Savage Crescent

My mother died earlier this year, after several years of moving through different stages of residential care. This tribute to her is adapted from an unpublished essay I wrote in 2017, when Mum was still living in her own home in Palmerston North, and is written from the perspective of that time. For a story from another phase of Mum’s life, see this earlier post.

The houses of Palmerston North’s Savage Crescent are solid and full of character. They have, as we say of both houses and people, good bones.

My mother does not have good bones. Hers are brittle with osteoporosis, but they have never yet broken. Her slight frame puts little pressure on her fragile bones. When I hug her, she turns herself to one side, as though to evade me or to shield her slender body.

Savage Crescent, one of New Zealand’s first state housing areas, was developed between 1937 and 1945. It was designed as a Garden Suburb, with a looping road and a recreational reserve in the middle. Michael Joseph Savage, New Zealand’s first Labour Prime Minister, spoke of building ‘smiling homes’ for New Zealanders. His namesake street represents an enlightened belief that state houses could be well-built, using good materials. While there were standard designs, the houses were not identical to each other.

Mum’s home is state house design no. 638, an English-cottage-style design. I know this because it appears in a book on state houses in New Zealand, and also in an article in Heritage New Zealand magazine. Mum’s house is featured because, when she purchased it in 2011, it was substantially unchanged from the original design. She is only the second private owner of this house, the previous owners having bought it from the government in 1957. There are still traces of its earlier residents in decorative flourishes such as the floral carpet, salmon-pink shutters on the front and side windows, and an odd wallpaper design that looks like a curtain behind Mum’s bed.

Mum lives with her elderly tortoiseshell cat, Sindy. Sindy turned up with a litter of kittens at my parents’ house in another part of Palmerston North in 2005. Other homes were found for the kittens, but Sindy stayed on. At the time, Mum was reading a book which mentioned the popularity among seventeenth-century English Puritans of moralistic names like Sin-deny. And so the cat became ‘Sindy with an S’, as Mum was careful to make clear when introducing Sindy to strangers.

It wasn’t long after Sindy arrived in Mum’s life that my parents’ marriage ended. Mum stayed on in their house for a number of years, while my sister and I tried to persuade her to move somewhere smaller and more manageable. She resisted for a while but then, to our surprise and on her own initiative, she bought the house in Savage Crescent. The house was cold and in need of sprucing up, but was fundamentally sound. Mum set about making it her own, turning it into a warm and cosy environment by having heating, insulation and double glazing installed.

The house is filled with items that bear witness to her life in Australia, the US state of Minnesota, and New Zealand. In the toilet is a figurine of a boxing kangaroo; on a bookshelf, a pipe by an Ojibwe artist from Minnesota, with a human head in red pipestone at one end and a wooden bird’s head at the other; on a wall is a plate showing a cheerful pūkeko striding along. Indigenous artworks and artefacts are displayed on walls and shelves, alongside childhood art by my sister and me, and by Mum’s two grand-daughters. There are owls, collected over decades: owl figurines of metal, stone or clay, owls on cards, owls in cartoons. A bookshelf in the living room is full: even as Mum gives books away to the Red Cross, she continues to buy more. In that, as in so much else, I am my mother’s son.

On the living-room floor are two rows of boxes, full of copies of the book Mum self-published in 2011, based on her PhD thesis. The book focuses on the life stories of seven women from the Ojibwe people, one of the Native American peoples of Minnesota. It took Mum almost twenty years to revise her thesis for publication, and by the time it was finally finished she was too frail and tired to promote the book actively or to travel to Minnesota for the party she had long planned to hold with the women whose story the book tells. This was the price of her perfectionism, another trait I share with her.

If you look carefully around the house, you can see Mum’s notes to herself. A chart on a wall sets out the places where she’s lived over the years, a sequence she now struggles to remember. In the kitchen is a list of the things she plans to eat for dinner that week. She writes notes of her conversations with me, and with my sister. In the study, beside her computer, is a note that simply says ‘HANG IN THERE’.

Outside, you would once have seen her little yellow car, which she had to give up on doctor’s orders. She didn’t concede without a fight. ‘It’s not easy arguing with a lawyer’, the doctor joked. When he asked her at a subsequent meeting ‘Do you remember me?’, she replied: ‘Yes, you’re the man who took my car away!’ But she’s got used to coping without a car, using taxis or saving up chores in town for when I or another friend or family member visit.

In the book on state houses, Mum is quoted describing herself as a ‘fanatical gardener’, and Savage Crescent’s gardens were part of what drew her to the street. Even now, her ability to care for plants and to remember their names is undimmed. She pays someone to help with heavy garden work, but it’s Mum’s skill and knowledge that keep the garden looking immaculate. In the front yard are well-trimmed trees and shrubs and colourful flowers. In the back are kangaroo paws (a reminder of her Australian origins); rhubarb plants with rich, red stalks; vegetables growing on raised beds; and lemon and mandarin trees. In summer, strawberries grow under tunnels of protective netting.

Mum likes to look out over her garden and watch the birds and the neighbourhood cats coming and going, just as she enjoys watching the people passing by along the street. She’s happy to talk to visitors who come to the door. Jehovah’s Witnesses, so used to being turned away, have no doubt been delighted to find her willing to listen. She takes an interest in who her neighbours are, and was friendly with the man with many cats in the house across the road, the house where police cars would occasionally pull up. Then the man across the street moved out suddenly, and the house was taped off while it underwent decontamination. ‘Methamphetamine isn’t illegal, is it?’ Mum asked me, though I suspect she half-knew the answer.

My sister worries about Mum’s safety, frets that she’s too trusting and can be taken advantage of, or that she might leave an element on and start a fire. I’m more willing to put Mum’s quality of life and independence ahead of her safety, but I still worry that Mum might get suddenly worse, either physically or mentally, and need to move into residential care at short notice. Both my concern and my sister’s lead in the same direction: to thinking about the day when she will have to leave the home she has made for herself on Savage Crescent.

Once you start looking, you realise that promotions for residential facilities for the elderly are everywhere: glossy inserts in newspapers, online ads, even posters on giant billboards. They always show beaming, healthy older people leading fun-filled lives. As Atul Gawande writes in his book Being Mortal, these places are not marketed primarily to elderly people themselves, but to their middle-aged children:

They try to create what the marketers call ‘the visuals’ – the beautiful, hotel-like entryway, for instance… They tout their computer lab, their exercise center, and their trips to concerts and museums – features that speak much more to what a middle-aged person desires for a parent than to what the parent does. Above all, they sell themselves as safe places. They almost never sell themselves as places that put a person’s choices about how he or she wants to live first and foremost.

I find it hard to imagine Mum thriving in such places. She is not one who fits in easily in an institutional environment, and she doesn’t want her life too closely enmeshed with the lives of others.

Near the end of Mum’s doctoral thesis, the writing takes a personal turn and she describes movingly her experience of feeling different throughout her adult life, concluding:

I am still different and sometimes I curse it, but at other times I know that my difference is a gift to be used creatively and in a way which is life-giving. Because I have made gardens all over the world I belong to all those places. Mainly I belong in Australia. I also belong in Aotearoa and even have a small place in my heart for Minnesota. I belong with my family, and I belong with my friends who live scattered throughout the world and who are, when I think about it, in general, ‘just as crazy as I am!’

Twenty-five years after writing those words, Mum’s world has shrunk, and she’s seldom in touch with her crazy friends overseas. But her garden is still at the centre of her world.

In her thesis, Mum writes about traditional Ojibwe attitudes towards old people. Old people were respected, but respect was accompanied by an expectation ‘that old people should, as far as possible, be self-sufficient and look after themselves. They did not complain about this; it was important to them that their manido [spiritual power or life force] be acknowledged.’ This philosophy seems wise, and yet so much rests on those few words, ‘as far as possible’. How far will it be possible for Mum to maintain her independence as her memory and judgement continue to falter, or if she falls and breaks those brittle bones?

Mum’s thesis ends with an enigmatic story about the time when she and her twin sister, growing up in rural Australia, found an echidna walking up their drive. Echidnas were rare in their area, so they were excited, and managed to capture it in a bucket to show their mother. Afterwards, they turned the bucket upside down with the echidna underneath. The next day, they found that the echidna had burrowed into the ground under the bucket, and escaped.

I don’t know how to interpret this story. Does Mum see herself as the echidna, spiky and somewhat solitary? Is it about the impossibility of holding on to the things you love, or of ever fully comprehending a complex culture, like that of the Ojibwe? Or perhaps it’s about the importance of respecting the independence of others, not confining them for our own convenience.

In her book, Mum discusses the Ojibwe concept of bimaadiziwin, which she says can be translated as ‘a long life, a good life, and a healthy life’. She notes that a good life includes both good and bad times, and that another way of translating bimaadiziwin is ‘a life which is truly alive’.  A comparable ideal of human flourishing lay behind the creation of places like Savage Crescent, with their promise of healthy homes and pleasant surroundings in which individuals, families and communities could live fulfilling lives.

When Mum self-published her book, she called the publishing imprint Mokoroa Press. This was a reference to the whakataukī (Māori proverb) ‘He iti hoki te mokoroa, nāna i kakati te kahikatea’. The mokoroa is the larva or caterpillar of the pūriri moth. It gnaws into trees, feeding on their sap and eventually killing them. The whakataukī says that, although the mokoroa is small, it chewed through the tall kahikatea tree. In other words, something small can bring down the mighty through sheer persistence.

Mum is small in stature and unassuming in manner, but strong and determined. Or, as she once said to my sister: ‘I may be small, but I can still pack a punch!’ The whakataukī also relates to something Mum remembers her mother saying: ‘You wait, the worm will turn!’ Mum is on the side of the worms that turn, the underdogs waiting to have their day (although she has always been more of a cat person). The whakataukī speaks to Mum’s willingness to challenge those in authority, and to her determination to work away at her thesis and book until she finally completed them.

For Mum, life has often felt like a struggle, but she has got through by focusing on the things that sustain her: a tūī singing in the kōwhai, a cat basking in the sun, a laugh and a piece of cake shared with a friend. As she recognised, being different can be a curse, but it can also be a blessing and a source of creativity. By hanging in there and always being resolutely herself, Mum has found her own way to live a life which is truly alive.

In memory of Gwen Morris, 20 November 1941 – 9 April 2023

References

Bill McKay, Andrea Stevens and Simon Devitt, Beyond the State: New Zealand State Houses from Modest to Modern (Auckland, Penguin, 2014)

John O’Leary, ‘Unaltered States’, Heritage New Zealand, issue 130, Spring 2013, pp. 30-35

Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Illness, Medicine, and What Matters in the End (London, Profile Books, 2014)

Gwen Morris, ‘Gifted Woman Light Around You: Objibwa Women and their Stories’ (PhD thesis, University of Minnesota, 1992)

Gwen Morris, Gifted Woman Light Around You: Life Stories of Seven Ojibwe Women (Palmerston North, Mokoroa Press, 2011)