I’m writing this in our little office (which, thankfully, now has air-con) on a beautiful February afternoon, and the temperature is rising towards 27 degrees. In a second, I’ll turn on the AC and it will be bearable for the afternoon. We installed it last year, after several years of baking-hot deadlines. I do like an open window, but sometimes you just need climate control, right?

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Meanwhile, outside, cicadas are in full chorus in the pōhutukawa across the road – which, remarkably, still has a handful of red blossoms on it. This morning, dropping the kids to school, a drift of bees hovered in the gaura in our new front garden, humming in the morning light. There is that sense you get in high summer that you’re on the very edge of a change to something else.

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And so I found myself thinking, as I always wonder at this time of year: why are we here in the city? Surely we should be at the beach. Why do we take holidays in December when the water’s still cold? And why are the kids at school in this bloody heat? Yes, I know, this is one of the oldest, and possibly most trivial, arguments in Aotearoa, and is the more irrelevant given everything going on right now. But still.

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There are pluses. Our garden has taken off this summer and now we get to enjoy it: our juvenile peach tree is laden with fruit – peaches! In Tāmaki! The tecomanthe is slowly winding its way over the fence, and the ribbonwoods are starting to screen us from the neighbours. A year ago it was a scraped building site, and now it is lush, if slightly gawky. We’ve started referring to this as its teenage phase. Some of the plants are tall, some are taking longer. This time next year it will look different again.

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So maybe it’s useful to think about this season as ngahuru, rather than autumn – specifically Poutūterangi, which is the time of year that relates to harvest. It feels like a more localised term, with implications of abundance – bees and food-gathering – rather than the end of something.

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Hopefully, we still have plenty of warm evenings ahead of us, sitting outside in the fading light, enjoying the feeling of being at home. Or maybe even enjoying the fact that you can head to Castor Bay Beach on the North Shore, swim out to the pontoon, look down the harbour past Rangitoto to the far end of the gulf, and marvel that this is your city.

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I guess that’s what we meant when we called the issue Private Universe. The idea of creating a meaningful life at home – wherever that is.

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