Irwin, Cheryl

As a young woman, I moved from the United States to my husband's family farm on the Canterbury Plains in New Zealand. The original farm house was still there, although in a state of disrepair. I walked in and immediately started imagining what the lives of the people who first settled here would have been like. There were many clues to how they lived: the huge cast-iron cook stove, the butter churn, and the copper urn for heating the washing water were all in their original places. Fragments of lace curtains hung in the broken windows and wafted in the breeze over the abandoned brass bed. I im...