A hawk above the cottage, sailing around on thermals, while I am guarding my puppies. My friendly cobras are terrified of dog poo and have decamped to a neighbouring garden. I want them back because otherwise my garden will be overrun with golden moles.
The rock roses, more formally known as cistus and including helianthemums are nearly over, that profusion of briliant papery flowers each day. But the day lilies are coming up, red with apple-green throats, salmon pink, lilac-brown and pale yellow. Ravishing.
And Charlotte came to supper last night bringing me a small dill plant and an entrancing Phlomis fructicosa or Jerusalem Sage. Mustard-yellow, a flowering minaret. I forgave her all her dithering. The new dill must be planted far from my Florentine fennel or the flavours will merge into a peculiar hybrid taste unusable in cuisine. I keep a mental note of plants that overpower or destroy one another if stuck together as companions. The strange pungent powers of blue-green rue kill basil stone dead. Lavender’s aromatics taint a small tricolour sage.
Scrawny Charlotte, who pecks at her food, ate up everything in front of her at supper, with some surprise. Very gratifying. We talked ecology and green politics. Una was bored and played with the pups, sending them into a frenzy. An enjoyable evening.
I have made a Lebanese chicken soup with mint for both Charlotte and another ill friend, Sheila. I am going out to plant my Phlomis in the front garden. One of my favourites.
But right now I am busy guarding my puppies. There are feral cats glaring at them from behind the old Crepuscule rosebush, clotted with apricot roses. The hawk is lazily circling above me. There are snakes busy decamping with some reluctance. Sandfleas. A wild lynx or rooikat has been spotted in the village, come down from the mountain to hunt chickens. The puppies are fearless and exploring each hole and crawling under thickets of tecomeria to sniff at poisonous spiders. Oh, life in Africa, the thrills and spills.
I wish I could protect my garden from the puppies because they have dicovered the joys of digging after watching me plant out parsley and basil and rocket, spading up the rich damp earth. They are digging up the seedlings and attacking the holes with little growls. I sigh and shrug inwardly. Life on life’s terms. Live in Africa and you get to see hawks overhead on a Sunday morning, but you have to live with the danger represented by those hawks. Live with puppies and you live with imperfect holey gardens and chewed furniture.
Later I shall take out a deep wicker armchair and read under the avocado tree, keeping a weather eye on the pups. There is so much I want to read: the collected letters of Graham Greene, selected poems by James Merrill, Roberto Bolano’s 2666. The letters of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. So much to look forward to, so little time.
I was 26 when I discovered the mandarin, complex and startlingly beautiful poems of the late James Merrill, an American poet who ranks as a major influnce of the 20th century. Sitting alone in the old library at the University of Cape Town one hot afternoon, I found the lines that spoke to my own brokenness and deceit and longing for truth. Ambiguity and invocation, the hope and dread implicit in each move towards intimacy:
See through me/
See me through.
Posted by louisey 