When they flow

It's become a favourite place: the hard plastic garden table and two white chairs at the edge of the garden, between the pool and the eastern wall, up against the fern fronds and elephant ears, beneath the low hanging trees. Lee covers the table with a sarong he bought on Durban's beachfront for R50. It, the sarong, reminds me somehow of Mozambique, probably because of its colours. The cotton is soft and cool, soothing. I sit here now.

Summer's being rather quickly nibbled around its edges by the autumn rat; the hardly noticeable changes tend to catch me by surprise. Shadows falling for longer and far earlier, an unexpected early morning chill, the blue of the sky much deeper, the sun more mellow. Aah the passing of time I think to myself as I finger The Pulse. 

The sun rays have not yet pierced the pool whose leaf strewn surface I shattered with delight much earlier. Towelling myself off bare--foot on the paving my focus was on the steaming tea mug on my table: strong with the bag intact, sweet and milky; the coffee's finished. The seasonal changes are not that obvious in this subtropical paradise. 

I've been mired in fear and self doubt, my words had dried up, my skeleton's been protruding. Wasting away I've been deadly close to self comprimise. That's why today I make my plan.

I took the photo on my back porch in Waterval Boven. I was there for over a week for a smidgen of work that bought me some of the mobility-freedom I so crave. It was an interesting time of hovering introspect, not unlike a fat green fly on shit. And of being sick. I regret neither. 

The leaves are already turning 600 kilometres to the north, and the veld grasses have gone to seed. Soon the burning will begin, then the sweeping fires as winter deepens and green dies down to tawny lion coloured. But not here.