The Fox, the Storm, and the Bread Bowl

1

Auckland held its breath. Word came that a significant cyclone was bearing down — warnings to stock up on three days' worth of supplies, to secure anything in the garden that could take flight. The civil defence alerts added to the tension. The bread and pasta aisles at Pak'nSave were conspicuously bare. An unfamiliar sight.

We unclipped the netting from the trampoline — which had once flipped in a storm — and gathered five people's worth of shoes from the front step and back door. When Sunday arrived, the braced-for cyclone came and went as little more than steady rain and wind. The relief of anticlimax. Other parts of the country weren't as fortunate. When nature turns fierce, all you can do is wait. The night after it passed, the sky cleared wide open and bright with stars.

2

The best thing about school holidays is not packing lunchboxes. The hardest thing is three meals a day, every day, entirely at home. It's always about food.

The children eat from bowls or simple plates. Adults have a separate dinner — the kitchen becomes its own quiet world after the kids are settled. We cook every day but rarely stop to photograph it. The ones that survived this week: katsu ball curry and a bread bowl made from a whole loaf of toast bread for the girls, grilled eel and caprese salad for the grown-ups.

3

One of the quiet losses of living abroad is how hard it is to get new Korean books. Fortunately, most libraries here have a small Korean-language section, and the children's shelves tend to be updated surprisingly well. Borrowing limits are generous, and return windows long, so a trip to the library usually means coming home with a bag full. For the titles the girls love most — a series they've been following, something one of them must own — a parcel occasionally arrives from Korea with a book or two tucked inside.

Borrowed or posted, books find their way into the evenings. They become something to do on a slow afternoon, a reason to lie on the bed before sleep. Jin has been fixed on The Fox Who Ate Books this week, reading it again and again. On the evenings when I'm occupied in the kitchen, her sisters stretch out beside her and read it aloud. What grows between the pages, always, is warmth.