Last day of a fleeting year

Where has the time gone?

Got up before dawn and  watered, planted up more cuttings — by autumn they will be ready to be planted out into  the garden.  Sat and looked at the empty fields and  quiet mountains, the beginning of a new day. The housemate and I took the dog  on a village ramble, past  the cottages with their  beds of  purple statice  (sea lavender) and white-flowering num-num bushes, hardy planting against drought. Verandahs shaded by grape vines,  sunlight and shadow playing on old limed white walls as it did perhaps a century ago. The streams running down through the village are just a trickle. We waved to  elderly villagers sitting out in the morning sun drinking homebrewed coffee with rusks, enjoying the leisurely day just opening up.

Last night was very sad — we went along to the former art teacher to celebrate her 80th birthday and reallised almost at once that  she was too ill and weak to  talk or eat. She should be in hospital but wept so pitifully at the prospect that we just set out chairs around her bed and sat with her as she dozed off from time to time. I hope she rallies, brave and indomitable  character that she is. All around her she had flowers, bunches of wild flowers, roses and lilies but she has not been able to get into her wheelchair for weeks, has not sat in her garden with its  Monet feel of pools and  bright  lovely flowers.

She asked me how the garden looked and I hadn’t the heart to say it was overgrown and neglected, many pot plants dead. I told her about the  white Stephanotis floribunda (Madagascan jasmine) twining itself around an old pillar and the clustered pods of wisteria tapping against the trunk and walls. Then she got that faraway look I dread and  we fell silent, though she squeezed my hand. We had a few mouthfuls of food, kissed her goodbye and let the night nurse take over,  came home.

Arrived back to find the neighbour hushing the Great Dane who had been howling with loneliness,  was thrilled to see us. Just as well neighbours in this street are animal lovers.

My small dog has kennel cough, incubating since her trip to the  doggie beauty parlour. I gave her honey on a spoon to ease her cough  and made a chicken soup for dogs with skinless boned thigh meat and mashed carrot. All three dogs are likely to get  kennel cough (tracheobronchitis) because it is highly infectious. The vet was happy to hear from me yet again and said he doesn’t believe in treating this with antibiotics, most infections  pass over quickly enough. He said I am welcome to bring the dogs in for a consultation. And infect a waiting room full of other dogs? So I shall see how my little Chlobi-wa-kenobi does. She has no temperature  and is lively as ever but sounds like an old smoker with a 60-a-day habit.

Looking forward to a quiet  evening with friends, hoping I stay awake until midnight. I wake most mornings before 5am, but go to bed at 10pm and  my days of being a party animal are long gone. You’ll always find me in the kitchen at parties…

Happy New year to  all my blogger friends and readers, I hope this will be a sober, peaceful and  contented year for all of us.

Holding steady in the liminal years

 

Peach preserves waiting to be decanted, smallish terracotta pots on the verandah lined up waiting for planting, another chapter with footnotes to be rechecked, giant dog unable to understand the words ‘Sit’ or ‘Stay’.  I look at the syrup-glazed peaches and think of  eating my own bottled peaches  with thick custard on a cold winter evening, look at the pots  standing in a row and think of tumbling  fuschias in scarlet and purple, the  lively mauve of the ribbon bush, sprawling apple-mint and lemon-scented pelargoniums. One of these days the chapter will be checked and tidied up and ready for publication, the agony over. One of these days the  adorable lunatic puppy will be a well-behaved obedient dog.

An American visitor from Atlanta, Georgia, dressed vividly in  a red and blue tropicana T-shirt, a black sun visor, strings of  local ochre clay beads dangling from her neck and wrists,  stops by to ask me for some parsley. In one hasty gulp of breath she tells me she voted for Obama, she does not support American aggression abroad, she  likes to think of herself as different from other American tourists, she is genuinely interested in  the problems of rural Africa, she tries to contribute meaningfully, tries to show respect for cultural difference, feels she can learn from the heroic liberation efforts and  staggering natural  beauty etc of the Third World.  Fortunately she runs out of breath and I  assure her we don’t see  all Americans as Ugly Americans,  give her  a large bunch of flourishing Italian parsley.  She thanks me as if I have given her a gilt-edged credit card or a wide-eyed baby to adopt. Guilt and privilege seems an inescapable combination. And tourism worldwide lends itself to satire, exposing the increasingly homogenous ‘global culture’ where, in the search for different cultures, those exotic fascinating different cultures are destroyed. My parsley-clutching acquaintance says  how she loves to meet  black  South Africans and listen to them talk about their  dreams and  hardships.

Well, I could give her a list of black South African entrepreneurs living in Atlanta, Georgia, and  more than willing to talk to her about their dreams and hardships, but  that wouldn’t be the same thing, would it? The writer Geoff Dyer wrote a piece on the charm of American travellers in which he comments:

The archetypal American abroad is perceived as loud and crass even though actually existing American tourists are distinguished by the way they address bus drivers and bartenders as “sir” and are effusive in their thanks when any small service is rendered. We look on with some confusion at these encounters because, on the one hand, the Americans seem a bit country-bumpkinish, and, on the other, good manners are a form of sophistication.

The tranquillity and  delightful unsociableness of our post-Christmas respite is over. There is  a luncheon party on a nearby farm, the  80th birthday of the former art teacher,  friends arriving for  New Year’s Eve, more friends arriving on New Year’s Day.  More Asian chicken salad, more homebaked bread,  a watermelon, feta and black olives salad, another baked ham, a berry pavlova perhaps, jugs of  lemonade with  fresh mint leaves. The skies are cloudless, the nights starry and brilliant, warm and scented. If the guests don’t get heat stroke, it will be perfect.

Whatever it was — that unsteadying combination of unhappy or traumatic factors — that flipped me so off-balance in December has gone. As if we had jumped over a hurdle and now just have to turn the corner into another year. At night, I light candles on the verandah and sit there watching the moon come up over the  mountains, just breathing in the silence and the  spaciousness within.

We live in fragile and liminal times of collapsing economies,  global conflict, shifting and threatened climates and ecologies, older nationalisms falling away along with so many older certainties — we need different and more responsive traditions, more frugality, more authentic ways of connecting from different places. Goodwill is not enough. How to become more flexible, receptive, less fearful, rigid, judgmental? I have no idea really  and watch the  moon whiten the fields,  the stars of the Southern Cross filling the skies with brightness.

The daily mundane, so valued

Up well before dawn and  watered the garden against the heat to come. My elderly neighbour helped mend my sprinkler system, a crude business of a thick patched hose and  smaller tubes, but it runs along the  front of the house and  may keep some of my  little grey bushes of santolina,  helichrysum  and the  climbing aloes and heliotrope alive. Sun just  breaking over the mountain peaks as I finish weeding and  mulching. Turtledoves chuckling overhead in the loquat trees. I like to stand bare-legged in the  low spray, deadheading and  with no fierce sun on my back yet.  Life returned to  sweet blessed ordinariness.

Fennel, bronze and a wild lemony green, racing to seed in the back garden, yellowy pollened umbels and the seeds I can collect in a little brown paper bag and dry. Plaited shallots and  garlic drying  in the kitchen.  In the hedge there is the ‘Black Knight’ dark purple panicles of the buddleia, swarming with bees and butterflies.

The poet Zbigniew Herbert on the Greek landscape, so many parallels here:

“Whoever comes here with the palette of an Italian landscape painter will have to abandon all sweet colors. The earth is burnt by the sun, parched from drought, it has the color of bright ash, sometimes of gray violet or violent red.”

Today I must  make preserves or jams from all the fresh peaches and plums in the kitchen. Not looking forward to standing over  simmering pots and pans of syrup and boiling fruit,  sterilising  jars and finding reliable rubber rings. I don’t have an aptitude for  this kind of  culinary  skill — but the fruit cannot go to waste, the jams and  clear amber or  crimson  jellied preserves will be  needed in winter. And it is my turn to make soups for the valley soup kitchen, more than enough vegetables and homemade chicken stock for the 10-litre pots. Some left-over panettone the housemate turned into a delectable trifle.

On the whole nobody ate too much — probably due to the heat — and we all went for long walks and swam, a healthy enough festive time. We talked and talked. The usual human tensions and  squiffy dynamics at moments, what else?

A note I made in a journal late last night: The fear of abandonment so deep in each of us. So I never plant a herb or plan for a meal without some presentiment of loss or failure, a small darkness nudging at my  elbow. And when it comes to expectations, the sentimental is the enemy. As it is with writing.

The learning curve that is life in sobriety.

IN RESPONSE TO A REQUEST TO
“EXPLAIN THE SECRET OF TEACHING”

If I explained aloud, then it wouldn’t be a true explanation,
And if I transmitted it on paper, then where would be the secret?
At a western window on a rainy autumn night
White hair in the guttering lamplight, asleep facing the bed.
—Gido Shushin, translated by David Pollack

Hope in broken places

 

Behind the nearest range of granite mountains, veld fires are raging, driven across fields, orchards and vineyards by a strong north wind. We go out to help throw wet sacks onto pallets of fruit  stacked outside packing sheds and watch helicopters  tip massive buckets  of sea water onto  lines of flame. The only real drama this festive season,  outranking all the petty stuff. Wild animals in flight, so many small  tortoises incinerated, fledgling birds choked on the thick smoke. The land alight, lines of fire licking at the edges of  squatter camps from which people flee with cardboard boxes of  bedding and pots, fire crawling deep into thickets amidst the mountain ravines, leaping the dry river beds.

You cannot live on this  continent without  learning to live with cruelty and  extremes, with  fire and floods, with a paucity of resources, with suffering and indifference, with  myriad powerless places.

And the morning light is phosphorescent: I sit up in a yellow-eyed dawn writing and  drafting out new  sentences, finding my way to a new voice. The need for growth and change, this too, as so often when the  solstice  pauses and the season turns. Just say what it is like, just  tell the story without shying from the rougher truths, let the ugliness in along with the beauty.  Hope sometimes  is found only in broken places.

It was a celebratory time, a quiet and lovely time, not an easy time but good. Another year of coming through, another year touched by invisible grace in unexpected places.

Peace to all

 

And peace and goodwill to all…

Windy and bright, friends, neighbours  and guests coming and going. A hot summer’s morning in South Africa, Christmas day 2011. There are tiny whippy  scorpions running about in the garage, almost invisible. I go in to collect firewood wearing gumboots.

The dog moseyed into the kitchen and had a few slices of unattended panettone. Delizioso, squisito!

The fresh galjoen lies on a slab of marble in the fridge  glaring up at me with its  fishy eye. Prawns to be deveined and peeled. On the stove I have  a pot of butter and lemon sauce to anoint the  fish on the grill over seething coals. The day stuttering into life — all night I suffered with Camembert dreams of lurid nonsensicality. Cheese before bedtime sends the imagination into overdrive.

Wrapping paper scattered all over the living room floor. Church bells waking the village, wind in the tree tops. The LED fairy lights have stopped working, it doesn’t matter. The tables are  laid out in red and green, ivy trailing from jugs of starry myrtle, small teak bowls of pecan and macadamia nuts, larger bowls of  oranges and clementines.

Take a deep breath and join the dance.

A poem for Christmas:

Sonnet in the Shape of a Potted Tree

By George Starbuck

O

fury-

bedecked!

O glitter-torn!

Let the wild wind erect

bonbonbonanzas; junipers affect

frostyfreeze turbans; iciclestuff adorn

all cuckolded creation in a madcap crown of horn!

It’s a new day; no scapegrace of a sect

tidying up the ashtrays playing Daughter-in-Law Elect;

bells! bibelots! popsicle cigars! shatter the glassware! a son born

now

now

while ox and ass and infant lie

together as poor creatures will

and tears of her exertion still

cling in the spent girl’s eye

and a great firework in the sky

drifts to the western hill.

Befriending darkness

Visitors come and go, the guest list for Christmas Day luncheon  increases. There are friends heading down to holiday cottages on the coast, dropping off bags of ripe plums and  panettone. There are homesick  South Africans just back from a year working abroad, tears in their eyes at the sight of Table Mountain and the Mother City shaped around the green  bay that once sheltered Dutch sailors  searching for the Spice Route to India. There are families  come to say goodbye before they head off to the Fish River and Amatola mountains for  reunions in Xhosa cattle country. There are aimless pallid  holiday makers, foreign tourists  sighing over the beauty of the countryside, sun-dazzled after the grey northern climates from which they have escaped.

The purple-blue of the jacarandas against the  blue of cloudless skies is breathtaking. The dog has a new red rubber bone and marches around   hoping someone will try to take it away from him. A fisherman friend  up from Malgas on the Breede River, a small village with the only river pont left in the country, has brought us fresh galjoen, a tasty  fish known also as black bream — so the menu has changed again. I send guests out into the garden with  bashed straw hats and sun creams, jugs of  homemade gingerbeer. Earlier I cut branches of starry myrtle for the house. I have repotted my  haworthia succulents in a green and black pot and they look spectacular.

The shadows of crime, violence, poverty are never far away. Are they ever? Stay with the darkness, I  tell myself, embrace the fear and dread. Darkness and light both have their place in this season. It will pass.

Siyahambe, the music drifts down through the village from the  community hall where the African Zionist  community are singing the  old Zulu  marching freedom song Siyahambe, known in the West as Walking in the Light of God. God being Mwari rather than the God of Christian  understanding although this song is sung by many Christian groups. Mwari is the bringer of peace, the bringer of rain, the comforter of the  poor, there for those who have no-one to pray for them, those whom the ancestors do not protect. Mwari has a luminous light that is dark at its core, a womb-darkness.

Siyahamba ekukhanyeni kwenkos’.

Siyahamba, hamba, siyahamba, hamba

 

 

 

Someone to watch over us

Just taking a moment to think of the homeless all across this great lonely world.

You know, it doesn’t matter if you’re homeless because you’re a destitute refugee from Zimbabwe or Mozambique, if you are mentally ill and  guarding your park bench, if you’re an alcoholic or an addict  trapped in  a vice that keeps squeezing you into a smaller and smaller space.

It’s getting dark and cold and there is nowhere to go. Nobody cares. Nobody has left a light on  for those  of us who have lost our way home.

Under a bridge next to the railway on the Simonstown route, the homeless used to sing this  on nights when the rain was coming down and the crackling acacia fires in disused petrol drums sank low. From the  great Ella Fitzgerald:

Tell me where’s the shepherd for this lost lamb

There’s a somebody I’m longing to see
I hope that he turns out to be
Someone to watch over me

I’m a little lamb who’s lost in a wood
I know I could always be good
To one who’ll watch over me

 

Taken at the flood

On the old rose-red Italian platter I bought way back in 1992 there are heaped ripe peaches, so fragrant that the kitchen smells like an orchard.

My plans for a sedate  weekend are  running away in all directions. The housemate had a call from an old friend and invited her  to drive four hours from another remote village to visit us.

‘Tutti loves dogs too,’ said the housemate happily. ‘She is not sure if she can get all five retrievers into the back of her  ancient Volvo, but Satchi will have friends to play with. Isn’t that nice? She is bringing some home-cured salmon and dill gravlax as well as salt beef in a bucket of brine. She may have to leave her husband at home because there  won’t be room in the car.’

Mary:

One of  the newly sober  women (let’s call her X or Xanthe) coming over for a sedate Christmas lunch under the olive trees rang me to say the guitar-playing ex-boyfriend with a  little drink problem has been charged with assaulting his former wife.

Xanthe: He wouldn’t hurt a fly. The sweetest man. She must have provoked him beyond reason. I am selling my  grandmother’s pearl ring to  get bail for him. All I can think about is him and I may have to stay here  in my apartment all alone on Christmas day in case he needs me.

Mary:

The other newly sober woman, (called Y or Yolande) is on a shimmering pink cloud at 65 days sober. She is bringing along a video camera so she can video the luncheon and capture the thrilling occasion for posterity. Do I want a camera in my face as I  watch eight dogs tearing around the garden while eating  salmon that  glows in the dark?

Mary:

Yolande’s video project is taking on the glamour of Angelina Jolie’s directorial debut. She has so much energy she  wants to climb  the  Cape fold mountains in  ferocious summer heat. In January she will have her ears pinned back for cosmetic enhancement and embark on a film-maker’s course. In April she  wants to relocate to Nairobi.  She has given up smoking, caffeine, chocolate, men, romantic comedies, her job, antidepressants. And alcohol.

It”s called acceptance, I suppose. Life like a river in spate, carrying along dreams, expectations and   hopes like trees wrenched  up by their roots. So I plunge into the river, hoping for a calmer eddy, a safe current,  and  wonder if I  shall sink or swim, my  life entangled with the lives of others, all of us coming up for air and  chancing the rapids. Waving not drowning. Shakespeare comes back to me:

There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in.

Summer solstice

A dazzling brightness on mid-summer’s night here in the dusty valley, the summer solstice marking the longest day in the southern hemisphere. Neighbours up the road making  potato latkes for Hannukah, the Festival of Lights, much party-going in the village.

The housemate  and I made devilled eggs by the dozen (about three dozen) using a recipe I found in Smitten Kitchen, one of my favourite and most reliable food blogs. This is Caesar Salad Devilled Eggs, a deluxe version of devilled eggs and fairly time-consuming to make, which was not a bad idea considering how flattened and bleak I felt. We adapted this recipe to serve about 30 people, tripling the quantities and tasting as we seasoned, but I’m leaving the original with a few comments from me in italics. The eggs were a wow and  not one was left.

Caesar Salad Deviled Eggs
Adapted from Good Food to Share

Serves 6 to 12

To make these and bring them to a party, Sarah-Kate suggests that you can prepare the filling and crumbs separately and assemble them when you get there. This will ensure that the yolks don’t dry out and the crumbs stay crisp and light.

6 large eggs
12 small romaine lettuce leaves [We used lots and lots of  gem lettuce leaves for little cups]
2 to 3 tablespoons mayo (2 is suggested but 3 will make a creamier filling)
2 teaspoons smooth Dijon mustard
1/4 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce (optional) [I used a mixture of Worcester sauce, light soy and  balsamic]
1/2 teaspoon lemon juice
2 tablespoons chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 anchovy fillet, minced
1 small clove garlic, minced
1/4 teaspoon grated lemon zest
1/4 cups (30 grams) panko bread crumbs [I used day-old ciabatta crumbs, lightly toasted and ground]
2 tablespoons freshly grated Parmesan cheese or more to taste

Place the eggs in a saucepan and cover with water. Bring to a boil over high heat. Once water begins to boil, reduce it to medium-low and simmer eggs for exactly 10 minutes. Drain eggs and cover with cold water. Sitting them in ice water will help the eggs chill more quickly.

Do ahead: As I discovered giving your eggs two to four days to rest in the fridge ensures that they peel more easily. If you’ve got time, do this now. [We should have done the eggs a day or two before because our eggs were large organic, very fresh and  hard to shell.]

Arrange 12 small lettuce leaves on a serving platter. Carefully peel the eggs and cut in half lengthwise. Remove the yolks and place them in a small bowl. Arrange the whites on leaves. Mash the yolks with the mayo, Dijon, Worcestershire (if using), lemon juice and 1 tablespoon of the parsley until smooth. Season generously with salt and freshly ground black pepper. Set the filling aside.

In a small skillet, heat the olive oil over medium heat. Add the anchovy and garlic and cook, stirring, until the anchovy begins to dissolve into the oil, about 1 minute. Add the lemon zest and bread crumbs and saute them until golden, about 2 to 3 minutes. Stir in Parmesan and set crumbs aside.

When you’re ready to serve the eggs, spoon the yolk mixture back into the cavities of the egg whites, mounding it slightly in the center. (To make extra-cute eggs, you can pipe the filling with a star tip.) Sprinkle each egg with some of the crumb mixture (about 1 teaspoon), allowing some to spill onto the lettuce cups. Garnish with remaining chopped parsley and serve.

Then the housemate had to go and check on her home carers because there are patients ill with typhoid out on  the farms. Each summer, there are cholera and typhoid outbreaks, hard to contain and  heartbreaking because small children and the elderly, the most vulnerable, are the first to die.

Off I went to the  party in my capri pants and  shaven legs, hair washed, smile in place, bearing platters of eggs. A large  acquaintance with a pony tail  cornered me and lectured me about druids. This kind of thing happens at solstice. Ill-met by moonlight! I escaped and discussed the genealogy of the 1820 Settlers with another neighbour who has just discovered that her great-great-grandfather died of leprosy in the leper colony on Robben Island in 1850 and that his grandfather fled from a debtor’s prison in Somerset, England, to arrive on the banks of the Fish River in South Africa in 1820 and find that none of his English fruit farming skills were any use to him out  here amidst the dry river beds and snakes.

Most of us at the party knew one another and so conversation flowed. D invited  me to a musical evening  at her home on the 23 January,  chamber music with a supper dish of  curried mussels at interval. Live dangerously! M showed me a glass lamp she had made with smoked glass and a variety of welding tools, a lovely unusual lamp in amethyst and blue. Everyone asked after the Great Dane pup who has acquired a degree of  fame or notoriety. G and I had a spirited discussion on e-publishing and marketing one’s own work. T told us all about her  children’s book, begun when her  children were toddlers. The toddlers now have adult children of their own and the book is still  without an ending. All this interrupted by the deaf  former Presbyterian minister who got up and said a long grace even though we had been  eating snacks for  several hours, then attacked the worship of druidry right in the heart of a respectable village. The druidic pony-tailed guest looked thrilled.  Ironically, we  all then went out into the garden to admire a Cape Chestnut tree (Calodendrum capensus) with spreading canopy and  deep green leaves. Moonlight  whitening the garden, shadows deep as  any woodland glade.

The druidic influence  perhaps winning out on a mid-summer’s night!

Walk if you can’t dance

One of those mornings when waking was like crawling out of a dark pit — but the phone was ringing, the kettle whistling, the dog clambering onto the kitchen table  to show he could do it.

Dog: Why did  Tensing and Hillary climb Everest? Because it was there!

And the sun was shining, the white and  pink  abelia bushes all in flower, pools of icy mountain water flowing across the back garden, little orange butterflies and dragon flies dancing  in the warm still sunshine. The housemate  is making devilled eggs to take to  a festive party this evening. The crackpot landlord is  flying off to France on some nefarious business deal, shouts ‘Allo! Allo!‘ and  winks lasciviously at me while searching for  a red neck scarf to attract rich French widows. I am supposed to give a literacy class this morning. And finish  another  16 000 words of  editorial.

Crawling out  of the dark pit and feeling  slow-witted, absurd, ungrateful, ashamed to not be coping better. The sun is like broken egg yolk.

‘Why are you weeping?’ said Bembel Rudzuk.
‘I am suffering from an attack of history,’ I said.
‘It will pass,’ said Bembel Rudzuk.
-  Pilgermann

One of the  newly sober women  who  will be here for lunch on Christmas Day calls to ask if her  still-drinking ex-boyfriend can come along with her because she  is afraid he will  behave worse if she is not there to keep an eye on him.

‘No,’ I say promptly and with relief that I  know my own mind on this at least.

‘He will just sit at the far end of the garden with his  Baccardi rum and  play his guitar and  not cause any trouble,’ she says with that  cluelessness I remember in myself  at  six weeks sober. Gosh, what could go wrong? How could a melancholy drunk sitting all alone with his booze and his  droopy moustache, his six-stringed guitar and a tuneless rendition of My Sweet Lord spoil the lunch for everyone else?

He will, trust me, he will. Drunks have to do what they have to do.

The heat is belting up into  the stratosphere. If I shave my legs, that might galvanise my sluggish body into action. Smooth egg-shell calves so I can help make  retro-50s devilled eggs  and go off to the festive party in capri pants, find a red polka-dot scarf for the mad landlord, get the dog off the kitchen table and wash  my only  decent-looking dark blue capri pants so they  might dry by this evening.

If I stand still, I might be eaten alive by  my own demons. Besides, I need to stop thinking  about this quotation from Jeanette Winterson:

“[U]nhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven. He or she has to learn to forgive him or herself.”