I lived the vineyard dream and retired just in time as the rain hit the following week and I don't suppose that I could have quite called it the 'dream' had it been down pouring the whole time.