When Mary May (then Mary Scurr) was just 15, she was pulled out of school to help her mother with chores - milking the cows, or making the butter, or helping with her eight younger siblings.
The oldest daughter of Cardrona Valley sheep farmers in the 1950s, she did not question it - it was just part and parcel of what life was like back then.
"Dad had me earmarked to come home and help Mum because after all, she had a very big family.
"I used to drive the truck so Dad could feed out on the back of it. We went from loose hay to stacked hay, to little round bales that we had."
She milked the family cows by hand, separated the cream and made butter from scratch.
The daughter of Jack and Mollie Scurr, who farmed sheep at Spotts Creek, she was a rural girl from the beginning, and was probably destined to marry a rural boy, she said.
She eventually did - at 20 years of age.
She met Alan May, of Cromwell, while she was working at the Wanaka post office one evening.
"He was a musterer up at Hunter Valley Station in Hawea.
"He came around to ring his girlfriend, and I think she ditched him that night, something like that. That’s how I met him."
The couple worked on several farms across the district and Lake Hawea Station, where she recalled the Rowleys being "super people".
They then shifted back to the Cardrona Valley before taking on her parent’s farm at Spotts Creek.
"It was modest in size by today’s standards."
The couple farmed much of the flatland, which is now filled with vineyards, and the high country too.
The farm’s original woolshed can now be seen today as part the Peregrine Winery stone building.
The Mays sold the land in 1994 and bought two farms in Tuatapere, Southland.
Within the first two years of living there, Alan developed a brain tumour and died at just 62.
Her husband’s death was devastating, but "you get on with it".
Mrs May moved to Arrowtown in 1998 and found a life of her own, she said.
She developed a garden, joined a local church, got a part-time job and made new friends.
Life alone since had not been easy, she said. But she was grateful for a warm community and to return to the Wakatipu Basin.
Now 89, Mrs May said she loved the way the Gibbston valley had changed over the years.
"The land was on the useless side, you couldn’t farm it. Now they have tidied it up in the Gibbston valley and I just love it the way it is.
"I think progress is wonderful."
