Gold on the upper Waitemata

From the sky and the sun, rather than the earth. Gold there was in large quantities in the hills further up the road beside which my father's farm lay. Many years before I was born, there was a massive gold mining operation in those hills. It had become farming land well before I played in the fields, doing things like riding a sled down a steep (or so it felt at the time) hill with sheep rutted tracks across the face of it so the skill was to stay on the sled all the way down. In the middle of another paddock was a crab apple tree, which I would eat from and my mother would make jelly from what was left. Only she and I liked the crab apples.

No; the gold in this scene is visual, and none the less valuable for that. My day at work finished mid afternoon. After getting back, I started to make some inroads on the mess I had made on Friday when I extricated a queen palm from the pot in which it was root bound; see the extra for what it looked like after being in the pot for well over ten years. It was quite a struggle to get it free, and cleaning up the mess was low on my priority list at the time. Now done. And the now empty pot (in the corner at the back) is waiting replanting by S.

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