Convalescence

Sick as a dog. Went out and did my bit, then came back home very pale and interesting and lay low for most of the day, sipping grape juice or ginger ale and tolerating the presence of hot wriggly puppies on the bed with me. I read Laurie Colwin’s Home Cooking which is not so much a cookbook as a celebration of life with broccoli and red peppers and the only way to make potato salad. By the time I discovered Laurie Colwin she was already dead, far too young, from a stroke, and with so many wonderful books unwritten. Those who know and love her work are like old friends, we can quote long passages to each other on having an English tea at Heal’s with clotted cream, or talk about the worst mistakes we have made as cooks.

 

Eventually I got up washed my pale and queasy face and went out to water pots on my stoep. As I was tilting the watering can over a pot of agapanthus, singing Little Drummer Boy to myself, a great black and grey and green mottled toad leapt out of the pot and landed on my bare foot.

 

With presence of mind, I screamed, dropped the watering can, tore indoors and lay on my bed hyperventilating. I am not afraid of toads or frogs but dislike sudden jumps and clammy contact. My neighbour Thinus came by and kindly lifted the distressed and shocked toad into a bucket and took it down to the river. 

 

The puppies found this very entertaining and flung themselves around the house barking in squeaky falsettos and tried to eat my toes off when  I got up to have some strong sweet tea.

 

One of those days…

Yule in summer

A few months ago I was walking along Great Ormond Street and wondering about the old hospital, and going to the market in Portobello Road, and looking at flowering peach trees in Notting Hill. A few months ago I was noting the rain pouring down on Mid-Summer’s Eve in the Welsh hills. Waiting for tomatoes to ripen. Planning a new life.

 

Now I am here in South Africa thinking about the summer solstice, the season turning towards autumn. Thinking about friends overseas at Yule, burning great logs in old brick fireplaces, turning on the gas heaters, braving the cold and snow to get to meetings, struggling with depression as the darkness blots out most of the day. I missed the Cape winter this last year, experienced a double spring and summer.  It is a little confusing, moving between hemispheres. My sense of place is uncertain and I have struggled to know where I belong. In an interview with the novel writer Junot Diaz, a Dominican who moved to live in New Jersey, he says that nothing is harder for the immigrant than living in a country where nobody gives a fuck about you. South Africa has never felt home to me the way Zimbabwe did or regions of England. When I was in Wales, so much came alive in me, an inner person I had not known about.

 

And accepting that I am back here has been a struggle. But I have had the opportunity to learn something very grounding about staying present to my own context, the here and now. Drinking used to take me into daydreams and nostalgia and wishing for elsewhere and otherwise; sobriety roots me in my own limitations and the gift of the moment.

 

Came back from helping out in the informal settlement late last night and fell into bed. Then woke up an hour or so later with a ferocious gut ache and that nasty sensation of the bowels turning to water. Furnace heat and outside I saw the skies bright and glittery with stars like crushed glass. Went to the bathroom and found myself throwing up, feverish and dizzy, with an upset stomach. Hoped to hell it was heat stroke and not cholera. But it passed, and I had some iced water to sip and slept in late this morning. My chief worry was not being able to get back out there and help with the food preparation or the sorting of documents, the washing of the elderly. I feel useful and needed, in a good way. Healthy caregiving.

 

Service is crucial to sobriety. I don’t altogether know why; and I am not keen on rescuing others, propping up those who prefer irresponsibility, or tolerating egotistic whining from the newly sober. I have done my share of whining and complaining and that was enough, thank you.  But service in a very simple pragmatic sense erodes our selfishness and keeps us humble. I am always wary of using this kind of language but here it fits.

 

My puppies have a new dance, a kind of sideways moon dance, skittering sideways on their tiny hind legs, jumping for the joy of it. An exquisite choreography of desire.