Mud pies and glue

A few months ago we visited Mangawhai Heads which is a quiet patch of beach. It wasn't the beach the appealed to the girls of this occasion however, but the hill of clay soil. You know where this is going, don't you? Amongst the playing, which occupied them for hours I might add, they scrapped and gathered till they were happy with the contents of their "take home" bucket. Arriving home late that day, I was very quick to put the bucket out of sight.

Well, the past few days they've been asking for it and there has always been a valid excuse, I mean reason, why "now" was not a good time. That was until today, when it was a perfectly good time to get the stuff out and make a huge, gooey mess–all good, clean fun.


Watching the girls through the window, I was transported back to my childhood Sundays. After the family lunch at Nonna and Pop's farm, Corina and I, along with our cousin Simone, would would sneak spoons from the kitchen drawer and take them under the house where we would proceed to make mud pies for our imaginary pie stall. We would stay there for hours until our parents called us and it was time to go home. Of course the spoons didn't always make their way back to the kitchen and we had guilty looks on our faces when Nonna asked us if we knew we they'd gotten to.

Sadly, Nonna passed away a couple of weeks ago and for our family it is the end of an era. We have said good-bye to the head matriarch and the glue of our family—through thick and thin, Nonna was the one who held us together. And even though we may come unstuck during the rough patches we will no doubt encounter in our own lives, I hope we all remember the strength Nonna showed us.