The Sheep Shed of Earthly Delights
Landfall Nov issue, Otago University Press, 2018
It would be our big sister who spotted the hand-painted sign, ‘Eden Hore’s World of Fashion’- banged onto a fencepost out in the back of beyond; who made us turn down a gravelly road, past parched paddocks of dusty daggy sheep to a great blot of a corrugated iron shed by a brick farmhouse. We bleated. Eden wasn’t around, but some woman gave us a tour of the Collection – opening up half a kilometer of purpose-built closets and pulling out racks of flouncy gowns and gushing over a particularly something teal-dyed hand-spun Romney hogget fleece thing with peacock feathers attached.
We heard about the early Scottish settlers; about the Hores farming here for generations and ‘Glenshee’ being the Hore family homestead – “from the garlic Glen Sith – meaning Glen of the Fairies”; about Eden not being much into it, instead converting the shearing shed and ‘diversifying’ – at first into sheepy garments of wool, suede but then these high fashion gowns à la Miss World.
We giggled, we sniggered. My sister snorted that we were all so parochial, and flounced ahead. We straggled along behind, dully, but when we heard about Eden’s vision to turn the farm into a safari park my little sister was off, imagining giraffes and echidnas and rounding me up into a fantasy about a tiger cub that escapes and we find it up by Clunie’s sod hut and sneak it food and it like only trusts us and is our secret and tame but still wild and then and then and like and then.
But I had my own flight of fancy going on – ever since a neighbour had dropped by that morning to warn us that a youth from the Waipiata naughty boys home up the road was on the loose.