It is winter, early morning in the little township, chilled and blackfrosted, the plants and bushes stiffly frozen, the football field icy, the trees carrying crystals of sharp ice up to the wet sodden air-hugging mist.

Listen.  It is morning quietly roving the main road, the moist melodic streaming mist rising over the garage and the schoolhouse.  It is grass shivering on the hill.  Sunrise, dawn, the chorus of birds in the pinetrees.

It is Sunday morning. The thin clear slants of sun echo back onto the thick mist.  In the silver windowed house, the parents sleep heavy while three blanketed children toss and turn. In the workshop of the garage, Joe is up and in his practical oil-stained overalls is working on that ute that the farmer needs today.  Back in the house, the children now sit heavy-eyed around the wooden rectangular table.

And the toast burns as the jug boils.

“Hurry up kids, we’ll be late,” Mum shouts, sharp tongued.  Washed and combed and brushed, families drive the short way to the little church on the hill.  Past the swamp where the dragonflies shimmer and hover in the morning sunlight.  Where the captured tadpoles would have grown into glazed green slippery little frogs.

Look. On the hill behind the house the pinetrees lift their heavy branches of sharp dense needles into the dwindling disappearing time-now-over mist.  Down below in the township, the little general store opens its ready-for-anything doors to sell soap to biscuits, flour, tea towels, light bulbs and milk that will arrive later in the day carried for hours on the bus.

And soon you will be sitting on hard straight-backed wooden pews with no cushions.  The tiny white wooden church echoing with the sound of morning hymns, streaming out into the frosty but now sunstreaked morning.

Describing Class room:

A thick grey air filled room, disturbed by silence. Besides the mundain and droning voice of the teacher.

leaving the discouraged voice of the teacher as the only exception.

Arriving in whanau to sit slumped and grown in time with the equally discouraged chair