We turned into Nairn Road and looked out over the park on the left before the end of the road. The long driveway, starting with a mailbox and lined by tall hedgerows, leads down and curves right, past the big mesh gate marking the beginning of the house and the wooden gate that leads into the garden. Past the flower beds at the front of the house we park, just in front of the sheltered porch area where we see Ava’s little car. The large brick garage stands adjacent, full of old junk. The crazed black half-Labrador half-mongrel, Garaja, hops madly at us as we get out of the car, barking and flailing on her length of chain. The chain is connected to a metal wire which strung up like a washing line across half of the back garden, giving her at least a little freedom while my father figures out what to do to stop her escaping. Without the wire and chain she runs and shits all over the garden. Barking, she jumps any height of fence and runs along Nairn road and into the park. Each time she jumped while growing my father built the fence higher, but now has given in.

The cicadas clamour in the garden. Amid the click-clack hum I observe the rich colours of all the species of flowers I will never learn the names of. The bees make their daily rounds, dutifully collecting nectar for their honey, bothering no one. Grass flies leap and fall all across the lawn. By the sliding door is the stretch of smooth red-brick patio, some garden chairs lean up against the white-wash wall and a swinging seat rests in the impression between the kitchen and the master bedroom. To the right Garaja lies prostrate and bored. If I sit on the swinging seat she barks constantly, but otherwise is docile. The whole of Gara's area is all torn up bits of plants and mud. The grass cannot survive under the crazy dog. Her mess is all over the end of the lawn by the garage. In the opposite direction you find the opposite situation. There live an impressive array of flowers and plants that my father has grown and nurtured. Their guests always compliment him on the wonderful state of the garden, all of its colour and neatness and uniform petals. There is a generous vegetable garden, sprouting corn, cucumbers, giant courgettes and tomatoes on the raised and fenced area in front of the garage at the end of the driveway. These are harvested for our meals in such abundance that the grocery shopping is limited to watermelon, pineapple and mushrooms. My father has spent time here. Done work here. He has done this work at every house he has owned. Repeatedly constructing, creating and enjoying them while he had them. Each time he has been forced on, forced to leave everything behind. He still does this work. He will continue if he needs to, in another place, quietly regimenting his family into something good while his hair turns through each whiter shade of grey. He bought this house with two very large trees dominating much of the garden, the red-brick patio stretching across the lawn and a dark log fence separating the lawn area from the patio. He cut down the most overwhelming tree and lopped off the overhanging branch of the other. He took apart the log fence and staggered it on the lawn area to create two new flower-bed areas. There is a smiling snail gnome at the front of the house that greets me every time I arrive.

The barbecue is a permanent construction of brick with a wood burner flanked by two wooden-door cupboards – fuel storage. The brick chimney races fifteen feet in the air and is topped by a metal spout which touches the holly bush and turns the leaves black. My father blithely tells us the chute is long enough that the bush won't catch fire, even in this year of drought conditions where the park's grass has burned in large black patches, perhaps spontaneously. The wood burner has a glorious rusted cast iron front cover from a Tauranga Railways steam engine. The fire heats stone blocks beneath the six square foot metal plate covered in a few leaves and bits of dust and soil. My father heats it up, pours on water to sizzle off while he scrapes off the black and the particles of leaf that remain. The oil goes on, followed by the meat. My father maintains a conveyor-belt of food towards the left where trays will carry it away, perfectly prepared, to the guests. He is meticulous in washing and preparing all food and always uses separate tongs for raw and cooked. Weeks later he explains all of this to a colleague at his own barbecue. My father lectures the host standing by the barbecue as if he was a student and takes over the cooking at every opportunity. Forty years of animal husbandry come to the fore.

We enter the side door into the ‘rumpus’ room which has now been sectioned into a utility room   and the new spare bedroom by way of an arbitrary wall and ceiling that does not yet connect with the roof. There is a washing machine, spare freezer, various cupboards and shoe and coat racks. The new bedroom, half unfinished, needs carpeting and painting. The new plaster gleams with light from the two large windows meant to serve the originally-sized back room. Opposite this, connected to the back room, is the office: a locked door and inside more years of files than the family's three in New Zealand warrant. Two walls of shelving are full of decades old books on dairy farming and the biology of the cow. There is a computer, a couple of second hand wooden desks placed together, all strewn with papers – faxes, files, some print outs of emails. A pot of pens, a phone, a printer. Two ageing metal hole punches and a desk fan facing the wall. There’s a business card selotaped to the computer with a password written on the reverse. An email is pinned to the wall with email addresses of my relatives written in pen below the first in computer font. There are maps of Rotorua and of the world's distribution of language families that serves to point to this family's international home. One end of this room, my father tells me, will soon be snipped off and the desk relocated to make space for a shower and toilet – an en-suite for the new bedroom. I wonder exactly how this might be accomplished, considering his attitude to sorting the shelves of paper. It is a small library of things no one will look at again. A typical mis-managed organisation of everything that might pass through a person's hands in three years. I wonder why and how this has happened, for two people to arrive in suitcases only to re-acquire lengths of papers. Yet those saturated shelves are are nothing compared to the completeness of the house; each carefully chosen piece of furniture and Ava's self-made curtains, couch covers, frocks.

A long corridor leads away from the back door through which we entered, running the length of the house into the open and spacious living room. On each side of the corridor are the three bedrooms and toilet and shower room. The shower in particular is something new to me – like a purpose built walk in wardrobe sized room-within-a-room, with a metal floor sloping to the hole, a water tight magnetic shower door and a standard window, perfect for keeping the bathroom steam free. The shower pressure is perfect. All the bedrooms are standard, decent sized, carpeted. Two children live here in their typical rooms – tv, hi-fi, microscope and no clutter versus a pink rug, dolls, clothes strewn across the floor and bright plastic storage units. Thirteen and eight they act their parts perfectly, fighting, shouting, doing homework on the living room floor. Ava's children from before, and they are loved. This corridor is dark, lending the impression of hurried design, efficient but imperfect architecture. This is not an expensive or showy house, but a lucky piece of quality found in a foreign land. It must be nurtured into its own life.

There is a front door and hallway between the bedrooms and the main living area. There is a bookshelf here and above it some paintings, a phone and a calendar. I find treasure in the bookshelf and steal it away. The living room and kitchen span the width of the house with a dividing brick wall on one side rising not quite to the sloping roof to split the small kitchen away from the spacious living area. Brown leather sofas ring most of the room with one white cloth two seater and another cheap leather one seater. The two brown one-seaters – 'lazyboys' – have the best swing-out foot stool setup that I’ve ever come across. An auction bargain, the set fills one side of the lounging area. I lean back into a lying position and the chair slides on its runners. Ava tells me the tale of how she, from the spare cloth for the curtains, made the covering for the white settee and a number of cushions. Like my father, she has been creating, using her sewing machine to save and make money. The long hallway had been black tile with a long Turkish carpet running its length, but the living room is a plush cream carpet with a large Turkish rug in the centre, and several small occasional tables as mug and book stands. The carpet is dirtied by children's feet. As I enter the room I face two large floor-to-ceiling windows at the end of the house and another on the left. The TV is in the far left corner. On the wall to my left is a chest of drawers and an organ of some kind all covered in family photos and objects of remembrance. The art on the walls is as I would expect from my family here; throughout the house are a hodgepodge of old English and Welsh farming landscapes, sheep and cows, a horse, a road. Their titles are 'Through Gorse and Bracken', 'The Path Across The Common', 'The Church on the Fens' and each is perfect, parochial, more English than England. There are a few ageing portrait photographs of old Turkmens – Ava's family who stand and face the camera in a sepia age, each portrait individual and full of character. The father, grandfather, patriarchs and matriarchs. Their whole family from toddlers squeezing a smile to the great grandmother staring glumly is collected in one photo, showing in one moment the wealth of time that begun in Turkmenistan and has led out here to the bottom of the world where Ava is left with homesickness and phone bills. A gaudy black, silver and gold thread impression of Istanbul hangs, greedily stealing one's attention on the other wall. There is also a Japanese style pagoda-type house overlooking a misty gorge with a splendid run of trees and ferns in delicate oils. It is entirely out of place. On top of the dividing wall there is an arrangement of half empty bottles of whiskies, cognacs and brandies that look untouched for years and extremely attractive. On the side opposite the kitchen there is a log burner with tall chimney in the room's centre that can heat the house from the top down in winter. It is full of bits of wood and rubbish that have been collected through Spring. There are lamps and light fixtures on the walls which later provide a tasteful warming glow and fine reading light for a few of the chairs. On the other end of the dividing wall is another fireplace – electric – and hung up is a digital clock-thermometer-calendar and mini white-board with “Jury Service” written at the top. I can look up at these things when sat down for meals at the dining table which sits in the far right corner of the room, next to the French windows that lead into the wonderful garden. The tall fridge freezer and various counters line both side of the kitchen, which is floored (along with the dining area) by the same black tiles as the hallway. The high sloping ceiling in this room provides a kingly spaciousness, giving the impression of a Nordic beer hall or some alpine cottage where you might ski directly out of the front door onto the piste. There is a strong beam at the zenith with two slowly whirling ceiling fans. This room in its wholeness makes the house, it is the house. Everything else, the bedrooms, the office, the garden, is an accessory. This is their home, and by default it is now my home too, but I do not wish to stay here so long that I feel it to be my home. I have not grown up here and I will not stay for a year or clean or build in this house. I will not raise children here, I will not return here from a honeymoon, nor cook for guests or search for jigsaw pieces. I will not decide to move this there or buy a new one of those. But I am welcomed and invited to do all of these things. There is a pressure to do these things. It is not my house, but I am given all the hospitality that a lost son, found, naturally attains, followed by a pressure of love that wants me to stay and become young again. I will not.

The cicadas clamour in the garden. The furious solar light – stripped of its familiarity – is a hammer thumping from its vertical after the long hot morning. There is an occasional loud call of 'a-goo-ul, a-goo-ul,' that takes me away from this place to a dream of jungles. Vines and fronds. Clearing a path with a machete. Some colonial estate hewn from the spaces, the carcasses of rainforests, continuities broken. Air that is soft and viscous and hot, pleasant on the skin but impossible to breathe. All some wanderlust, a place I will go. And a savannah of wildebeest...