My house which became an island

And the booze hearing continues...

Photo by Wolfgang Hasselmann on Unsplash

Many years ago I used to live in an old house on a hill, in a very flat part of a largely flat city. From the upstairs window, if you glimpsed hard to the left, you could see the Takitimu Mountains, invariably snow-capped. And if you opened the window to get a better view, you could get an evocative whiff of the freezing works to the north of Invercargill, if the wind was blowing the right (or I guess the wrong) way.

To the south, on a good day (which I admit is doing heavy lifting in this sentence), you could see all the way to Bluff and Stewart Island. It also meant you could see when the weather was coming. I remember watching out that window as the rain and wind smashed against our old house on the hill, causing it to groan, shake and leak.

From that southern window I remember seeing our backyard start to fill with water, but that was nothing compared to the lake which grew, and grew, and grew further down the hill. I was no longer looking across the water for Stewart Island, the water had come to us, and we were marooned on an island.