Madison Hamill
Your mother dangles you, a 4-month-old, feet first in a fast-flowing north-Canterbury river. The water, a gushing bridal veil dyed auburn with leaf-litter, comes from the Rolleston glacier and is barely above freezing. It tugs at your frog-like legs. You laugh and laugh.
You live in a flat inland town where snow settles in the winter, looked over by a mountain range that takes the form of Sleeping Beauty, who in winter slumbers beneath a white shroud. The Narnians in your storybook wait for God to come in the form of a lion, thaw their frozen kingdom and kill the witch who made it cold. But not you. On snow days you and your sisters listen to the radio, shushing each other not to miss a word; race up and down the hall; find scraps of old board with which to toboggan down public hillsides.
When there is thunder, you run into your parents' room while the sky cracks its whip. In the fields, where there is nothing tall to divert the current, people have been struck. You imagine them lit up, leaping, now vessels for power, now dead or miraculously unscathed. Your parents' duvet is as white and puffy as good snow, and your mother tells the story of Bad Jelly the Witch, doing all the voices and being the witch, saying, "Just step inside this nice sack and you'll be nice and warm." The witch is going to make the children into sausages and they'll have to escape on the back of Jim the eagle, which is all you want – to fly from a tower on the strong back of an eagle into the crisp unknown.
At 8, you move to a new city, where the weather changes several times a day and you are told to dress for all possibilities, like a witch in drapes of black merino layers, easy to add or remove at short notice. It's hard to keep yourself so hidden and so prepared, so you teach yourself a trick: you decide the weather you want it to be and dress accordingly. Now, if you dress in shorts, no amount of bitter wind could convince you to feel discomfort. You learn to relax into the cold, to un-tense your muscles one by one, to become cold-blooded.