The beautiful nephews visit

The beautiful nephews are visiting from The Big Smoke and staying at my house. It is hard to believe that it has been three years since their birth. They turn three next Saturday. I've had a fair amount of contact with small children but there is something about small children that share your genes that is astounding. The love one feels that makes your heart squelch up and then go so huge it feels like its pushing all your other organs into one small corner is just astounding. I cannot imagine what it's like to be a mother if this is just what it feels like to be the aunt!

They are at the 'Why?' stage which is such fun. Nothing is impossible with them. I've heard stories of giant crabs crawling off the roof onto one of their legs, been explained to very seriously that while giraffes can't fly when they're small, they fly very well when they grow up and told that dragons live in Australia. All of these things make complete sense and my explanations of things (which often tend toward the ridiculous) are lapped up. It's like a three person mutual fan club.

Of course, being three comes with many challenges too. We had an early birthday party yesterday, complete with Granny-made lion cake (much fearsome roaring), many balloons festooned around the lounge and a whole bunch of noisy children. One of them got left out playing 'Catch' and was heartbroken. My heart nearly broke for him too and I had to remind myself that all that is part of growing up.

This morning I was sitting in the kitchen having tea after a particularly rigorous game of 'Hit the balloon so high it reaches the ceiling." One of their mothers had cleared up the lounge and put the balloons at the back of the desk in the lounge. Another challenge. He traipsed through to me.

Nephew: Auntie Shiny?
Shiny: Yes?
Nephew: Where's my big balloon?
Shiny: There. On the desk. Can't you see it?
Nephew: Yes. Can I have it?
Shiny: Of course you can. Just go and get it. (Aunt's prerogative(sp?) - I never have to say no)
Nephew: But it's too high.
Shiny: Is it? Did you try?
Nephew: No, I can't.
Shiny: Why? (forgetting the poor mite is not yet three feet tall)
Nephew: If I climb on the table to get it, I might fall down and hurt myself.
Shiny: Fair enough. Shall I come and help you?
Nephew: Yes please.

One forgets how little they are sometimes. It's hard to say no (make that impossible.) I fear I'd be a terrible mother and spoil my children. Those little faces, so unspoilt yet by humanity and the hard things that come with it. It makes me want to keep them safely inside, away from it all. Then I remember all the good things that come with humanity too and the fun to be had out there and all I can do is wish that, at least mostly, those are the bits they'll see.

At the seaside, Part 2

I dreamt of it last night, our beach shack, and reckon it’s a glaring sign that I need to get back over here to my blog.

There was no TV and no phone. The sum total of electrical goods in the house were an ancient fat fridge, a light in each room and a reading lamp in the sitting room. The bathroom only had a candle for years, until my father rigged up a single bulb with a cord into the house which we thought was the ultimate in luxury. The stove was gas and the water out of the taps was brack. On top of the fridge was a battery-operated radio which told us the news and played us songs.

The second drawer from the right was the Treats Drawer. Every December it contained an enormous Christmas cake (baked by my mother in September and doused with brandy regularly until it's trip to the seaside) wrapped in tin foil, which got progressively smaller as the holiday progressed. The drawer smelt deliciously dark and rich. In there, too, were the sweets and chocolate bars: two sweets or two pieces of chocolate each afternoon after lunch when my parents went to rest.

We drank water from the rain water tank which lived out the back door and to the right, a place that, when we were small and scared at night, flitting out at breakneck speed to fill the orange water jug, was full of dark shadows, possibly containing wolves. The square of light that fell on the grass from the kitchen window didn’t quite reach far enough to light the little tap. We made it through twenty years of holidays without being gulped down by wolves I’m pleased to report. The water was sweet and delicious and we ignored the mosquito larvae that floated about in it. "It's just protein," said my Mother.

If we wanted to phone someone, which of course became an absolute necessity when we hit adolescence, we had to walk over the bridge to the post office and use the ‘tickey boxes’. For our weekly dose of television (Who’s The Boss, on a Wednesday), we’d go over to the lovely old couple next door, The Cleghorns. We’d watch while the old man, Theo, ate Provitas for dinner and told us stories of 'The Olden Days' (far more interesting, even, than Who's The Boss.)

It had a specific smell, which is hard to define, but I smelt it in my dream last night and woke up feeling holiday blissful. It was a combination of grass mats, seaside mould and pure, unadulterated happiness.

It’s almost as if that house was built of love and happiness (at the risk of sounding schmaltzy). It saw me grow up and provided some of the very happiest moments in my life. When I went to university (60km down the road), my parents gave me the keys and we went down regularly for weekends (and sneaky week days, which my parents were blissfully unaware of).

It was there I had my first crush, then first fell in love and there that I lost my virginity (a fact my parents definitely would wish to be blissfully unaware of, I'm sure). I can’t think of a better place for it, all of it. That house, if it could speak, could tell many fabulous stories. There are more, but let me stop there.

I miss it.

At the seaside

We had a cottage at the seaside. My parents bought it when I was two. Living in gold mining towns, often dusty and small and farfarfar away from the sea, they bought this little piece of paradise in a coastal town in the Eastern Cape, near the university they went to (and then I). One small bite of the Eastern Cape and it steals your heart and beckons loudly forever. Thus, their purchase.

This was not a seaside holiday house in the manner of those that are found there now. This was referred to as our shack at the seaside, and rightly so. It wasn't on the sea - in fact it was a good, brisk, ten-minute walk to the beach. It didn't have any amazing views or large numbers of glass sliding doors opening onto a patio and rim pool. It was, in fact, a rather ramshackle, four-roomed square of a house, with an outside bathroom which had lots of ginormous spiders and no electricity.

And we loved it. With every cell of our bodies. And, even though it's no longer ours, I still do.
Spending six weeks a year there (one of the joys of working on a mine back then was lots of holiday time) over Christmas was like heaven. The four rooms were: a lounge into which the front door opened which led into my sister's and my room with two highly sprung metal single beds, some shelves made of bricks and planks, and a dressing table with two large drawers and three small. The three small ones were for my sister's clothes, the two big ones were mine. Always.

Our bedroom led into the kitchen which had a back door that opened onto a bricked path across which we'd fly on dark nights to the bathroom, under a tin 'afdakkie'. Off the kitchen was my parent's bedroom which contained a large double bed and a huge wardrobe which always had 'secrets' in it until Christmas and a top shelf on which my father kept coins for some reason.

The whole house smelt slightly mouldy, as seaside houses do. The lounge floor was covered in grass matting that we'd lift up twice during the six weeks: once at the beginning to sweep away the year's dust and once at the end to sweep out the tons of beach sand that we'd carried in on our salt-soaked, sun-kissed bodies throughout the holiday. Pure bliss.

This story is far from finished, but I've promised myself that I'll press 'Publish' more often this month, so I'll end Part 1 just here. 

The house with two numbers

It was Small Town South Africa of the 80’s at its best. Our telephone number only had four digits – 3583. I lived in Beatrix Street for years, first at number 11, then number 33, but they were both the same house.

I’ll explain. At the end of the street was a large piece of veld with nothing on it except a huge rain drain that ran through the middle. During summer thunderstorms children would go down the roaring rapids that would appear suddenly on blown up tyres. Unfortunately, the rapids would disappear just as quickly, leaving us sitting on our tyres on the concrete floor of the drain.

About five years into our stay at number 11 they extended the road into the veld and built a whole bunch of little boxy houses down there. The problem was that number 1 started that end. But, my little Small Town South African Small Town didn’t let that get in the way of expansion. They just tipped it all over and started with number 1 at the opposite end, changing ours from 11 to 33 (and everybody elses from whatever to everwhat).

For years we got the previous-33-er’s mail and the previous-11-ers got ours. Essentially, it turned into a really good way to shake the street up and allow everybody to meet their neighbours. Then again, in Small Town South Africa, we knew everyone anyway.

I was just thinking, though, perhaps it’d be a good idea in The City Beneath the Mountain. While I know my neighbours, it is in a vague-wave-hello kind of way, as opposed to a may-I-borrow-an-egg-here’s-a-slice-of-the-cake-I-just-made-send-your-kids-over-here-while-you-shop way.

I wonder if I should send a letter to council suggesting turning the number chronology around of streets?

A flashback and an old friend

My mother sews, beautifully. She made all of our clothes as children, much to our chagrin as teenagers, when all I longed for was just one item of clothing with a label (the ingratitude of adolescents!) She still sews for us if we are specific about what we want, years of experience having taught her that.

It was with a pair of pants in mind that I found myself, reminiscent of my childhood, in a material shop with my mother this morning. She can spend hours, possibly days, in those places so I had prepared myself mentally for some people-watching while she ambled about touching, stretching, experienced-seamstressing the hundreds of rolls of material.

My father drove us to the edge of the city where the enormous, warehouse-like material shop lives, two buildings down from the lap-dancing place where young Eastern European beauties trade their ware (apparently) and my mother and I went into the Aladdin-like cave (the fabric place, not the lap-dancing one.) As expected, my mother went into her Material Hunter mode and I sat quietly watching people.

The thing is, though, I had this funny feeling from when we walked in. You know that feeling when you meet someone and you feel like you know them, but you don't know where from? I looked at my mother's fellow hunters - the elderly sisters dressed in clothes too young for them, trying to find the perfect blue chiffon to go over the pale violet satin they'd chosen; the movie-type blonde wanting metres and metres of white fabric for a set; the gentle Xhosa lady going through the cordurouy for the perfect colour for children's dungarees (with my mother, momentarily distracted by possible fabrics for dungarees for the fabulous twin grandsons) - nope, none of them seemed familiar (other than my mother, of course.)

Then I suddenly got flashbacks of dark, smokey corners, flashing lights and loud music and I realised that behind me, where there were now shelves and shelves of buttons and zips, there used to be a bar and there, on that huge floor covered in rows of material was a dancefloor and up there, where the material shop owner stood talking on a cellphone, surveying the room, was the DJ box.

This here material shop used to be a club, it was the building that was the familiar person I'd been feeling, having been there once, in it's previous life as a nightclub, before it had retired into the more sedate phase of fabrics. I sat thinking of the night, the people I'd been with, that time of my life.

It's always nice to bump into an old friend, isn't it?

Snail-racing

I woke up this morning thinking of the house I did a fair amount of my growing up in. The one in the dusty Free State town. I have a vivid picture of it in my mind and I think it’s because I was at my very happiest there. I remember it as a safe, warm place with lots of places to play – a coal shed in the courtyard, big trees to climb, a vast garden to run around in. We lived there from when I was about three until I was ten. I played a lot. In between playing I went to first Nursery School, which I loved, and then Primary School, which I loved more.

From there we moved to a far more conservative (putting it lightly – it was a hotspot of nasty Apartheid politics) Small Town, and things changed for me. It’s not that I was unhappy there, it was just that my eyes were opened to all sorts of things I had been completely (and happily) oblivious to. Whether this was actually to do with us moving, or just me growing up, I’m not sure.

We used to have snail races at that Free State house, my sister and I. That’s how much time we had. There was a garden tap outside my bedroom window which was the local hangout for snails. We would spend an extended period of time choosing which one would be The Chosen One for each of us. Then we’d name them, place them on the painted brick wall, say “Ready… Steady… Go!”, and watch as they sped off toward the finish line ten bricks up, yelling encouragement.

Of course, them being snails, they didn’t really speed off, and we quickly changed the finish line to two bricks up and sometimes to the left, or right, depending on the two snails preferred direction. It was problematic when they went in opposite directions. That is when one realises it’s not so much fun being the younger sister. Sigh.

Snail-racing – is there a more fun way to spend an afternoon?

The beginning

I am punctual.

Let me start right at the beginning, to explain. The beginning of me. Well, not right at the beginning, of course, nobody likes to think of their parents having done the deed to create them, do they? I know mine, for certain, only did 'that' twice. One time for my sister, one time for me. Of course.

Anyway, back to the point. As the story goes (I can't absolutely verify it, even though I was there), I was due on the second of February. That morning my mother went into labour and trundled off to the local hospital in that dusty Free State town and read her historical novel until I showed up, just after the ward staff delivered lunch. 1pm on my due date.

My father ate her lunch while she had me, it being before the hands-on-daddy days.

See? I told you I was punctual.

My first crush

I had my first crush when I was at primary school. He was a beautiful, clever, tall boy. I did the as-to-be-expected “I don’t like you” thing, as one must when one is 10-years old and has a crush. It lasted for three years, during which time I twisted and turned around him, watching him from behind my maths book, going to holiday tennis club to see him, despite a distinct lack of any tennis talent, and so on… typical small girl crush behaviour.

And then we were in our last year of primary school and, with that, came the 13th birthday parties – all very grown up, we moved from afternoon dress-up parties in the garden with jelly beans and tartrazine chips, to evening disco parties in the garage, with jelly beans and tartrazine-filled chips.

We would all stand around awkwardly, girls giggling on one side, boys on the other, fleeting glances across the room, everyone waiting for everyone else to start dancing, hormones raging around the room, silently causing havoc. With that came the dreaded Spin-the-bottle, a game that I still can’t bear. But. On my one dalliance into it, I longed for the bottle to land on me and him. It didn’t. I spent an awkward minute in a cupboard with a boy I didn’t like, studiously ignoring him, and blushing wildly. It put me off the game forever.

I continued my crush, however, and became quite good friends with him (I was unaware at the time that this was the beginning of a pattern for me) and then began swooning over notes passed back and forth in the classroom. Ah, young love.

Pity the notes were for my best friend, and not me.

Childhood phenomena

I’ve lived through some fantastic natural phenomena. I am blessed (some would disagree, but my heart beats in a small town rhythm) to be the daughter of a geologist, so was born in a dusty Free State town full of fresh air and surrounded by kilometres of mielie fields and huge blue skies, did part of my growing up there and then moved to another, slightly less dusty town (but still surrounded by mielie fields as far as the eye could see, even when climbing the tallest tree in the garden.)

Beneath both towns lay kilometres of dug out rock tunnels, a dark, hot place with men drilling, sweat pouring, as they exploded out huge blocks of rock to be vomited up to earth and chemically treated and carefully sifted and filtered and heated by fire to bring out the molten gold of king’s crowns and princess’ rings. Well, that’s the childhood version of it, before the teen realisation of the ethics, the socially decrepit aspects, the hardship involved. I stray though, that’s another post.

This one is about the natural phenomena.

We always had tremors. Earth tremors, like rumbling monster’s tummies from deep below us, down there, where the men worked. Rockfalls or explosives, it was impossible to know as they happened. It was only when the news filtered up, of men trapped or hurt that one knew the difference between the planned and the disasterous. For us, above, they ranged between a slight feeling of misbalance to full-on glass-breaking, nerve-shattering ructions.

We only had one of those earth shattering ones in my time. I was sixteen, and had a friend staying. A non-mining child. We woke in the middle of the night to the whole house rocking, back-and-forth, like a granny on a rocking chair on the stoep, north to south, and back and forth, for what seemed like hours. She was petrified (the friend, not the metaphorical granny), so was I. I stood up, forgetting our childhood-drilled-into-our-heads-instruction to “Stand in the doorway” (the strongest place in a house.) I padded through to my parents to check they were fine.

We all survived. It was on the news, and my friend Trevor-who-lived-down-the-road’s wall fell down. Everything on shelves facing a North-South direction fell down, the East-West ones stayed safely in place. All rather exciting in the greater scheme of things.

Then there was the Red Storm of nineteen-eighty-something. I was about 10 at the time, and one afternoon in that Free State town surrounded by red-soiled mielie fields, the wind picked up to give us a monumental dust storm (we were used to arbitrary little ones that flew through town leaving a layer of dust that left our beloved Regina tutting and flapping with her duster. You could sometimes see them flying through the mielie fields - mini dust tornadoes.) This one, however, was way beyond any imaginings we could’ve made up. It turned our little town dark, at 2pm, a beautiful red dusk, the streetlights were turned on.

It was surreal. I whirled and twirled in our garden, a child dervish in the red dust. My poor sister was stuck indoors with the scary nun music teacher at the convent down the road that we shared, missing out on the excitement. I thought of her, stuck inside, while I frolicked in this outlandish world. She probably didn’t care either way, being of teenage temperament at the time.

Oh to be that whirling child, wild imaginings running through my mind, in the red dust world amongst the mielie fields below that huge blue sky… I really was a lucky child, wasn’t I?

Miscellaneous ramblings

I was lucky to be brought up in Small Town, South Africa, in the '70's and 80's. It was, for a child, idyllic. I am lucky to have parents who loved, and love me, an older sister who I adored despite ferocious sibling hair pulling and fighting (she broke a brush throwing it at me once, thank god it missed me and hit the cupboard behind... My pudgy little nose might've been pudgy, and skew!) Four years difference is a lot when you're 11 (and want to wear the same as her) and she's 15 (there's NO way I'm being seen in public with my little sister, let alone in matching outfits.)

I spent my days outside, in the sunshine, barefoot. Riding bikes, swinging in the park, running wildly, having snail races, rearing chickens, you know... childhood stuff. And, now, in my mind, that was a time of eternal and enormous blue skies. Like the one today (thus my rambling post.) It is the blue of a child's painting, and the air is so still that it feels as if, if you blew a feather into the air, it would just stay there, floating. It would be a white one, from an angel's wing.

I would spend hours, as a child, lying on my back on the grass staring into this same blue sky (slightly younger, and slightly more north), watching clouds, seeing shapes, dreaming of the places I'd explore, the things I'd do, the loves I would have. How I wish I'd written those childhood dreams down.

I am going to reminisce about childhood days and keep my other thoughts separate for now. That sad elephant is still sitting, heart-breakingly in the corner, wishing, hoping, fervently willing it to turn out that love wins and everybody gets to be happy. And by that, the elephant really means everybody. Because, ultimately, doesn't everybody deserve to be happy, to love, and be loved?

Ringlets and curls

As a child, I had a friend called Liezl, who had the most beautiful ringlets. When I think about it now, her mother must've spent hours on them! It does sound a little Charles Dicken-ish too - ringlets. I'm not one-hundred-and-forty-something years old, though... It was the 80's, as in 1980's, not 1880's. There's no accounting for 80's fashion choices and, really, they were very beautiful. I used to sit behind her on the carpet for storytime and play with her hair, seeing how far up her ringlets I could put my finger without touching the edges.

I met someone the other day with equally as beautiful curls and I longed to reach over and do the same thing, luckily catching myself before I did, realising that really would be invading her personal space. It made me think, though, with a nostalgic air (seems to be a common thread running through my thoughts at the moment).

When exactly does the switch happen that turns us into grown-ups (blegh), making it unacceptable to admire someone's curls, tactilely?

You knock the breath out of me

Ah, how bored I have become with my whitterings on computers and the such. Indeed, I have. Although, before I relegate it all to the dusty archives, let me just ay one more thing. The BFF has some fabulous music on this thing. I'm filling my head with tummy-twisting tunes of before. The type that throw you back at such a speed, your wind gets knocked out of you, leaving you breathless and flushed.

As a child, we had a swing made out of a long length of fraying rope tied to the Plain tree on our front pavement, with an old car tyre attched to it. I spent hours in it, swinging higher and higher into the bright blue sky that I could see through the leaves, flying through the air to places in my head.

One day, however, the frayed rope finally gave in, slamming me into the pavement, knocking the wind completely out of me. I remember lying there in the dappled shade of that beautiful, big tree, trying to take in a breath and not being able to, wondering if I was going to die.

I didn't (obviously). My mother, most fortunately, happened to come out of the front door (I wonder how mothers somehow just manage to do that?) She rushed over, sat me up, and rubbed my back to calm me, coaxing the breath back in, there on that grassy pavement in small town South Africa in the '80's. Having got my breath back, I sobbed uncontrollably into her chest - my first glimpse of my own mortality.

Flittery hot Saturday musings, with a head full of music. I think this might all just be an allegory for something else that's going on.