The Cream of Matakana

One of the places Heather suggested I check out was The Cream of Matakana. “It’s in the dairy co-op building,” she told me. That sounded interesting. Taste a little New Zealand butter or what have you.

Except, of course, the old co-op, where they once made Matakana Pure Creamery Butter (“The Delight of the Table”) hasn’t churned out any dairy products since 1963 when it closed down. Now it’s a bit of an arts complex with a place to do pottery and an eclectic design store called The Cream of Matakana. Out in front of the store, sitting at a wooden picnic table, was a young woman in a straw bonnet and sunglasses soaking in the sun and reading the newspaper. When I started up the steps of the store, she turned half way around and said, “If something catches your fancy, just give me a shout.”

I went back down the steps and asked her if she worked there. She said she did. “I should be inside,” she said, “but it’s too bloody cold. The building was designed to keep the milk cold you know and they did a good job of it.”

She was right. Inside the store, with its concrete floor and high ceilings, it was like a meat locker (remember it’s winter down here).

Now, I’m not the one to call The Cream of Matakana an eclectic design store. That’s what they call themselves on the little sign attached to an old push lawn mower in front of the store. But I think they’ve got it right. There were necklaces with little resin birds in red and black and blue; a brooch of glass jet planes that looked like they could have been little candies; blocks of lavendar or cinnamon soap; jars of colorful bath salts; tie-dyed baby hats; pink or lime watering cans with flowers on them; pillows made from recycled vintage blankets; and lots of framed photographs of what looked like local scenes—the beach, smooth stones, water.

What I settled on was an odd painting with six stylized portraits of what looks like the same cartoonish woman, one with a crown on her head, another with a blue page-boy haircut. It was as if a six-year-old had decided to make six little portraits of her mother in different moods from silly to sad.

I went back outside and told the woman sitting in the sun that I’d found something that caught my fancy. She came inside, picked up the painting, and gave it a good luck. “Oh, yeah, that’s nice isn’t it?” she said, as if this were the first time she’d ever seen it (and maybe it was). I asked her if she could wrap it in bubble wrap or something since I was going to have to transport it back to the States.

“Is it a gift then?” she asked.

It is, I told her. For a woman I knew who had multiple-personalities. “You never know which one is going to show up.”

“This will be perfect then,” she said.

Yes, I told her. Perfect.