This is a belated Mothers’ Day post. (Technically I’m still in time, because it’s still Sunday 8 May here.)

(by Gaetan Henrioux at Art Data Bank)

Vehicles my mother has driven

• A Mark II Ford Cortina (three-column change)

• A white Nissan Stanza with chocolate-brown seats and the dog’s tartan blanket inside (“Your mum’s a terrible driver,” said my friends on a trip up to the big smoke, Hamilton. To my shame, I didn’t leap to her defense.)

• 49 CC motorbike (colour unknown) in Christchurch, 1975, between her flat, Otago university campus, and the airbase, where she flew a …

• Lerke, a kind of long-nosed glider at Wigram airbase

• Yellow kayak, with dachshund, on the Tairua River of the Coromandel Peninsula

• Yellow kayak, solo, in Blenheim, on the river behind the backyard, with ducks (real and rubber)

• Pick-up truck, in Blenheim, when shifting all of my boxes of books, furniture, bags, bedding from Wellington when I was leaving New Zealand

• A navy blue Fiat Uno around 1991, 92, back seat stacked high with my dad’s accounting files in filing boxes

• A long white van loaded with fifth-form Japanese students, the wrong way down all of Wellington’s one-way streets on a school trip

• A midnight-blue Fiat Coupé (the car my dad purchased when he bought 50. On the streets of Te Kuiti admist the yellow trucks and sheep trucks and Ladas and Holdens, the Coupé looked ridiculous, but Mum gave it a mien of glamour)

• A holey rusted wheelbarrow, to cart compost, lawn clippings, dead-heads, oxalis bulbs etc. around the garden (often followed by a caravan of chickens).

by Aaaamandaaaa via Flickr