Migrating birds like the godwits come and go and, after floods, sand bars migrate towards the sea.
Over the years I have watched a piece of "three square" (Schoenocarpus pungens) arrive and then multiply. This native sedge has, by now, established quite a large patch. The half metre high, dark green, triangular stems catch sand and the beach is slowly building up around them.
The devastating June 2015 floods did not affect our section in town - unlike our piece of land up the river.
As I explain to friends and family who ring us up when the latest flood makes the TV news, in Bedford Avenue we are too close to the sea for the Whanganui to rise up much past the high tide mark.
Further up the river, the peak of the one in 150-year flood coming down the river met the peak of a king tide going up the river right about at our piece of land. The two sine waves reinforced, resulting in a spectacular two metres higher than the last biggest flood in 1990 and we had over a metre of water through the complex of sheds we call our summer camp.
The 2015 flood wasn't just a huge flood, it was more like a very liquid slip and the whole landscape started flowing leaving 200 millimetres of silty goo all over our lower flats. It took fully six months before it was dry enough for a digger to scrape it off.
In past floods it was not uncommon for the river to come over the road and back up into our creek. After June 2015 it was months before you could even walk down there without loosing a gumboot.
By the end of the following summer it was starting to grow an assortment of weeds that had floated in - willow branches, tradescantia and the dreaded horsetail rush were all sprouting and needed to be dealt to.
The first crop of seedlings to sprout in the sterile silt was kanuka, which I allowed to grow for firewood.
Fortunately the white flowering rata (Meterosideros diffusa) climbing up an ancient mahoe survived being inundated.
In the past I had fenced off a riparian strip until I realised what a weed control problem I had created. These days I take a middle path and let the stock in when it is dry and exclude them when it is wet.
Nowadays when I see a press report of a Green Pollyanna leading a bunch of schoolchildren planting out another riparian strip with native plants I wonder: "Who's going to do the follow-up weed control?"
As a keen fisherman from Marton pointed out in the Chronicle recently, many of the region's riparian strips have turned into weed-infested jungles.
While our next house is being built we are moving into the summer camp up the river. While some people our age are moving into a retirement village, we are moving into a caravan.
My travel companion in this journey through life is a little nervous about moving on to a floodplain. "If a flood is coming we can haul the caravan to higher ground," I reassure her.
In the time our shed has been flooded once, the Anzac Parade houses have been flooded three or four times. "They are the ones you should be worrying for," I explain.
*When Fred Frederikse is not building, he is a self-directed student of geography and traveller. In his spare time he is co-chair of the Whanganui Musicians Club
