Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Blue sky memories

It's approaching 39 degrees centigrade in the Cape today. The heat wave is moving northwards across the African sub continent.
It was in Cape Town at the beginning of the year that I tanned dark brown without evening trying to, beneath the clear cobalt sky.
Unlike where I live, Cape Town's climate is a mediterranean one. It's a winter rainfall region that I often visit to soak up the moisture so lacking here in the winter, when we are parched and tinderbox dry, when the vegetation changes from the luminous green of central summer, to lion tan and khaki of winter.
My thoughts have, unhappily for now, been on the winter. But that's still far away, relatively speaking of course.
But today I've woken late. I forgot, unusually, to set my alarm. I also got back home to Waterval Boven last night, and didn't get do and see that which I wanted to do and to see.
Wind is buffeting the eaves, whistling through and into the open bits; fine but hard rain is slanting against the home, and water again chortles in the tin gutters.
The summer garden is lush and verdant green.
Mika is curled up tight against my right leg as I sit in my favourite chair by the window in my studio. It's cool enough for me to be wearing my finely striped baby blue pyjama pants and a zipped up to my throat jumper.
The wind whistles like it would in a novel.
The lush pomegranates hang the branches low, the one looks ready to break. The tree will get hard hit again by frost in the winter. Valiant has pruned the wild olive round, I'm not sure that it pleases my eye, nor my sensibility. Manicured and suppressed, I was once that, while being readied by a bad state for the army... and to die for my country.
But it's a beautiful day in my eyes and my destiny is, more than ever, in my hands.
My thoughts are intertwined with the memories of the blue skies and bare legs of just-born January; and of Derick and Jesse, of Martin and Joe, of Ruan and Chad, of Alex and Alex, of Vi and Vince, and Ulrich and Kyle, and then Hardus. People who touched my life and soul.
In safe and good hands are they, I pray, as I fall into the vortex?

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