My grandmother lives with Uncle Ben o her own land in her own little house with all her friends.
The sitting room is warm and cosy. It has a sleepiness feeling about it. Whenever I enter this room, time seem to stand still. I felt relaxed and tired and a kind of peace filled up inside me. That was the place for me to relax by the fire in the big chair.
On the walls are hundreds of photos of all the relatives. Some of these were long gone, but somehow she could communicate with them. Somehow.
I used to watch her at night when the tv had just ended. She'd fall asleep and her lips would move. I could almost lip read what she was saying in Maori. But as usual she would go too fast for me. Sometimes, she would catch me trying to read her lips. She would only smile at me. Each time she smiled at me, I would go all warm and fall asleep. If you looked closer into her eyes you could see her culture all stored away there inside.
I said she lived in her own house with all her friends. To my grandmother her friends were all the photos hanging on the walls. She knew them all. To me, all the people there seemed to live on through her, because her face told the story of many tangi gone by.
Nanny, as she was known to all her mokopuna, is very understanding. I hated travelling when I was small and Nanny lived twenty miles away. She'd say to me, "You don't have to come if you don't want to because I have lots of friends."
She would point to all the photos and smile. That made me feel really good. And now that I am older, I don't see her often. But, I know that she has a lot of friends she could talk to about old times. Photos of people is a way of keeping in touch with them. Nanny and I seem to understand that relatives and the smiles are all joined together in a word called, "Friends."