The first mists of autumn

 

Woke up to  the valley blanketed  in mist, the first  of the autumn mists, Damp white and  low cloud right across the fields and  mountain slopes — I couldn’t see to the end of the back garden. And by 9am this solid white fog had burned off in the sun.

Spending time with someone who  grows apricots, saffron  pears,  quinces and  pomegranates in her back garden. She preserves and bottles them, following an old recipe for pickled peaches with vinegar, bay leaves, cloves and chilli that dates back to the French occupation of the Cape in 1803. Her family farmed near Ceres and came over the mountains in ox wagons in the 1920s to farm wheat on the  rolling slopes around here. We sat talking on the  sunlit porch or stoep under a trellis of reddened vines, drinking strong coffee while she told me  family history. Her grandmother used to sit out in the same spot shelling peas into her starched white apron and smoking an old  hand-carved calabash pipe, unusual in a woman then, but she was a skilled midwife and highly respected in the area. She smoked her own fish (snoek, kabbeljou, geelbek) caught down at the coast and  hung up to dry with  plaited strings of onions next to pegged washing, starchy Sunday-best  suits and  cotton frocks  all suspended together in the tiled  laundry room at the back of the  house. White shirt fronts  imbued with  a whiff of  smoky fish…

Shielding my eyes from the  last of the summer sun, the  sky overhead a dome of  sheet-metal at  noon. Today the  eye is rested although still aching a little. There are  luscious pink and white nerines coming up in  all the gardens down this  street,  wild unhybridised nerines known locally as ‘March lilies’. A few retired homesteaders have  white dovecotes standing tall  in their orchards, so that white pigeons are wheeling over the  oaks in perfect formation. And the oaks are now heavy with acorns, fodder for  squirrels and  pigs. All around the valley there will be wild eland and grysbokke come down from the mountains to graze on fallen fruit.

Meditations on country living. The pace of life is slow here and ‘nothing happens overnight’: back home the dogs are all asleep under the avocado tree and lizards are still basking on the back step, a small grey cat sleeping curled up under a berried viburnum bush. Too slow a life perhaps, but in truth I can’t imagine myself growing old in a city, away from seasons and tides and leaf fall..

 

From Stanley Kunitz’ End of Summer

An agitation of the air,

A perturbation of the light

Admonished me the unloved year

Would turn on its hinge that night.

 

I stood in the disenchanted field

Amid the stubble and the stones,

Amazed, while a small worm lisped to me

The song of my marrow-bones.

 

Blue poured into summer blue,

A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,

The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew

That part of my life was over.

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