Mother and Child Reunion

Mother’s Day

I had a call this morning from Alex to wish me a happy mother’s day. It was lovely to hear from him (he phones me at least once a week for recipes and other life skills which I obviously neglected to teach him when he lived at home). I don’t think that if he were on his own he would know that it was mother’s day, just like he doesn’t know when my birthday is, but fortunately for me he lives with other boys whose mothers are more demanding and so he is forced, through circumstance, to acknowledge this day.

It’s funny how I can go for ages without missing the blighters, but come a day like mother’s day and suddenly I’m reminded that my children are not here. Not, as I’ve mentioned before, that I’ve ever really spent mother’s day with them or that we’ve made an issue of it, but that’s not the point. The fact of the matter is that they are very far away.

I decided to cook lunch for my mum today. She loves gammon, so I boiled a gammon in Appletiser, made boulangère potatoes and winter veggies au gratin, plus a lemon pudding. Not bad, I thought. I asked her if she wanted to come down to us, but she said she would prefer for us to bring the meal to her. When we traipsed up the steps to the wee house with all the grub, I was amazed to find the dining table so beautifully set.  And we had such a lovely lunch together. She recalled her mother always insisting on eating at a perfectly laid table, even if the offerings were not terribly plentiful. I love my mum and am so blessed to have this opportunity to spend time with her. I know that it can’t be for that much longer (she’s 89 year’s old) but every time I take time out to spend with her, I learn something new. It’s a snippet here and a snippet there and sometimes it helps me to understand exactly where I’m coming from.

A friend of mine, Chris, talks in his blog about the generation gap in relation to music between us and our parents and the shrinking of it now between us and those younger than us. I, for as long as I can remember, have loved music in all shapes and sizes (except, I have to confess, rap and Whitney Houston-type warbling). My father used to rile me up with his negative comments about “my music” and we would have the most awful fights about it. So much so that I vowed that I would never, if I had children, criticise their music. So I lived through the Spice Girls (with Kiera) and Jack Parrow (with Alex) and a lot of brilliant stuff in between. And then I discovered that I knew all the words to every Frank Sinatra song ever sung. My mum told me that when I was a baby and wouldn’t go to sleep, my dad would put on a Frankie record and walk around the lounge with me, with Jomo (the cat) pacing up and down the back of the sofa with us, until I drifted off.

I miss Alex sitting at his computer in his bedroom in Morningside Road listening to music, calling out to me to come and listen. “Hey mom, do you know this song?” And often it would be “my music”; the Stones, or Led Zeppelin, or even Bob Dylan. But it would also be new stuff and I would lie on his bed just enjoying the moment. How sorry I am for my parents that they couldn’t transcend that divide. And how I miss that exposure now.

my mum

In The Garden

 

When we built the house here just over 10 years ago, we didn’t plan for a garden because I thought (quite rightly) that it would require too much work and I intended to use the country as an escape from all that. Our garden in Durban had a chequered history. When we bought the house it was very tropical; lots of large-leafed plants, heliconias, crotons, bougainvilleas and palms. At first, I took no interest in it and left it up to my mum to take care of. However, when I gave up working and became more domesticated , I did a couple of landscaping courses; I took over the care of our back yard and started spending a lot of time and money in garden centres and visiting open gardens. One of them was the garden of an emerging landscape designer (Jan) and I fell in love with the formal style of it. In a fit of madness I commissioned him to turn our small back garden into something similar; lots of hedges, repetitive use of a small selection of small-leafed plants, a formal water feature and extensive use of paving.

Just as everything was starting to take shape, a rather large sink hole appeared at the bottom of the garden. The municipality came in, dug a dirty great big hole to fix one of their pipes that had sprung a leak and, in doing so, made a bloody awful mess. The garden and I never quite recovered from that. I phoned Jan to ask if he could fix it but, unfortunately for me, he had since established quite a reputation for himself and my backyard could not compete with his larger projects. I had to try and sort out the mess myself but, I have to confess, my heart was never in it. When I look at photos of the garden now, I kinda prefer the garden pre-Jan.

In hindsight, I suppose that I didn’t have the will to sort out the Durban garden because I had in the meantime been seduced into creating one at the farm, surprise, surprise! In fact, because of my city mentality, I made a rod to break my back by creating a whole lot of small gardens, until Kiera suggested that I merge them all to make a more unified look and less work. This is what I’ve been trying to do ever since. I only hope that I don’t look at photos of the farm in years to come and prefer it pre-me!

I’m reminded of my childhood when I’m gardening. We kids would play outdoors for hours on end, getting sweaty and dirty (and lots of thorns in our bare feet) and, before you knew it, it was getting dark and you were being called indoors to bath. We never went in on the first call; all the kids in Woodville Road would call out to their mothers that they were coming but it was only when we were threatened with a “clip around the lughole” that we reluctantly dragged ourselves away from our games and went inside.  There’s no better feeling than getting into bed body-weary from playing in the garden and content from listening to “earth-songs” and knowing that, for a brief moment, all was as it was meant to be.

And all the times I was picking up potatoes, I did have conversations with them.  Too, I did have thinks of all their growing days there in the ground, and all the things they did hear.  Earth-voices are glad voices, and earth-songs come up from the ground through the plants; and in their flowering, and in the days before these days are come, they do tell the earth-songs to the wind … I have thinks these potatoes growing here did have knowings of star-songs.

Opel Whiteley, 8 years of age, The Singing Creek where the Willows Grow – The Mystical Nature Diary of Opal Whiteley, Penguin, 1994.

P.S. Thanks Lex for introducing me to Susan Tedeschi’s music.

There’s A Hole In The Bucket

 

How do men and women live together for any length of time without going completely doolally? ‘A fair question and one that in recent weeks ‘as been much on my mind.’ It’s quite true what they say; it’s the little things that drive one over the edge. I’ve always thought it a sensible solution to have spouses living in separate homes. And for awhile, I managed to get my way. However, Peter joined me here nearly a year ago and now there’s nowhere else to go! The problem, I think, is that Peter has semi-retired and I haven’t. His work keeps him occupied for about 6 days a month and for the rest of the time, he is free to watch sport on telly and read murder mysteries to his heart’s content. I, on the other hand, have not had the luxury of retiring from my housekeeping duties.

When I was a stay-at-home mother and Peter went out to work (this being a mutually agreed upon decision for the benefit of the family), I was quite happy to shop, cook, take care of the children’s needs, be the family social secretary, manage the home finances and keep house (with the help of a full time maid). However, since the children left home I feel that the day-to-day stuff of running a house should be shared. And mostly it is, except for tidying up.

As Eleanor Roosevelt commented:

There are practical little things in housekeeping which no man really understands.

And there’s the rub.

We have a stack of plastic drawers and two bins in the garage, dedicated to recycling. Bottles, cans, milk cartons and polystyrene trays go in the bins and paper, cardboard and plastic go in the drawers – a simple system one would think. However, for some reason it has become my job not only to keep the house tidy but also to sort all the rubbish for recycling. Peter knows what we recycle because he takes it to the recycling centre but it appears that he doesn’t know how to sort it for storage, or perhaps he just doesn’t see it: the pile of old newspapers on the coffee table, empty milk cartons in the sink, and my worst, used toilet roll holders on the bathroom window sill. A young lad (a friend of the family) once apologised to me when I asked him to get me something out of the fridge and he couldn’t find it even though it was staring him right in the face: “Cathy”, he said, “the trouble with men is that they look but they just don’t see.”

The straw that broke the camel’s back happened about a week ago, when Peter returned from Pietermaritzburg and deposited a box containing a gas heater, which was just too big not to notice, at the foot of our bed, rather like a cat dumping a dead rat at one’s feet and waiting for praise. The box sat there for several days while I stubbornly ignored it. Finally, I bought a gas cylinder and asked Peter to connect it. He removed the heater from the box and I had to ask him to take the heater to the veranda where we intend using it. The empty box was left behind with all the bits of polystyrene packaging and the plastic cable that had been cut from the box and left lying on the floor. A few days later I noticed that the box and cable had also been moved to the veranda, not the garage as one might have expected. Our maid (part time) came to work and in order to clean the veranda floor she lifted the box onto the table. I had resolved to ignore the box for as long as it took but I couldn’t keep it in any longer. That evening I asked, as politely as I could muster: “what the fuck is that empty box doing on the veranda table?” The response I got was: “what’s stopping you from putting it in the garage?” That precipitated a rather long rant from me on slovenliness, servant complexes, pigsties and the like. Since then things have improved slightly but I’m not holding my breath. After all, the polystyrene packaging is still in the bedroom.

On a positive note, he is quite good at getting snakes out of vacuum cleaners. We’ve had three red-lipped heralds trying to move indoors with us. Thandi (our maid) discovered the first one when she lifted the rug under the dining room table as she was mopping the floor. I heard a blood curdling scream and Thandi came running out onto the veranda shouting “inyoka, inyoka”. The snake slithered out from under the rug and disappeared behind a dresser. Thandi and I were standing outside when I saw Peter appear with Alex’s cricket bat; I screamed “don’t kill it” and Thandi started shouting “kill it, kill it”! Fortunately Kho  arrived to help and between Peter and him they managed to return it unharmed to the bush. The second one got as far as the veranda and slithered off into the garden on its own accord when we discovered it. The next one was not so lucky. Again, poor unfortunate Thandi was vacuuming and again I heard a god-almighty scream and the vacuum cleaner went flying across the room. Thandi had inadvertently sucked a snake, which had been under the sofa, into the vacuum cleaner and it was coiled around the roller. This time Peter had to coax it out very gently, and although it was injured, it managed to uncoil itself. Peter gathered it up in the pool net and again returned it to the bush. I hope it survived the trauma, but I’m not so sure that our floors are going to be maintained to the same standard in future.

nothing sucks like Electrolux

 

Growin’ In The Wind

Autumn

Plant growth in the allotment has slowed down considerably and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that we weren’t too late getting the winter veggies in. Not only are the days getting shorter but because the sun is lower in the sky, the garden shed tends to block out some of the morning sun. That was a bit of an oversight on our part – we built it in summer. Fortunately it only affects the two beds nearest the shed and I haven’t planted any winter crops in them. We’ve planted the usual stuff: winter cabbage, broccoli (never can remember how to spell that), cauliflower, a couple of brussel sprout seedlings (not many of the seeds germinated and no-one is particularly crazy about them anyway, except for my mum), leek, kale (which I’m growing for the first time) and onion. I forgot to order garlic this year and I think it’s too late now (damn). But I’ve got some garlic cloves and ginger in my veggie rack that are sprouting, so I’m going to plant them and see what happens.

The autumn veggies were hopeless this year. All the pumpkin, butternut and squash rotted on the vines – too much rain, methinks. The brinjal (aubergine) plants are looking healthy but all the fruit has burst open, again too much rain at the wrong time. And the carrot and beetroot were tasteless, not sure why.

So, all I have to do now is sow some broad beans to harvest in spring; get trenches composted for some asparagus crowns that I’m going to transplant in early spring; mulch what is left in the beds with tagetes minuta (khakibos) which grows wild here and is very effective in keeping the nunus away; keep everything watered and basically forget about it until winter is over. This is just as well because I have a wedding reception to plan.

Kiera and James have set a date in December to have a small shindig at the farm to celebrate their wedding which took place in Washington DC in November 2011, without any family or friends present. I’m not sure that, if it were left up to them, they would bother but I confess that I have nagged and finally it is possible for them to take leave and travel to South Africa. And we are so delighted that James’ family will also be making the trip out here. We are very fond of them and I feel so lucky that my daughter has married into such a like-minded family.

I’ve always valued the use of ritual as a means to share life-experiences and build common memories. I think that it creates a sense of belonging which, as you have probably gathered by now, is very important to me. Religion usually plays this role but I grew up in a nonreligious home and we tended to celebrate religious holidays with the emphasis more on being together as a family. When I was a child Sundays were family days, ending with cards games played around the dining room table in the evening; and we always spent Christmas together at home. Christmas lunch was always a big production, the pièce de résistance being the flaming Christmas pudding.

When I became a parent, I tried to introduce our own family rituals. I was very aware that being raised in a nonreligious home can put children at a disadvantage, in as much as when I was a child I often felt that the other kids knew something that I didn’t  So I decided to read to Kiera and Alex every morning before school from Buddha’s Little Instruction Book! Little gems like: “When asked, “Are you a god or a man?” the Buddha replied, “I am awake.” That ritual, as I recall, did not last very long. But there were other rituals that did, like having dinner at a properly laid table most evenings; tea and watching Rugrats every afternoon at 4; family holidays every year at the same time and same place (Umngazi); and Christmas Eve dinner with family and friends (always the same menu, always the best china, always Judy’s mum’s trifle and always opening our presents that evening after everyone had left).

Christmas Eve dinner with Grandpa Bill

Alex was there too

Alex on the booze cruise at Umngazi in 2005

Kiera’s 21st at Umngazi

And a wedding, of course, is a ritual and once again we have to make this one up since Kiera and James are already married, they are not religious and they are not concerned about tradition. I think we would all agree that Kiera and James’s wedding reception should reflect who they are but there are a couple of problems in executing this. Firstly I’m organising it from a distance and it is very tempting to slant it my way. When I got a bit carried away with ideas about entertainment (I was quite keen on a drumming circle) Alex asked me rather pointedly whose wedding this was, Kiera’s or mine (and I did notice that James didn’t get mentioned). The other problem is that apart from the menu, Kiera and James are not too fussed about the other details. Kiera has never shown any interest in weddings; she was never one of those girls who kept a scrapbook of her perfect wedding and as I mentioned before, if she could get away with not having one that would be the route she would go. But I think she agrees that from the family point of view, it’s important to have one.  And of course it’s very important that I get to be “mother of the bride” after all.

Kiera and James on their wedding day

Beautiful Boy

 

People come and go in our lives. Sometimes we lose touch completely and sometimes we simply pick up where we left off, whether it is after months or years. There’s no sense, with our long-standing friends, of us getting any older. In fact, occasionally we even revert to our younger selves in their company (usually with dire consequences)! Time spent connecting with good friends is food for our souls.

I also love spending time with my children but saying goodbye is becoming more and more difficult. Alex has just gone back to Stellies after spending a week at home with us and I found myself more upset than usual when he left. Every time we see him there are subtle changes so it’s not a just case of picking up where we left off, it actually requires some adjusting on our part and there’s that unsettling feeling that life is slipping too fast through our fingers. Of course, there are some things that just don’t change. He knows exactly what he can expect from us; his laundry will get done, he will be waited on hand and foot, he will be fed on demand and usually his favourite meals will be on the menu. However, the Alex that came home this time was definitely more mature than the one that stayed with us at the end of the year. This year he is doing honours in accounting and for the first time in his academic career he failed a test in the first semester. So the first thing he did when he arrived home was to commandeer my desk (all my stuff landed up on the floor – something else that doesn’t change) and, much to our amazement, he actually spent most of his time studying.

In between studying he watched sport on telly with Peter and they proceeded to make what resembled a nest in the little upstairs tv lounge, with blankets, cushions and plenty of snacks on hand. Peter thoroughly enjoyed having his sporting companion back and the house shook with all the raucous shouting and swearing emanating from the rafters. Fortunately their team, the Sharks, won their (rugby) game on the night before he left so the mood was jubilant.

already watching sport with Dad at 8 weeks

Alex really enjoyed his short stay at the farm and finally acknowledged that he thought we had made the right decision in moving here. So it seems that he has at last forgiven us for selling the family home in Durban. On his first night home we took him to our local for dinner and two things happened that I could see were “aha” moments for him. One was that in the rather crowded bar area we glimpsed a woman who looked like the mother of a Durban friend of his who was also arriving home from Stellies that day with his sister. Alex was adamant that it could not possibly be his friend’s mother because she would most certainly be at home for her children’s holiday. When it turned out that it was her (she and her husband had left the son and daughter at home and were spending the long Easter weekend in the Midlands on their own) I could see it suddenly dawning on Alex that parents too have lives of their own to live. The other “aha” moment happened because our local is a very sociable place and as we were leaving Alex commented on how many people we seem to know now. I think he realised, for the first time, how much we enjoy the sense of belonging that has developed here. From that moment on we never heard another negative comment about how our moving to the country had ruined his life!

So you can imagine how hard it was to say goodbye to him. My boy is growing into a man, and a thoughtful one at that. Who could have seen that coming?

he still does a mean braai

with his sister in a beautiful ‘Berg stream

scrabble with his beloved “Enna”

my boy

 

 

Om Mani Padme Hum

 

I knew that I was straying off my particular path of enlightenment when I found myself one afternoon watching, out of morbid curiosity, a double feature of the Bachelor UK. I felt rather like I was rubbernecking at the scene of a terrible accident, desperately hoping to see some carnage. It was then that I knew I had to start taking some action to prevent any further deterioration of my mind, so I signed up to do an online 21-day meditation challenge with Oprah and Deepak Chopra. Okay, I’m not so sure that all of you, dear readers, will see that as a step in the right direction, but hey, it’s certainly an improvement on Gav and the gals.

I’ve been meditating on and off for about 10 years. When I get in the zone I really do notice the positive benefits of the practise, but all too often other stuff gets in the way and I get side-tracked. Anyhow, for the past couple of weeks I’ve been taking 15 minutes each morning to meditate on perfect health, much aided by Deepak’s incredibly soothing voice. And already I feel rejuvenated. The trick is to keep it up every day. I’m not sure why I find it so difficult to maintain good habits and so easy to succumb to bad ones. There’s a song (from Peter Rabbit, I think) that goes through my head whenever I’ve fallen off the wagon for the umpteenth time:

“Why do I do it, what can it be, there’s naughtiness in everyone but twice as much as me.”

They say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions and it’s just as well I’m a non-believer because I would definitely be on my way there if the saying were true.  I am forever starting some sort of healthy lifestyle regime which inevitably fizzles out after a few days: drink more water and less wine, eat 3 meals a day and no snacking in between, exercise every day, and so on. Yeah, yeah, I console myself with the notion that at least I try but it seems that is just not good enough. However I have every intention to work on this meditation thing – watch this space.

We woke up yesterday to snow on the ‘berg which was, I thought, rather unexpected for this time of year. The liquidambars have only just started changing into their autumn outfits and already there’s snow. Seeing the snow sent me into a state of slight decline as it brought back memories of our bitter blockade last year, not something I would like to repeat. I immediately ordered two bakkie loads of firewood and asked Kho to patch up our gravel driveway; although now that we have the Subaru I feel a lot more confident about getting out of here in a blizzard. Last weekend I took Judy for a drive to the Karkloof falls; we took a wrong turn and landed up inadvertently off-roading up a rather hair-raising, muddy hillside track. I bottled out after awhile and, to Judy’s disappointment, turned the car around and headed back down to safety.

light snowfall on giant’s castle and southern ‘berg

the giant slumbering under a dusting of snow

I’m sure that many of you South Africans reading this post have visited the Drakensberg in autumn and have memories of the masses of confetti-like pink, white and magenta cosmos flowers growing wild at the side of the road, welcoming one like enthusiastic gatekeepers. A few cosmos plants have sprung up unannounced in my garden and they are such a cheerful sight at this time of year when almost all the other flowers have died off.

On the bird feeder are a couple of southern red bishop males, looking very tatty as they are in transition from their breeding to non-breeding plumage

I’ve been harvesting the last of the summer cucumbers and courgettes (zucchini) and have tried pickling them for the first time. I pickled them both in white wine vinegar and a bit of salt and sugar – and added sliced shallots, mustard seed and chilli to the courgettes and fresh ginger to the cucumber. It seems to have been a success – the courgettes in particular are great with cheese and on sandwiches and burgers.  I’ve also harvested a lot of green chillies, which I chopped in the food processor with vinegar and salt and then froze in ice cube trays.  This seems to be an effective way of preserving foodstuffs that you add as a flavouring to cooked dishes (like garlic, ginger and leafy herbs). There’s nothing quite like preserving and pickling one’s produce, I always say!

pickled courgette

chopping the chilli

chilli ice cubes

Piper At The Gates Of Dawn

 

One of the many pleasures of living in the highveld climate of Nottingham Road, as opposed to the tropics of Durban, is that one really gets to experience all four seasons here. And my favourite time is the moment of transition from one season to the next because it still carries the expectation of good things ahead. At the moment we are busy signing off on summer and welcoming in autumn and thoughts are turning more to making the inside comfortable and less about making the outside pretty, spring cleaning without the zing as it were. There’s the promise of beautiful autumnal days still to come; of lazy afternoons lying on the sofa, washed in weak sunshine and rereading Nigel Slater, as well as all my treasured gardening books, and even dusting off some old Josh Grobin cds. Oh, and eating chocolate. Well, that’s how I’m picturing it anyhow. Autumn in the Midlands is all about crisp blue skies, sunshine that you can bask outdoors in and landscapes that photographers will travel miles for. Ah yes, I’m looking forward to it.

Recently I’ve become quite interested in astronomy. Kindled at first by Prof Brian Cox and the Wonders of the Solar System programmes, and then by my wanting to know more about moon cycles and lunar planting, I now find that there’s more to it than meets the eye (so to speak). It’s a primordial connection to long lost practices of our forefathers – navigating by the stars, farming according to lunar cycles and wonderful pagan rituals dictated by solar eclipses and equinoxes, on which the Christian religion very cleverly piggybacked. (Today, by the way, is the autumnal equinox in the southern hemisphere when the sun shines directly on the equator and the length of day and night is nearly equal. The equinox in March is also known as the vernal equinox in the northern hemisphere).  I digress; astronomy is also a constant reminder to us that we are part of something vaster.

There’s a blog that I subscribe to called Notes from Near and Far written by Julian Hoffman. He has an empathy with the place in which he lives and a way with language that I can only aspire to. In his post called Across the Sky (check it out – the pelican photos by Steve Mills are also phenomenal ) he writes:

“It’s not easy remembering to look up. Standing amidst cloud and snow brought home to me the forgetful tendencies of the eyes. Our lives are lived primarily on the ground, in the here and now of our immediate concerns and surrounds. We’re so used to keeping our eyes ahead of us, focused on the next step – on work and worries, our daily routines – that whatever glimmers about the edges, or passes high above, can easily slip unnoticed through our days. As far as the human mind can fathom, what arches above the clouds is virtually endless, a universe of other worlds and stars and galaxies beyond reach. Comparatively few things pass into the narrow orbit of our experience, the tiny span of our sentient presence on this planet, and yet we’re part of something indescribably vaster all the time.”

He goes on to say that the pelicans “are reminders: to be open to faint glimmers that appear in the distance; to look up and let wonder lift me from the surface of the earth; to let go and lean into the sky.”

Oh, that I could write like that! And one of his readers commented “as though in writing we can only nod to the numinous, without being able to explain it”. I suppose if you move in literary circles there’s a standard to maintain, even in your comments! I do nod to the numinous more often here than I ever did in my previous life, not in a religious sense but in more of a “communing with nature” sense. For Mole and Ratty it was meeting the Piper at the Gates of Dawn, for me it is “leaning into the (night) sky” and losing myself in the Milky Way. One particularly splendid numinous experience comes to mind when Judy was visiting me at the farm. The Milky Way was directly above, so I laid out some blankets on the front lawn, plunged us into total darkness by flipping the trip switch and dragged my reluctant friend outdoors to participate in some communing. Need I mention that a few glasses of vino had already been consumed? I also had uncontrollable hay fever at the time. As we lay on the grass, me sniffing and snuffling and Judy muttering something about frostbite, I waved my arms magnanimously up towards the heavens and earnestly proclaimed “Judy, that sky is not something to be sneezed at”. Hysterics ensued. Elation, I believe is a common response to the numinous.

a splash of yellow coreopsis from my bedroom window

sunflowers pop up from the leftover bird seed

a bed of physostegia