20

Early this morning, dark outside.  I got my breakfast and through the windows it was suddenly dusky pink, dense winter branches in silhouette, softly glowing sky.  Then off to gym where I exercised all my muscles, then ran 1.4 miles (2.25km). 

On the way home I spotted a hawk in a tree over Bothways Farm pond, so rushed home for Tim's long lens and slithered and slid back down the icy hill and around the corner, where I smiled to find it patiently waiting for me. 

Wallpaper: Hawk and visitor

Still too far away really, but beautiful to see, the red-tailed hawk.  Even though they are the most common bird of prey in North America I am still thrilled every time I see one.

We have occasionally had them attacking birds at the bird-feeder and once when I returned from a conference I was pleased and surprised that Tim had maintained the seed in the bird-feeder.  I thanked him but he guiltily revealed that he had had an ulterior motive.  He had seen a hawk in the area and had been hoping to lure it by feeding its potential prey! 

And that is part of their fascination for us, aside from their aerodynamic perfection, their prodigious wingspan, it is that they deal swift termination, these beautiful raptors, death in their talons, pure purpose in the eye.  And although I feel sorry for the little vole, or mouse, or dark-eyed junco which meets a violent bloody death, a few of them who are many, are worth the survival of these magnificent creatures at the top of the chain.

This is the photograph I would have liked to have taken!

My other resolution was to really become proficient at music theory.  I learned quite a lot when I was a child, but we learned the British version, whose basic notes are the romantic sounding breves, semi-breves, minims and crotchets.   The American system uses the much simpler and easier to understand whole notes, half notes, quarter-notes, etc.  Which seems ironic in a way, because America still insists on using the ridiculously antiquated English Imperial measuring system instead of the simpler metric one.

It is like learning another language, filled with strange names and symbols. Did you know that there are things called Diatonic Modal Chords?  And that modes come in seven forms: Lydian, Ionian, Mixolydian, Dorian, Aeolian, Phrygian and Locrian?

This is frighteningly incomprehensible to me, and luckily it is quite far into the book, where I have not yet travelled.  Hopefully by the time I get there I will be accomplished enough to decipher this befuddlement.

I am still at the clapping and counting phase, drawing rests and time signatures and whatnot.  Some of it is so difficult, and then all at once it will make sense, like finding a puzzle piece which suddenly fits.  So I struggle, from sudden bursts of sense through bogs of foggy quicksand, on to the welcome light-bursts of more sense.

I am hoping that I will have a better understanding of the music that I play, and that it will enhance my interpretation and expression, so that the notes from my fingers will unfurl like colourful soundwaves into the room, wafting into the ears of the listeners, floating, enchanting... 

19th day

A lovely cold walk on Singing Beach today.  So strange to walk at the shore without a dog in attendance. Singing Beach, a short drive from our house, is a beautiful sandy cove flanked by mansions, where many dogs are walked in the winter. 

Strange vortex on our way back.

It gets its name from the sand which sings, or squeaks rather, when you walk on it.  Apparently this phenomenon is not entirely understood, but it is thought that it takes place when the sand is made primarily of quartz and when the actual grains of sand are all uniformly spherical.  It's a beautiful name, much prettier than Squeaking Beach.  When we went to Prince Edward Island two summers ago, on the eastern point of the island we came across the same squeaking sand phenomenon, and the beach is called Souris, a perfect name, the Mouse.

The biggest dog on the beach, Max, a mastiff, the size of a small pony.

The smallest dog on the beach, with a miniature ball.

Tim had been taking these photographs of all the dogs, when we met a couple with whom we are acquainted, whom we haven't seen for a long time.  We were standing chatting with them when the mastiff, who was lolloping about with another dog, ploughed into our friend who screamed with pain and exclaimed that the dog had broken her leg.  But after a couple of minutes she was fine, and the owner of Max was, I expect, very relieved.  There would have been a lot of litigation, this being America.  

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
I discovered audiobooks a couple of years ago with a great deal of excitement because they contribute to the ultimate in multi-tasking.  You can read a book while driving a car to school, you can paint a picture and listen to a novel at the same time, you can do the tedious washing-up while you are far away inside a story.  

The Goldfinch (Het Putterje) by Carel Fabritius 1654

 I have been dipping in and out of the world of The Goldfinch for quite a while and finished it today while folding the washing.  It is 32 hours long, beautifully read, and with a wonderfully wrought young protagonist, Theo Decker.  I am always impressed by authors who write as the opposite sex in such a seamless, believable fashion. 

This little painting survived a gunpowder explosion which killed Fabritius at the age of 32, and destroyed most of his work.  It is a very sad painting, when you notice the thin chain which keeps the bird a prisoner, but the little finch still stands there as itself, the viewer feels the personality of the tiny creature, the delicate beauty of the yellow stripe in the feathered wing, the knowing eye.  The book is about many things, friendship, catastrophe, how the lives of the rich are so far removed from those of the general public.  But it is mainly about Art, and how all the sentiments and experience contained in a work of art come down to us through the centuries, and by appreciating the artwork, by loving it, being enthralled by it, we all become part of that enormous human sensibility, we are richer for loving and appreciating that beauty. 

Day 18

I ran 3.5km today, in the cold and pouring rain which turned to sleet and then into huge snowflakes the size of potato chips! 

Some days we wake up to a whole empty Saturday, and lie in bed planning the day.  This morning Tim asked, "What is your heart's desire for today?"  My heart's desire was to have lunch with my daughters and granddaughters.  When I asked him his, he said, "to go back to the time before we came to America."  I thought he meant that we shouldn't have moved countries, but he said no, it was so that we could have come earlier and understood the restrictions and had time to organise for the girls to have come with us. Wishes.

When I was little I attended a school modelled on British schools, and we had to learn pages of interesting things which children don't have to learn anymore, like collective nouns and proverbs.  In grade 3, which was called Standard 1 then, we were tested on proverbs one day by having to "fill in the blank".  I got them all right except for one, "If wishes were horses, ....", for which I wrote, "...then beggars would fly".  Which made perfect sense in my head, because I saw Pegasus, the winged horse, when I read that line. And wishes were thoughts that flew through the air, not really connecting with anything real, in my experience.  I had wished for many things not to happen which had just gone right on happening, despite my fervent hopes. 

Anyway, the day's plans were laid and halfway through the day they changed, as plans tend to do, and instead there were friends and a movie and dinner at a restaurant, which is always a treat, as the older I get, the more I dislike cooking.  Tim and I both long for a wife who loves cooking!  When I think that I only have about 20 years left of my life I really want to spend the least time possible in the kitchen.  I have cooked so many many meals for seeming armies of people, friends and relatives and children and children's friends and I've just had enough now.  I am happy for my lunch to be a plate of steamed brussel's sprouts, quick, easy and delicious, to the horror of my family. 

Of course, like anyone else, I love food, but cooking has always seemed such a terrible waste of time.  You spend hours preparing a meal that is gobbled down in about 20 minutes, nothing left!  Yes, it is lovely to eat, and to sit chatting at the table with wonderful scents and sensations as the food is appreciated and devoured, I am just tired of being the architect of that endeavour. 

Day 17

On playground duty today I walked around watching all the kids running about on the soccer field, others climbing the enormously tall climbing frame, and a little group of girls playing a made-up game which involved balancing precariously, legs far apart, on the wooden frame of the steps up to the slide, and leaping off to try and beat the line, scratched in the sand, of the best jumper.  I think it is a game which would have been stopped by any other teacher, but I am not that teacher.  They lined up patiently without anyone telling them to, and then when it was their turn, strove with their entire young bodies to spring off as high as possible, like pronking skinny young deer, ponytails bouncing and hair shining in the sunlight, joyful shouting laughter.

A girls' playground in Ohio a long time ago.

A British school playground

Hopscotch, a universal game

I remember the kind of dangerous excitement of going to the playground in Pinelands, we used to edge into it on our bikes on the way to somewhere else, slightly uncomfortable.  We would rush for the swings, swinging higher and higher, daring each other,  then, tiring suddenly of them, we would climb the steep and endless thin metal stairs of the high slide, shrieking inwardly as we let go of our hands to sweep down and land balanced on our two feet.  It was not "cool" to shout with excitement, or to fall on your bum at the bottom!  And then we were off again, never staying very long because it was a strange place, quite dark and foreboding, very secluded, tall pines everywhere, and there were sometimes teenagers behaving badly, smoking and swearing, scaring us.  And we were not actually supposed to go there, I can't remember why, but I seem to remember that it was a vaguely forbidden spot.

When I was nine months pregnant with Jess, my heaviest baby, (really heavy) who also made her entrance two weeks late, I was for some reason in a playground in East London with little Emma, nearly three.  She was very brave until she got right up on to the tall platform before the slide, but once she realized how she had to descend, where I was waiting, huge tummy and all, to catch her, she lost her nerve and refused to come down on the slide or by going back and using the steps.  After half an hour of cajoling, bribery, shouting, pleading, talking to both reasonably and unreasonably, I was forced to clamber up something like a rope-ladder looking like a clumsy fat penguin, in order to rescue her.  Once I had hefted myself up there I decided that the easiest way down was the slide, which we took, both shrieking with laughter and fear, a bountiful-bellied woman clutching her crazy white-blonde daughter to her, and then running the gamut of disapproving faces as we waddled back to the car.

Absence is hard to bear some days.  It is the nature of life and death, of course, and also our global society, but the acceptance of that fact doesn't make it any easier.  So here are my two little daughters who are now grown and far away with daughters of their own, but I have been writing about their smaller selves and feeling nostalgic for those little cherubs, so full of vivacious energy and dancing delight.  

Seizième

Rambled through the misty meadows with my ghost-dog Molly, about 2km.  It was so quiet in parts, as though the fog had dimmed sound as well as sight.  But my robins found me along the way, flashing their bright feathers at me, flitting quietly through the branches, moving about in their element.

It is the birthday of my mother, who would have been 93 today.  January is filled with birthdays and anniversaries.

When people are old, it is hard to imagine them as plump little babies, with that beautiful soft skin, that tender little back of the neck, and clear-eyed smiles.  But of course we all started this way, held up and kissed by our parents, fussed over, bathed and fed and marvelled at, worried about, loved.

Granny Gracie with my mother Joan

Pop, my grandpa, with my mother, whom he called "Peg o' my heart"

My mother was born in South Africa, a third-generation South African.  My great-great-grandfather John Webster was a baker who supplied the Karroo Zuurberg Pass roadbuilders (mostly convicts) with bread for many years and later had an inn nearby called Ann's Villa.  His wife Ann died at the age of 46 after bearing 14 children!  I am very glad that I live in an era with readily available contraception.

We went to Ann's Villa on an outing one day in 2000, as I wanted to see this part of the country where my ancestors had lived before leaving South Africa.   We spent a wonderful morning with the elephants at Addo, Tim taking many photographs,  and then travelled up the old Zuurberg pass, which apparently has a magnificent view if it is not raining like crazy as it was that day.  We had to negotiate hectic hairpin bends and avoid steep drop-offs through thick mist at times.

The little boys were so tired that they had fallen asleep by the time we eventually got there, but I rushed about with a huge and excited sense of my own history (and a sense of relief that we had successfully completed the Pass), looking at the family names on the gravestones, going into the villa and meeting some distant relatives who were renovating it, and then Tim took my picture standing proudly under the sign, "Ann's Villa".

When we arrived home Tim discovered that there was no film in his camera.

Anyway, my mum grew up in Sea Point in Cape Town, in a house on Trafalgar Square.  Such a different place from the crazy crowded city creeping steadily up the mountain-slopes as it is now.  My mother would play bicycle hockey on High Level Road on the way to school.  The little family would  just walk a couple of blocks behind the house, up to the mountain path where they would often go for picnics and days rambling together.

My auntie Nora, Pop and my mother.

Joan on the left was 14, Gracie 37 and Nora 12.

My mum was lovely.  She lived a good long life but I wish she could have died quickly like Tim's mother.  Her death was long and drawn-out and painful and I wasn't there for most of it so my sister had to deal with it all which was so difficult to bear alone and I am still sorrowful about that.   I have yet to scatter the ashes of my mother and father, kindly brought to me in a brown paper envelope by my sister a few years ago.  They are both there next to my bed, a handful of little pieces of grit and ash, with small shards of bone.  They are different colours too, just as they were in life. 

 I still wish I could tell my mother everything important, how the icicles hang shining from the gutter, how my son tells stories like his grandpa, how Matthew is going to Senegal, what it feels like to have granddaughters.  I want to play her Chopin's Nocturne in C sharp minor using Skype, I want to drink tea and eat raisin bread with her, I want to bask in the radiance of her smile.  I want to commiserate with her as we talk about awful things, rejoice with her in all the things we hold dear, and to understand how life is such a rushing torrent.

Day 15

It is so difficult to get up when it is still dark and cold!  I dutifully did many exercises and then ran 1.5 miles (2.4km) on the treadmill, as the roads were icy this morning and we slithered from our cars to the gym building, the black asphalt shiny and treacherous.  But the sun was shining on my unwilling heart and when there is all this blue bright sky after a few days of rain you can't help but feel more cheerful.

My Firstfriend turned the same age as me today.  (Although it is already afternoon on the day after her birthday in Melbourne where she lives on the other side of the world.)  We met when we were both only a year old, our mothers' meeting forging the two of us (and our mothers) into the best of friends.

A little older, so close, more than sisters, our wanderings took us all over Pinelands together.  Our mothers let us roam freely, often accompanied by my lolloping dog Timmy.  We explored the golf course near my house, roller-skated up and down steep hills we found.  We told everyone we were twins, although they may have been suspicious of this fact when we also admitted to having been born five months apart!  Also that one had lovely dark wavy hair and the brownest of eyes, while the other possessed a short shock of straight blonde hair and blue eyes.

We lived a privileged happy childhood in a suburb where groups of children played cricket on the playing fields near Trish's house, and in the gardens along the block, huge games of hide and seek, or some other game made up on the spot.  Our artistic leanings were the same, and we spent hours drawing, or colouring in coveted colouring-in books of ballet dancers, with crayons from the big Crayola box that one of us had received for a birthday, the one with about 500 colours, including the prized gold, silver and copper!

She was my first love beyond my family and still holds that place in my heart.   We are entwined together with those bright threads of connection from the old days, long ago now.

Best friends Trish and Anne at Dalebrook, circa 1961

My twin is also a grandmother, of darling Poppy

Orchids are exquisite.  We are fascinated with them because their voluptuous waxy petaled forms are so resonant of various things: birds, animals, insects.  But they are also bewitching to us because that is their modus operandi, employing seduction and deception to get their way.  Some orchids pretend they are nectar-bearing flowers to attract pollinating bees, while others actually mimic bees in flight hoping to "incite territorial combat  that results in pollination" according to a National Geographic article, although it stated "male bees" which doesn't sound right, although apparently male Carpenter bees do exhibit this behaviour.  (My knowledge of bees comes from keeping honey bees, but there are many different kinds of bees which do not necessarily live in colonies run by a queen.  My idea of a male bee therefore is a drone.  In autumn it is horrifyingly fascinating to watch my worker bees sting the drones, drag them out and throw them over the edge of the landing board to die.)

I have had two orchids for a few years, although neither of them have blooms right now, and so their pots are filled with just these rather flat, strange large succulent leaves.  It is always miraculous and exciting when I see that there is a new little stalk slowly emerging, with all that promise of delicate white furlings contained within it.

14th day

Went for a wet walk in Cambridge at lunchtime, around the block, looking at all the grey rainy houses, such close neighbours, feeling happy that I have so much space around my house, so many tall trees, so lucky to have room to breathe, so fortuitous to be friends with a meadow.

Blue paint is beautiful on a grey day.  Bright turquoise, deep ultramarine, cobalt, azure, indigo, cerulean, even the words conjuring up so many images: earth from space, the little blue marble of our planet,  the Caribbean sea, the stormy Atlantic, my childrens' eyes, my old school song, stage curtains, nightfall.  

The majority of people in the world choose blue as their favourite colour.  I wonder if that's the pervasiveness of the sky and its reflection in our eyes.

So we all love that blue depth.  But apparently we see red differently, men and women.  The ability to see red is contained in a gene which sits on the X chromosome, and women have two of those, therefore two copies of the gene, so we see many more variations of red than do men. 

So today here is a myriad of blue fragments of 8th grade Gerhard Richter-inspired abstract art. 

And then there is the damp smell of the road when you're travelling on a rain-drenched journey home from school in the pouring night, your nose aware of an acute mixture of asphalt and grass, car exhausts and splashing puddles, until finally by heart you know the sharp turn of the driveway, the dripping trees lining your path up the hill to the house with its bright windows shining, and inside your people waiting, and hot supper.

13th January

Woke up very early to skype, then off to the gym, only to realise once I was there, that I still had my woolly warm boots on, and the gym  personnel frown on running barefoot on the treadmill, so I just did all my weights etc, looking like a twit in my boots, and then came home feeling rather disgruntled and ran  2.8 km through the cold morning air, until it became coolly welcome on my hot cheeks and arms. 

It is the birthday of my little granny, my mother's mother, the bird-boned grandmother who struggled to walk, who my father would pick up gently like a baby and carry up the stairs when it was time for her to go to bed.  Granny Gracie.  She would have been 116 today.  She lived until she was 81 and died just a few months before her fifth great-grandchild was born, my Emma.  While I was pregnant I really longed for her to hold on so that she would be able to to meet my baby, but her later adult life had been immersed in pain and so I was glad that her suffering was over. 

My grandmother is something both natural and man-made, so I will only talk of her tonight.

She was born in Brampton in Cumberland, which was the place where Bonny Prince Charlie once had his headquarters, right in the Northwest of England.

She always believed that her name was Dorothea Grace, but late in life she received her birth certificate and it stated that she was Nina Grace, which came as a great shock to her, as no one had ever called her Nina! She was known as Gracie her whole life, and my littlest granddaughter bears her name next to her first name.

Gracie and her mother, Nora.

She was an interesting girl, climbing trees, playing the violin, attending Art School, and when the war came along, becoming one of the first members of the Women's Royal Air Force, working at Suttons Farm airfield, where she would sneak in her little brother Ronald who was obsessed with the planes.  He proudly kept a photograph of himself next to a Handley Page bomber, the photographic opportunity which Gracie had organised, for the rest of his life. 

Grace Hewitson at Suttons Farm Airfield

But all that changed after she met my grandfather, Gerald Webster, a South African pilot who had fought in Egypt during the war. 

Gerald and Gracie

They were married and she moved to South Africa with him, which was very brave, but life there was very different and not what she had expected, and two girls arrived in quick succession, my mother Joan and her little sister Nora, and Gracie was somewhat overwhelmed, returning again and again to England and her family, and then traipsing back to South Africa a few months later.  She was a sickly adult, and from her fifties suffered from terrible osteoporosis which left her unable to walk after several falls and breakages. 

Gracie looking apprehensive, her future laid out before her, unknown.

She was very dear to me, and once when I leaped out of the car to help her out of the passenger seat, I inadvertently slammed my door on her hand, where she had put it to hold on while she slowly tried to swing her feet out so that she could balance herself to be able to stand up with the aid of her walking stick and me.  I was horrified and opened the door again as fast as I could, but all her fingers were squashed on that little hand, and such pain in her face.  She tried to cover it up for my sake but I could see how much agony I had caused and felt awful, still feel awful, watched the hand turn black and blue over days, the fingers discoloured and useless.

She loved reading and listening to boxing matches on the radio, (of all things!) and giggling, and music of all kinds.  My mother would visit her at least 5 times a week when she was bedridden in a nursing home and I would often accompany her, all the years I was in High School.   She was generally pretty cheerful even though she was often in pain, and never "lost her marbles".  She adored my dad, that big strong man of the huge hands.  And he loved her too, she kind of took the place of his mother whom he had left in England when he came to live in South Africa just as Gracie had left her own family in England years before. 

When Gracie was dying, she asked for Jack, my dad, and when he went to her bedside she gave him a beatific smile, saying, "Come to my arms, you bundle of charms," which was the funny thing he would say to her when he used to pick her up, years before when she lived with us, and carry her to her room, because she couldn't manage the stairs.  It was part of the lyrics from a 1940's song they both knew.   Those were her last words before she died.

One of Gracie's nudes from her Art School days, part of the portfolio she left me when she died.

She is part of my line, the oldest from my bloodline whom I remember well, and now I am a grandmother myself, and all these lines draw the family tree, branches growing, names appearing and re-appearing, traits passed down, the colour of the eyes, the sweep of hair, the way a foot plants itself on the ground to stand the body upright.

January twelfth

Tim and the boys and I always try to beat one other to the car wherever it is parked when we come out of the movie, or the supermarket or wherever.  We helter-skelter, trying to remember where the car is in the first place, then darting in and out of the rows of parked cars, cheating by trying to distract or hold the other back until the last minute, and then there is the final mad rush to get there and be the first to actually touch the car! It is seldom that I win.  Tonight we went into the city to watch a movie and have dinner with Nick, and afterwards, coming up to the alleyway leading to the parking lot we all suddenly took off, but the young lion  beat the old lion by a few lengths, the old lioness bringing up the rear, running her heart out, but to no avail!

My littlest granddaughter is five months old today.  Funny how for the first two years your age is counted in months, and thereafter, once you have done all that amazing growing and developing month by month, you are measured in years for the rest of your life. 

Ella at two weeks with grandpa

Grandpa still has the right touch to send babies gently to sleep!

We are watching her grow remotely, but hope that in the future we can all live closer together.  It is torture sometimes to see these babies on Skype and not be able to reach out and hold them close, stroke their tender cheeks, cup their soft-haired heads in your hands, feel their comfortable weight in your arms.

Humans have been measuring periods of time according to the moon since Upper Palaeolithic times, about 30 000 years ago, according to ancient tally-sticks.  The Ishango bone found in the Democratic Republic of Congo has been given various interpretations by different archaeologists, and several scholars believe that it shows a six-month lunar calendar, or a menstrual calendar, and that it was probably made by a woman.  It is the fibula of a baboon, with a sharp piece of quartz fixed to one end.  (I was interested to read that recent archaeological evidence suggests that at the beginning of the Palaeolithic, about 300 000 years ago, people banded together in egalitarian groups, and that hunting and gathering were done by both sexes, and also, that they looked after their elderly.  There is a theory that the later division of labour was probably what allowed Homo sapiens to out-compete the Neanderthals.) 

The word month is derived from the word moon and many types of calendars, such as the ancient Hellenic, Hebrew and Islamic calendars, were based on the lunar cycle.  Depending on your location on the earth, the lunar orbit and cycle is not very constant, and therefore a solar calendar was gradually developed from the Roman calendar, called the Gregorian calendar, which has been in use since the mid-1500's and is used by most of the contemporary global community. 

The month of January comes from the Roman calendar and is named for Janus, the god of beginnings and transitions, usually depicted with two heads facing in opposite directions, looking to the past and to the future.  January is the gate into the new year, but close enough that it looks back into the old year just past.  (The original Roman calendar had 10 months, and winter was considered a monthless period!  Take that, Winter!)

So months are both natural (lunar) and man-made (twelve named months). 

You can remember how many days each month has by the little poem, "Thirty days hath Sepember, April, June, and November, ..." but also by looking at the keys of a piano and counting off the months starting with January on F.  All the months which fall on the white notes have 31 days. 

This is the mug Matthew made for me a few years ago.  I am very particular about the shape and look of the mugs I drink my coffee and tea from.  There are only about three in our cupboard which are aesthetically acceptable, and two of them were made by Matt, and this is my favourite presently.   

Day 11

Not finding a parking spot today at the gym I decided it was balmy enough to run, turned around and drove straight back out to do all the errands, after which I ran 3.6km in the forest and through the wet empty streets under water-logged skies, the only creature I met being a friendly sodden chocolate labrador ambling across the quiet road.  The thing I like about our town is that dogs are allowed to roam, there is no law against it as in many other towns.  You just have to attach a disc with your name and phone number on to the collar somewhere so that people can phone you if your dog wanders too far.  We have ourselves rung various people whose dogs we have found, and Molly frequently visited 'Kitty-who-lives-down-the-hill' (as she was known in our family) who took her into her garden to play with her Irish Setters Dylan and Clancy while she went inside to call me, again, saying, "Take your time, she's fine here."

Tim's mother died two years ago today.  We had seen her just a few days before, in the northern part of South Africa, on a luscious green farm where her daughter and son-in-law lived.  All four of her children had been together for a couple of lovely days, the first time for many years, with all the grandchildren and one great-grandchild there too!  It was a perfect summer's day, with a hot blue sky, and everyone had fun re-connecting and eating great food and sitting in the shade of the beautiful old trees.  And in the middle of it all was Elaine, the matriarch of this large family, a kind, sweet, strong person, with a gentle chuckle and the whitest of white hair, the epitome of a grand old lady.  She died how many of us would like to, after a long life, very suddenly, still independent, still "all there", still very present.  And after spending this rather amazing day with all her family around her. 

Skype is a brilliant invention.  Using skype I talk to my daughters and granddaughters twice a week, and even though we all live on different continents, they kind of know me.  Luna definitely remembers me and I make her laugh every time I talk and sing to her, and my heart is very full.  Ella was just a tiny thing when I last held her, so I don't know if she remembers me, but she does smile at me most times.  With Skype I have been present at bath-times, participated in Luna's first taste of solid food, read books with Ella, I have sung to her while her mother went off to find something in another room.  To counter the sadness of not living near these darling little girls, I can watch them growing and changing before my eyes, in that incredible first year of life, when a baby grows from a tiny helpless strange-looking creature into a walking, babbling little character.

So even though it must puzzle these babies, this strange flat grandmother, I am so lucky compared to my own mother who had to wait for the weekly Sunday night phone call, and letters, photos, and little movies on large videotapes, made for granny and grandpa, which arrived in the post every now and then, and the intermittent visits.

Apparently there are other VoIP applications such as Ekiga and Jitsi, but Skype seems to have the monopoly right now.  Ekiga used to be called Gnome meeting, which is quite wonderful.

Tenth day

No running on Fridays, always a long day which starts at 5am with the alarm going off and scaring me.  I hate alarms, hate waking up to their unnatural noise.  You wake in panic, your dream-self filled with consternation. Disoriented, you leap up to stop the infernal sound, then sink back down to tell yourself everything is alright.  Then you force your feet to drag your unwilling body to the bathroom where you sit on the side of the bath for the longest time, slightly unhinged.  What an awful way to start your day!

My sense of location did not work very well today.  I think Boston was getting me back for being rude about it yesterday.  I had to drive three students in to the IB conference, a regular trip of about 20 minutes, which took us 50, with several circular trips through tunnels under the sea, ending up at Logan Airport once and narrowly skirting it a second time.   I said several really bad words which teachers are not supposed to use, and although all three students were very supportive and sweet they were no help at all, none of them being drivers and therefore having no mind-maps of their own as to how the roads work. 

When we got back to school after their presentations, these dear students were so sweet when I apologized for the awful initial trip, commenting on what a wonderful adventure it had been, and eagerly narrating worse experiences they had had with their parents.

So Boston, I do love you, and here is a beautiful photograph of Luna and her mother on the Charlestown ferryboat last summer, and you are somewhere there in the background.

Day 9

Ran around like a crazy person today, but not in the gym or on the road.  Just after kids, up and down the stairs helping Nick take things down to the car and then up and down more stairs to his apartment when we got there.  And literally running around my school looking for a student who was supposed to bring me an artwork she had done which I wanted to put on an exhibition I had to put up in the city for an IB conference.

Driving in Boston is always quite stressful although I was pleasantly surprised by how much easier it was today, being in the middle of the day, so not as much traffic as during rush hour.  When we first lived here we had bets with another recently-landed family about who would be the first to drive in the city.  There was no such thing as a GPS appliance which talked to you and told you where to go.  We lived quite close to good public transport so it was easy for us to avoid taking the car in to the city for quite a long time.   A few years later I was very amused to see this:
 
Boston has seemingly endless one-way streets so if you go wrong somewhere it is hard to maintain your bump of location as you try each dizzying new turn.  But today, my mind-map worked pretty well, aided of course by a helpful app on my phone. How the world has changed in such a short time!  But I knew where I was going, I had a sense of where everything was, in which direction lay the sea, the Common, recognised familiar landmarks.

The spacial map in the hippocampus is larger in London black cab drivers than in ordinary people.  The connections caused by learning "the Knowledge" a system of 40 000 streets and landmarks around London, causes connections to develop and grow, almost like making a bigger space, like opening a drawer and slipping in a sheaf of maps.  We have so many maps in our heads, the people of my generation, especially from travelling the world, or from moving, living in different cities, but I think my sons' generation's maps are much smaller.  They have never really had to find places by trial and error, by following a map in a book, trying to memorise a route.  Once you have found your way you remember it for next time, and grow the map in your head as you do so.   GPS/Sat-Navs have been around since my sons began driving, so they listen to the directions more than remember the way for the next time.  And so less connections are made.  It is just one more way in which technology affects the brain.

Already our brains, and particularly children's brains, have shorter attention spans.  "Technology conditions the brain to pay attention to information very differently than reading. The metaphor that Nicholas Carr uses is the difference between scuba diving and jet skiing. Book reading is like scuba diving in which the diver is submerged in a quiet, visually restricted, slow-paced setting with few distractions and, as a result, is required to focus narrowly and think deeply on the limited information that is available to them. In contrast, using the Internet is like jet skiing, in which the jet skier is skimming along the surface of the water at high speed, exposed to a broad vista, surrounded by many distractions, and only able to focus fleetingly on any one thing."  -http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-power-prime/201212/how-technology-is-changing-the-way-children-think-and-focus

I thought that was such a beautiful metaphor when I read it.

Technology is amazing, wonderful, awful, terrible, fantastic, destructive, time-consuming, marvellous, distracting, helpful, seductive, addictive....  I love the app Whatsapp, because it enables me to communicate with my relatives and friends all over the world, but I hate the fact that what my 7th-graders are mostly doing when they have finished their homework is watching YouTube videos.

I love that you can look up anything online, like being able to read all the papers given at a conference in Australia on Adult Literacy.  But I hate that the adolescents of today are learning most of their sexual knowledge from internet porn, which anyone can access on a phone nowadays.

I love being able to listen to audio-books while I clean the house, or drive home, or wash the dishes, tasks that would otherwise be deadly dull.  I hate that many children will mostly choose to play video-games, if given the choice.  I recently chaperoned a four-day field trip to a Nature's Classroom camp, where no technology was allowed.  Everything was learned by doing, the science of frisbee flight was taught by playing Ultimate Frisbee and then experimenting and discussing how a frisbee actually flies.  The characteristics of fire were learned by making fires and cooking over them.  The nature of quartz was seen on a dark night-walk.   There was also tons of free time, and what I noticed was that everyone just ran about, playing running games like basketball and soccer and another crazily physical game which seems to have been invented there.  So when there was no technology they all just ran about, and seemed so happy, and so tired every night that there was no bad behaviour, no noise, everyone just fell into bed exhausted and slept very well.

Second week

I ran just over a mile today (1.6km).  Still in the gym.  It was -19C when we got up and went out to our cars this morning! 

 "Children of my heart".  These are other people's children, but you have a hand in raising them, as they spend so much time at your house, usually because they are friends with your own sons and daughters.  And they become so dear to your heart, and you follow their lives with such loving interest.  My mother had several of these children, and I became one of these children within the large family of my best friend.  I have quite a few of these beloveds myself, children who I have disciplined and fed and kissed goodnight, have sung songs with, taught to swim, been angry with for eating all the cheese, have patched up when they fell out of the trees in my garden, having been persuaded up them, against their better judgement, by my biological children. 

There were mostly girls in the beginning, when my daughters were young, and then when my sons were young the friends were mostly boys.  And now this latest bunch are all grown young men, they all tower above me where I stand cooking in the kitchen.  They come frolicking in at the door and envelope me in great hugs.  We have interesting conversations, talk of the great problems of our time, of relationships, careers, books, movies.  They lollop around like young horses, by turns clumsy and gentle, competitive and loud.  At times their rooms reek of testosterone and sweat, and then again, when they go out and about they turn out quite handsome and nicely dressed, smelling pretty good. 

Two of the "children of my heart" I said goodbye to today.

 Houseplants are another favourite of mine.  In summer there are only a few inside the house, as they are all outside where they can happily feel rain dripping off their leaves, feel the sun hot and life-giving, even experience small birds flitting about them.  So in winter the dining room and kitchen area becomes a tropical forest as we bring in all these fragile plants. Only the rhododendron is tough enough for the snow, and laughs at the delicate green-leaved darlings being cosseted so.  

In South Africa we call plants in pots pot-plants, but we have experienced several very odd looks from Americans when using this term.  When Tim's company moved into a new building with a spacious lobby area filled with light,  he exclaimed loudly, "This section would be really beautiful with a bunch of pot-plants!"  In America they are "potted" plants, whereas a pot-plant is something completely different.  

I am very good at keeping plants alive, inherited from my dad, the big man whom plants loved.  I love to have the green of them all around me in the cold months, when all the flora in the woods and garden is ostensibly dead, at any rate, completely colourless.  Houseplants enhance the oxygen in your house.  Most plants also deal with formaldehyde and other poisons found in cleaners and carpets and furniture.  Our houses are full of seemingly harmless objects whose fundamental elements could kill you!

The jungle

 

On the seventh day

Lucky number 7!  We drove through the freezing air, past frozen wastes of icy pastures, mountains of snowy ice by the sides of the highways, then parked our cars, reminded each other again to make sure there were no Swiss army knives on our keyrings, then ran across the road avoiding slipping on frozen puddles, and into the Federal Building, where everyone got through the metal detector scot-free except for me, who had to be scanned with a beeping device, which found: coins, a Swiss army knife (!), a buckled belt, and bracelets and rings which set off embarrassingly loud sounds!  The official was very nice though, and every time I said "sorry", he replied with a big smile, "Don't worry about it."  Nick kindly ran back to the car with my Swiss army knife.

Then we all congregated hurriedly together with the lawyer's assistant, who informed us that we were all late except for me, but that she had sorted it with officialdom and everything was fine!  The lawyer had told Tim that we would probably all go in as a group and it would last about 15 minutes, not individually and taking two hours as promised in the letter of invitation.   But of course that did not happen.  Bureaucracy must have its day.

While waiting to be called, Matthew stressed that I should not make a fuss about any question, like if they asked "would you be prepared to bear arms for the country at war?" I should just say "yes".  I said, "They're not going to ask me that, are they?"  But of course my interviewer asked that specific question, and I answered, "Do they really want a 58-year-old woman to carry a gun and kill people?" which was exactly what Matthew had warned me against.  But she was very sympathetic and said that no, of course not, women were exempt from that kind of duty and that she wouldn't want to do that either.

We had learned our 100 questions and answers well and all four passed with flying colours, 100%!  The three of us were kept waiting on tenterhooks for ages for Tim's interview to end, which took forever, but at long last he appeared through the glass doors walking down the passage towards us, and was given all the paperwork we had been given, so we were all suddenly naturalized Americans, like Albert Einstein, Madeleine Albright,  John Muir, Isaac Asimov, Dave Matthews, Isabel Allende, Pierce Brosnan, Yoko Ono and Nadia Comaneci! Well, we still have the swearing-in ceremony to attend, but we have passed the final test.  As Jess said, now we are real African-Americans!  It is a strange feeling.  As Matthew wrote in a poem just after we arrived here, when we were all longing for our familiar world back home, which was actually published in a book ironically titled, Poetry by Young Americans, "The shape of my country is in my heart".

With our letter from Barack Obama welcoming us to America!

The Cold is upon us again, -13C and wind chill even colder, I suspect, when I stopped to fill up my car on my way home from school this evening.  It was like torture, standing there mentally urging the petrol pump to hurry up and the numbers to go faster on the little dial!  Even though I had all the clothing required, I was chilled to the bone when I got back into the car and set the heater going full blast the rest of the way home!

When we arrived in America it was bleak winter, with ugly dirty snow everywhere, and one Sunday we were lying in bed and I asked Tim incredulously, "How did we end up in a country where you can die from the cold?"  There were times when the boys could only go outside for 15 minutes at a time to play, otherwise they were in danger of their eyeballs freezing!  Our house then overlooked a sheltered bay, which froze over for six weeks one winter!  Sea-water.  Frozen.  You could walk on the sea.  

Dogs don't mind the weather, they just want to walk and run with you, no matter what.  I miss my crazy Molly-dog.

Mad Molly in the snow a year ago.

Day Six

I ran 1.8 km today, but on a running machine, in a gym, which is awfully disgusting really.  I hate gyms but can't run in the snow.  I fall just walking in the snow.  I have run for almost four years now, but always outside.  When I run outside I don't have earphones in my ears, so that I can hear the birds and the trees and my hooves pounding the ground.  But in a gym you have to have earphones, so I listen to my book, which makes it slightly more acceptable. 

Gyms are weird places.  (My son-in-law has a blog which started off the klapping-gym-boet term in South Africa in 2010, http://slicktiger.wordpress.com/2010/02/09/the-slicktiger-guide-to-klapping-gym-boet/ It is satirical, so please don't be offended by the language and some of the ideas if you read it.)  I have a kind of horror of gyms, but our local Y had a special free deal to have three sessions with a personal trainer to advise us on the kinds of exercise relevant to our age and to help us draw up a programme.  So we have been doing this for about five weeks now, lifting weights, doing stretches, running, rowing etc.  It makes you feel good to think you are doing something positive for your old age. It is just odd that I have to fulfill this in a gym, a place, it seems to me, full of strange men lifting weights and watching themselves in the mirror, and germs.

The kind of instructions you find in women's magazines that I loathe (the instructions and the magazines).  If I am told I am doing something wrong I am immediately a rebellious teenager again and will definitely not comply.

So the natural thing for today is what I ran on this morning, the human foot, or feet. Apparently our feet evolved after our hands, and the reason they think this is because when researchers stimulated the finger-pads of apes' hands, the neural network mapped each finger to a separate location in the brain, whereas when toe-pads are stimulated they go to one location.  With humans, the hands react the same way as apes, but when our toe-pads are stimulated, the four smaller toes correspond to one location, and the big toe, used for balance and walking upright, has its own location.  So with this research comparing the brains of apes and humans, scientists have reasoned that our feet evolved after we diverged from apes.

In South Africa we go barefoot a lot of the time, and here in the north-eastern US,  in summer the pads of my feet are still hard enough to walk quite happily on a beach, with everyone around me leaping about from the pain of the hot sand.  In winter my feet miss the air.  It is so cold that I wear warm boots most of the time.  Only in bed do my feet get to breathe and be naked.

My sons have huge boats of feet, they take size 12 and 13 shoes!  My mother had neat feet with toes that angled in a perfect line from the big to the pinkie-toe.  I always rather liked the shape of my feet until I went to a reflexologist once (as a favour to her as she needed patients/clients on whom to practice), who asked me if my feet had always been so odd, with strange bumps and irregular toes, and such obviously different sizes, the two feet are not symmetrical.  It was rather shocking and I went home and stared at them often, wonderingly.  Eventually I grew to love them again, and now I am very proud of their almost 4 year running career.

I couldn't find a drawing of my feet, although I have done a few, so here is one by my daughter, a beautiful pastel portrayal of her own feet, done a long time ago, just after we had arrived in America. She also has perfectly angled toes like her grandmother.

Le cinquième jour

I took Tim's long lens and went for a long walk in the deep snow with my ghost-dog Molly to find my robins but today they weren't where I had expected them to be, and instead I found a solitary song sparrow foraging in the meadow snow, piping a little every now and then.  I think she was a female, as the males sing more than females and quite loudly, apparently.  They are very common small birds in North America, and their songs are very important to their procreation.  The male sparrows who are the most favoured by the females are those who sing the best, who have learned the most varied repertoires, in other words, those who know the most songs!

 

My little bird-friend ran along, finding tiny seeds of nourishment here and there, her delicate feet indenting the snow with tiny symmetrical prints, in places adding to the light tracks of field-mice and the rounded evidence of their snow-tunnels.  She was very intent, remaining companionably on the ground nearby for about half an hour before taking off effortlessly.  I would love to be able to do that. 

The oldest song sparrow ever recorded lived 11 years and 4 months. I wonder how many songs he knew. 

The snow today melted and softened a little from the relative warmth of the temperature, and I was suddenly tempted to make a sculpture of a snow-angel in almost the same place I had made one a few years before.  However, by the time I had finished, it was just about too dark to take a photograph, so here are the two best ones.  She is very large, larger than life-size, and dancing on her tippy-toes.   Her wings are made of wild grasses, and her head is tilted back, looking up towards her right wing, deciding where to float to next.   I would love to believe in angels, and almost do, such a perfect idea, a person who has wings like a bird and can fly. 

And here is the one from a few years' ago.  She looks much more ready to lift off.  Also a little uncomfortable, as though she had just woken up and wondered how she had become supine.

Day Four

We have a large rhododendron tree/bush next to our deck, beloved of all the birds, a good green and shadowy hiding place close to the feeders and bird-baths.  We were amazed, the first winter in our house, that this luscious deciduous-looking tree, bearer of thick succulent leaves, was in fact an evergreen, and that its approach to cold weather was to change these voluptuous leaves into sort-of fat pine needles.  We learned to judge the outside temperature by how the tree looked every day, and soon began referring to the "temperature-tree", which is what we still affectionately call it.  

When I looked up "rhododendrons in winter", there were all these websites telling me how to look after rhododendrons, how to protect them from the cold by wrapping them with burlap sacks, saying that the biggest killer of rhododendrons was frigid winters.  I think this one is so big, tree-sized really, that it can survive anything.  I am very happy that we have what is clearly a champion rhododendron!  The first time I recall meeting rhododendrons was in London when I was eight years old, and my parents were going through a bad time in their marriage, so my mother and I went to live in England for a while.  One typically grey day we walked through Richmond Park and the beautiful pink, purple, and crimson blossoms filled my astonished eyes and cheered my sunny-South-Africa-starved heart.

Today there was no time for a walk or run, as we slept in and rose very late, and after brunch for all the people in the house, I had to re-open Salon Cuisine to cut Joseph's hair.  I always cut my daughters' hair, and since I met Tim almost 30 years ago, I have been cutting his hair, and also our friend Stephen's, and when the boys came along I naturally cut their hair too.  (In fact the first time they ever went to a barber was when I was away in Cape Town once, after we had moved to America, and Tim took them all for a special treat!)  And sometimes their friends are over when they are having a haircut, and they decide that it is a good idea, and get in line for one too!  

   

One of my most loyal clients

Cutting someone's hair is a peculiarly personal thing to do , and also a great responsibility, as it would not do for your client to be dissatisfied with his appearance once the haircut is finished.  There in front of you he sits, vulnerable, expectant, with a towel around his shoulders, this beloved head with its hair, curly or straight, thick or fine, and as you begin you try hard not to hurt him inadvertently, you concentrate intently on keeping the hair the same length in the right places, you cut the hair in the short style favoured by the majority of men in the Western world.  For about half an hour, you work on this head, you cut carefully above the delicate ears, you compensate for crowns and hair growing in strange directions, you notice scars, you neaten the hairline at the top of the neck, you get to observe a head at 360°, you note similarities and differences, you take advice from onlookers, or not.  And then, finally, there is a circle of hair on the floor, and a new person who stands up and is suddenly much taller than you, who emerges from his towel, all clean and fresh-faced and beautiful!

Third Day

January 3rd, 2014.  Snowpocalypse, some are calling it.  We dug out this morning from about 2 feet (.61 meters) of snow, after one of the coldest storms on record.  As I write it is -17C at 7.30pm, and expected to go down to -20C later on tonight! We will all sleep well, quite soon!


Last night I lay awake for ages listening to the wind howling around the house, the gale force blasting snow and frigid air at our house, trying to sneak in at any little crevice.  And this morning all the birds arrived at the feeders: bullying blue jays, tufted titmouses, dark-eyed juncos with their tummies dipped in snow, cardinals, American goldfinches in their brown winter coats, downy woodpeckers, nuthatches, fat round doves, and tiny cheerful chickadees, my favourite bird, and also the favourite bird of the person who chose the state bird of Massachusetts.  It constantly astounds me, how these tiny little creatures can survive these gelid temperatures, these bitter nights. 

 Chickadees weigh 9 - 14g, the lightest of feathery creatures, and yet here they are, cheeping away cheerily, perfectly preened with their little black caps on.  Apparently they rely on their ability to lower their body temperature at night and also their amazing memory for where they have stashed food during the autumn months.  Their brains actually grow an extra bump to accommodate this larger requirement for memory, like adding a memory chip to a computer!

It was such hard work posting through deep deep snow into the meadow today.
I have a chair at the pond where I sit and watch the birds.  This is how it changed over three days.

My man-made thing today is a snow-angel.  One of the lovely things about snow, and children in snow, are snow angels.  This is a picture of a world record of nearly 9000 people in North Dakota making snow angels at the same time!

 

I made a snow angel in the second meadow today, under the big rock so that I could photograph it from above, and then decided to make six, one for each person in my family.  It was laborious work, so difficult to get up from the deep snow after each one, trying not to disturb the angel-shape.  I took several photographs, pleased with myself, until I got home and uploaded them to my laptop, only to realise, with a great sense of disappointment, that I hadn't done them correctly, and that instead of six lovely angels, it looked instead as though an adolescent boy had drawn six giant penises in the snow!

 

Day Two

What a difference a day makes!

Yesterday there was very little snow on the way to the meadow.  Most of it had melted to leave just a paste of brown flattened leaves.  In the colder parts here and there were patches of snowy ice and in the field, large stretches over which the white-tailed deer were loud in their getaway. 

Today we have a few inches of snow, with blizzard conditions for this evening and an expected 18 inches (46cm, almost half a meter) here on the coast by morning! 

In our house we have probably the same number of suffixes for the word snow as the Inuit, although many of our suffixes are laced with expletives.

We live on a HILL, a very steep HILL, the driveway up which curves at the top with such an extreme gradient that when you get to that point in your car, you actually can't see what is coming, it is as though you are flying, for a short while there is just sky in your windscreen's view.  In our family this part of the driveway is known as the Landing Strip.

During snowstorms we are cut off from the outside world until the storm ends and Tim or one of the boys (if they are home from college) has gone up and down numerous times with the snowblower, and the other members of the Bouwer household have shovelled and spread sand and salt, clearing a path for the cars to make their way gingerly down the slippery slope.  This takes about 2 hours or more if there has been a serious amount of snow.  We have to keep reminding ourselves that it is very good aerobic exercise.  "You gotta love the hill!" is also a common ironic expression used by our family while working on snow removal. 

So the man-made object for today, to accompany the snow theme, as I sit here next to the glowing wood-stove while the wind howls outside and the snow swirls through the -16C dark night,  is the common snow shovel.  I was interested to learn that there have been more than 100 patents for these lowly but invaluable tools, and that one of the first patents in the late 1800's was given to a woman designer named Lydia Fairweather, which is a rather beautiful name, especially for a designer of snow shovels.  We have four shovels, all of varying materials and sizes.  And we each have our favourites, depending on the type of snow which has fallen. 

So here is a drawing of an imagined Lydia Fairweather contemplating snow shovels!  As I contemplate all the snow I will shovel tomorrow, hoping for fair weather after noon!

A new moon starts this new year.  The first day of the new year is always so shocking, one can't quite believe that another year is over, a new number must be written.  It is like the first day of school, when all your books are beautiful and waiting for your thoughts, everything you will learn, there are no mistakes yet, no attempts at erasing, nothing crossed out, nothing judged.

We found the gym closed this morning so I went on a lovely cold ramble through the glittering meadows, with my ghost-dog Molly, where I marvelled at the frozen pond, surprised two white-tailed deer who fled leaping and bouncing across the crackled-icysnow field, and then met a host of bright piping robins popping off red berries against a blue-and-white sky.

Each day I will choose (in no particular order) two noteworthy things to write about and illustrate, one man-made, the other natural.
Today, the first choice is a tree. Well, trees. Matthew, who studies Biology, told me that a tree technically makes itself out of air.  

My dad's father, my Gramp of the twinkly sky-blue eyes which live on in my son, his great-grandson, lived in England.  Because we lived continents apart, I didn't really know him very well, but loved the fact that he never went to church with my grandmother, and once told my father that his god was the god of nature and the earth, of plants, of swallows nesting under the eaves, and quoted Dorothy Frances Gurney's poem as his life's philosophy:



The kiss of the sun for pardon,
The song of the birds for mirth,--
One is nearer God's heart in a garden
Than anywhere else on earth. 

The man-made object is a window.  Recently I spent a day cleaning out my room, (needs much longer than a day, I discovered) and found the notes for a presentation I made on Visual Literacy at a Linguistics Seminar in 2000.   
To quote from this talk: 
"When I was an art student I was obsessed with paintings of interiors with windows.  I love windows, the idea of them and the visual aesthetics of them, the fact that there is always a view from a window, even if it is just another wall, with perhaps another window.  

I think that life is like the room you are in, and education is the window opening, the sun coming in, the sight of far vistas, the feel of the breeze on your forehead.  It is something more than what you experience in the room before opening the window.  As a teacher I would like to believe I am an opener of windows." 

This is one of the paintings I did at Art School decades ago, which lives now in my dear friend Maureen's house in Australia.