Forty!

I carried heavy things this morning for my exercise, helping my son move furniture into and out of  his apartment.

We live moments at a time.  Usually the moments go swiftly by without us noticing them, until something happens to slow time down and we become more aware of a moment, or moments.  It's like when you are in a car and it is crashing, an accident is taking place and you are right there, and all your senses are working overtime, and it really does seem as though time becomes sluggish, and everything happens in slow motion, heavy moments. 

The Zen Buddhists belief is all about living in the moment, mindfulness.  Zen masters have two tasks: sitting zazen (meditating) and sweeping or raking.  It is a quiet, slow life.  They believe that there are 65 moments in a finger-snap.

It is rather difficult to define a moment.  Dictionary.com does it like this:
" moment:
1  an indefinitely short period of time; instant: I'll be with you in a moment. (me: indefinitely short?  Isn't that an oxymoron?)
2  the present time or any other particular time (usually preceded by the): He is busy at the moment. (me: the present is another problematic area of definition.)
3  a definite period or stage, as in a course of events; juncture: at this moment in history.
4  importance or consequence: a decision of great moment.
5  a particular time or period of success, excellence, fame, etc. : His big moment came in the final game."

The funny embarrassed moment when you discover in the morning, just before you about to leave to visit your son, that your dress is on back to front.
The ecstatic moment in bed yesterday morning.
The miserable moment remembering someone you love who has died.
The tearful moment in a book.
The heart-full moment of pride in your child.
The agonised moment at the airport when your person finally disappears behind the security barrier.
The heady moment at the top of the hill just before you let go.
The overwhelming moment when you behold beauty, be it in nature, art, music, dance, theatre, or a movie.
The angry moment when someone hoots at you because you have been dreaming and haven't noticed that the traffic light has changed from red to green.
The awful disappointed moment when you realise your child has lied to you/done something terrible.
The surge of happiness moment when you see your husband open the door and come into the light from the dark and stormy night through which he has been driving home.

Perhaps we hold all the moments we have had in our heads and our bodies.  They are all stored somewhere in our memories, like droplets in a vast lake, and sometimes a bead bubbles to the surface, led there by a line in a song, sunlight on the garden, a person entering the room.  Others stay hidden at the bottom of the lake forever. 

I love photographs but these days it seems that too many photographs are taken of too many moments.  Some people document their entire lives, the meals they eat, concerts they go to, their pink and silver gumboots on the sidewalk, so many images every day, everything snapped by a smartphone.  What you are doing is creating a likeness of the moment.  It is wonderful to have a photograph of a particularly beautifully set-out meal, with all the colours represented on the plate, and perfect presentation, something unique.  But it is not important to take a picture each time you eat out.  Sometimes you really do have to wake up and smell the coffee, not take a picture of it.

Having said that, I was looking through some old photographs and I'm so glad that these moments were captured.  That I can savour them again and again, remember and honour the people pictured in them.

My nephew and his pretty wife on their wedding day

And sixty or so years before, my mum and dad getting married.  They had no thoughts in their minds of their grandchildren having weddings of their own!

I love this photograph because of the head in the front, it seems to me to demonstrate the excitement of a wedding, and everyone wanting to see, and stepping in front in order to do that!  But the focus is still on the bride and groom who are the most important, while the guest stepping in front is blurry, unrecognisable.

And here is my mum with two of her granddaughters and her honorary grandson, who called her Grauntie.  These darling little things are all grown up and each have a delightful baby of their own.

Ben came to visit us for a week when he was ten years old and Emma was just a small baby.  He was always an interesting person, even as a ten-year old.  And finding this made me remember so much about that visit, the way that house sat on its corner, the strange place that was King William's Town, the new baby I wore outside my body, the sweet boy curious about nature and everything else too.

Isak and Elaine, Tim's parents, before they had any of the four babies they produced, or any of the ups and downs of life.. They were in love and happy in this moment.

My dad telling Jess a secret.  The perfect composition, a triangle, the sweetest of serious-eyed toddlers, and my old young dad.

And lastly how these two small grinning urchins turned into my aunt and my mother, holding their grandchildren, so many years later.

Nora and Joan, circa 1925

Nora and Joan with grandchildren 1980

We wouldn't be able to compare these moments without photographs.  We wouldn't be able to hold images so easily in our heads without photographs to inform them.  These photographs are our icons.  We sort through them from time to time, remembering all the moments of our days.

The snow mermaid has little delicate footprints of birds and squirrels stepping so lightly over her, and even a rabbit crossed her head.  There are little remains of a bird's feast on her belly, and the leaves of the rhododendron brush past her face sometimes, blown by the breeze.  But she slumbers on in the way of snow mermaids, who have been brought into being by a woman who walks carefully by, even though she knows the mermaid is not really sleeping.  

Thirty-nine

Tim had something else to do today and as I couldn't bear the gym on my own I decided to tramp through the snowy meadow with my ghost dog instead.   This field belongs to someone else, but it is MY meadow, well mine and Molly's really.  Molly could not wait to get there every day.  I learned to run in the meadow.  It has heard all my joys and sorrows, comforted me when my mother died, and later my father.  I tell the bees and then the meadow when something momentous happens.  I know all its seasons, all its moods.  It is a beautiful piece of open land in the middle of the forest, a refuge I have been visiting almost every day for nearly nine years now.

I planned on a brisk half-hour trudge through the deep snow, but arrived back an hour and a half later.

This is some of what kept me there for so long:

The wispiest of soft clouds in a wide blue sky with a sun you could feel.

A little plump mourning dove, one of the most successful birds ever.  20 million are shot as game birds each year in the US and yet they continue to thrive.  The mourning dove is Wisconsin's state symbol of peace, and yet I am sure that Wisconsin has dove-hunters too.   Shooting the symbol of peace doesn't seem like such a great idea.   

Mouse footprints like handwriting in the snow.  Footwriting.

Pattern in the snow, but I have no idea what made it.  An aspiring mouse artist?

I love to inspect all the tracks to see if I can guess what they are.  I can see when a deer has just been ambling along, or when it galloped.  I love to see the small prints of fisher and coyote, and where the little squirrels with their beautiful long feet have scurried across the snow, when they are not streaming along the canopy highways overhead.

patterns

My camera battery died just before I saw a horde of bluejays land in the tree nearby.  Then a red-tailed hawk took flight just ahead of me, and a little black-capped chickadee sang her song almost in my ear!  I was so sad that my battery had died, but then consoled myself with the whole 'living in the moment' thing, and how you don't really do that if you are always framing the experience through a lens.  But then I thought, well, sometimes you want to preserve the moment. You are still living it, only with a photograph you can re-live it again and again. 

At one stage there was blood all over the snow and I fully believed a massacre had taken place and that pretty soon I would find the grizzly remains.  But there was nothing, and eventually I realized that I was standing under a group of sumac trees, which have as their fruit (called drupes :-)) a brownish-crimson triangular mass which is apparently ground and used as a lemony spice in Arab countries.  The birds and deer obviously eat this as a last resort and someone had had a sumac feast in the snow!

I am somewhat obsessed with the panorama function on my phone's camera.  So brilliant, so easy, and you can show much more of your perception of the experience, rather than a narrow view.  I suppose it can also be a metaphor, the importance of seeing the BIG picture, instead of focusing on a more limited perspective.

Meadow entrance

Bothways farm

Singing beach under snow

Essex river and sky

And our lovely messy jungle this morning.

38

Frigid again today, not much exercise except for running up and down several staircases having forgotten essential materials which needed to go from the Art room to the classroom where I was teaching. Also threading needles, at which I found myself better than most 7th graders, who looked quite physically and mentally challenged at times, trying desperately to push that thread through the eye of the needle.   And then some arm-wrestling with my 8th graders to shouts of Bou-wer! Bou-wer! (I won some, lost some, but only to the biggest strongest boys!).

Mountains of snow on the sidewalks, on the edges of the highways, in designated areas of parking lots, where the town snow gets dumped.  People become very angry with one another during cleanup after a huge snowstorm in the city, because where do you put all the shovelled snow?  Each household is responsible for clearing the sidewalk in front of the house, and any fire hydrants, but there is no space to fling the snow to, as we have here on our hill in the woods, where we can pile it up next to the wood-pile, or on to the lawn, or shovel it down the bank of the hill through the trees.

There are feuds about parking places too, because if someone has just taken all the time and effort to shovel the space, they are not going to be happy when another person takes advantage of the spot without having done any of the back-breaking work.  So people constantly leave objects to save their spaces, and sometimes they are really weird things, like cooking pots, large pumpkins, cat carriers, standing fans, and even an ironing board.  There have been cases of people taking others' spots and coming out in the morning to find their tires flat, shot with nail-guns.

But of course, like everything else, snow-removal comes with an ecological price.  The roads are treated with chemicals before the storm, or during, and then all that snow is collected and pushed into parking lots, sometimes tipped directly into rivers and ponds.  But even if this is not the case, when the mountains of snow melt in the spring, all the chemicals are mingled with the runoff which of course goes into the groundwater and the rivers and ponds and ultimately, the ocean. Oh, I think I just found another thing to worry about, woohoo!

Today on our way to lunch my friend Mohamed noticed that a funeral was taking place in the large cemetery near our school.  The temperature was about -5C and the mourners stood around the grave in all that cold and snow.  I didn't even know they could bury someone when the ground is covered in ice and snow.  I suppose it is a leftover from some book I read where they couldn't bury the body in the frozen ground, but of course now, in the 21st century, we must have the technology to dig a six-foot deep hole even in the dead of a New England winter.

I am reading a book called A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki, which is rather wonderful and fascinating and has similarities to the remarkable Stranger than Fiction, which was Nick's favourite movie for the longest time.  Much of the story takes place in Japan, and when the old great-grandmother Jiko, who is a Buddhist nun of 104, dies, I was captivated by the description of how the body is prepared for cremation.  She is washed and then dressed in a white kimono, hand-sewn with no knots in the cotton, so that she can slough it off easily and not be tied to the world.

The body is placed on a metal tray which goes into the crematorium oven, and when it is over, the tray is slid out again and all that remains is a skeleton of warm white bones.  The relatives all stand around with one chopstick each, and they work with a partner to pick up all the bones and deposit them in the funeral urn, starting with the feet, because you don't want her to be upside down for the rest of eternity.  The most important bone is the nodobotoke, which I think is the hyoid bone.  It is called the Throat Buddha, and is the last bone put on the top of the pile in the urn, and if it is found it is very good luck and that person will enter nirvana and the ocean of tranquility.

In the western world we are so scared of death, have such an aversion to the subject, that when it comes up invariably someone will propose that we change it.  Death is inevitable and it seems strange that there is such a taboo about it.  I love the Buddhist idea of reincarnation, because it means that dying is just a part of the whole circle, as one's soul is reborn again according to your karma, which depends on how well you lived in your previous life.

When I arrived at school this morning I was greeted by this beautiful maple.

 And then this evening when I made my way out to the cold parking lot at dusk, it bade me goodbye.

And when I arrived home in the dark I nearly tripped over the mermaid on the steps, still fast asleep!  Snow mermaids, huh?  What a life.

Day 37

The snow was wet and sticky, for a little while at the end an icy rain.  Then the temperature dipped way down and so this afternoon, even after the weak sun has shone most of the day, every tree is outlined in white.  It is as though Krishna, the mischievous god, had roamed around in the night, tracing each tree with a white crayon.

My exercise today was plodding through the woods, where I found a deer-bed.

You could see the where the warm body had lain, clearly imprinted in the shallow snow, under the protection of a thick weave of cedar branches, a good choice during the storm which dumped about 9 inches everywhere else.

Also hauling wood, taking care up the steps not to bother the mermaid, who is sleeping.    

Mermaid, tired from surfing, asleep under the rhododendron.

My friend Kate who lives in on an island in the Hebrides (where I have always wanted to go after falling in love with Gavin Maxwell and Mijbil when I was 12 and read Ring of Bright Water), wrote a post on women born in her sign, the, year of the Dog according to the Chinese Horoscope, with a link to an interesting site where you can look up your own sign. 

Sculpted Chinese Zodiac: 12 animals, one standing for each year.

The 12 year system describes how people perceive you or how you present yourself.  There are also animals designated for each month, (inner animals), each day (true animals) and also for each hour (secret animals).  So you may appear to be a Dragon because you were born in the year of the Dragon, but internally you may be a Goat, truly you may be a Rat, and secretly you may be a Snake!

So of course after reading the attributes of people born under Kate's sign, which she said was surprisingly accurate, I looked up the rest of my immediate family.  We also have a Dog (Jess), as well as two Goats (Emma and Anne), two Monkeys (the boys), and a pig (Tim). 

I agree with Kate, there were several credible attributes for each person, it was quite uncanny, and I rarely follow such things, but it is interesting to know about all the theories of origin, the mystery of what makes us who we are.  (I am an animal that I loathe, by the way, and I think secretly I am really a Dragon.  At one time I thought all goats should be eradicated off the face of the earth.  They are such destructive animals, and ate all our new little trees we had planted at Nombulelo, the school where I taught in Grahamstown.) 

My two Monkeys are very different people and there are several attributes which relate to one and not the other, but I can see both boys in this excerpt, "Monkeys are hard workers once they have a piece of the action. The bigger the piece, the better they do. Monkeys like to travel, and they want to do it first class. They need a certain amount of excitement in their lives."

And my Jess, a Dog, like Kate.  "They are extremely protective of themselves and their loved ones. With a passion for fair play and justice, they never fail to rescue you time after time. They may rant and rave, but they never rest until they right the wrong. They are true humanitarians and suffer with the world.
Once Dogs classify you, they rarely change their minds. There are few in-betweens. Dogs perceive things either in black or white. You are either friend or enemy." Jess has always been like this, since she was a small girl.

And the stubborn Goats, Emma and I.  "The goat is known for gentleness and kindness. They also worry. (You see, we can't help it!)  Sometimes clumsy in speech, they are always passionate about what they do and what they believe in. They are compatible with Rabbits, Pigs, and Horses. Goats like to set their own hours and will not tolerate too much discipline. They are also very offended if they are criticized."  Yes, we are both like this!

So Pigs are very loyal and kind.  They are compatible with Rabbits and Goats.  According to the website, "Pigs do not dazzle or shimmer. They possess the old-fashioned chivalry that grows on you until you totally depend on it. It is so easy to trust Pigs. They have a calm expression and a sincere manner. They are blessed with endurance and work steadily at tasks with great patience until completion." Yes, all this is true, except that Tim definitely shimmers.  He is, after all, my knight in shimmering armour.

Thirty-six

Snow day today!  It's like a public holiday as just about everyone stays at home because travel is so dangerous.  Sometimes the only vehicles on the roads are the snow-plows trying to keep the streets clear for emergency vehicles and then for the next day, when everyone brushes all the snow off the cars and everyone begins their normal daily routines again, until the wonderful unexpected holiday of yesterday is forgotten, like a lovely dream.

Yesterday all the students at my school were very excited at the prospect of a snow day, the younger ones because they would go sledding or watch movies at home, or just "chill out", the older ones because they would be able to catch up with work.  I felt so sorry for these responsible youngsters, just 16 or 17, working so hard so that they can get into the right college, have the right life. They need to play more, we all do.

Billy Collins, one of my favourite poets, has written a wonderful poem celebrating days such as these, called Snow Day.

Our driveway requires much attention on days like this, so late this afternoon we went out, even though it was still snowing lightly, Tim to snow-blow, me to shovel.  Good hard work, and then I could play, but by the time it got dark I hadn't nearly finished the snow-mermaid I was fashioning on the steps, and the wind was hurtling snow down on me and her, so she is still a bit rough, but large as life, surfing a wave of snow, next to the rhododendron.  While attempting to photograph the mermaid we were utterly overcome with snow from sky and trees doing its best to sand-blast us, so the photographs are very hurried and quite poor, and don't show her beautiful flicking tail either.

About this time last year we had another snow day, well it was in March actually, and I made a snowman.

And here is a little baby ellie who came to visit Molly one day last winter too.

While writing this blog tonight, I had my headphones on listening to my itunes on shuffle, and suddenly a harmonica came on and with a familiar shock I knew it was my dad.  Alan, my darling nephew, arranged for my father to record his harmonica-playing in a proper recording studio in 2006, a few months after my mother had died, and then gave me and my siblings a copy of the cd.   He was a self-taught player of the mouth-organ, my dad, and pretty accomplished.  The thing is that he talks on the recording, answers questions from the sound engineer, and tells a couple of stories as he used to do when he answered questions.

And to hear that voice again causes a small earthquake in my heart.  Usually I turn it off, it is too unbearable to hear him, my 88-year old dad, the habitual voice of my childhood, hear him pronouncing Afrikaans words in that funny way, where he says the Afrikaans 'g' sound as a 'k'.  All the songs were for my mother, he keeps saying, "oh, and she loved this one" and "have I played this one already?" not wanting to make a mistake, because he was slowly sinking into dementia and he knew it.

He was a big strong man, like a great old tree.  And when my mother died it was as though he had been struck by lightning. His nickname for me when I was a tiny thing was "Anne-pan", and he still called me that, even when I was already 50 years old.

So I am determined to end on a positive note.  Because here we are, we're alive still.  We're lucky.  We're warm inside with electric lights, comfortable wood-stove, food in our bellies.  We have four lovely children, three of whom I spoke to today.  And two dear little granddaughters. We have good jobs that we love.  This is our thirtieth year together and I would still carry Tim on my back if he were injured ( I'm not sure how I would do that but it is a metaphor, I expect).  And we laugh. 

On Skype today, Emma was telling me and Stuart, her husband, about her outing with her two friends.  They all have babies who are more or less the same age.  The two little boys are not really crawling yet, while Luna has been mobile for months already, and is a very busy little girl indeed!  So at the restaurant, the two little boys sat quite happily in their high chairs, shovelling bits of food contentedly into their mouths as babies like to do, while Luna tried desperately to escape from the straps holding her in, and when at last her mother took her out to put her on her lap, proceeded to throw her arms and legs about in a tantrum as she wanted to get down to explore the floor!  Stuart piped up in the background, "Well, those boys are learning a valuable lesson, you should love food more than women".

35th day

 I wrote an entire blog, was just finishing and cut and pasted a sentence in the wrong place, so pressed Alt-Z to undo the paste, and my entire entry has disappeared. 

My first paragraph went something like this:

A beautiful sunshine-on-snow day.  It is important to delight in these short sharp bursts of pleasure, because if you think too hard about the world just about everything is pretty awful: elephants and Monarch butterflies becoming extinct, female genital mutilation, the situation in Damascus, rivers of radio-active water being pumped into the Pacific after the Fukushima disaster, human trafficking, too much plastic in the oceans, too many people...

Mother and baby in Addo Elephant Park in South Africa.

I am too tired and sad to re-write everything, I was trying to cheer myself up with trees and birds, so it will have to wait until tomorrow, I wish to go to sleep like a tree for the cold winter, and wake up to a verdant spring, and burst into blossom.  But it is going to be a snow day tomorrow, so I will re-write it then, or write something entirely new and happier.  

I loved this explanation by a tree researcher who discovered that the concept of mother trees and a communication system between trees which was so beautifully created in the James Cameron movie Avatar, is actually true.  

Day 34

I "ran" two miles on the elliptical machine today, at the gym.  It is always so hard to get up early in the morning to go there, it is not where I belong.

There is a man and an old lady whom I see every single time I am at the gym, and I go at different times, so why are they always there?  The old lady is always walking very slowly on a treadmill and the man is always standing talking to some poor person who is trying to exercise.  And no, he is not the trainer or the person on duty.  All those people wear special t-shirts so you know who they are in case you need to ask questions or be rescued from weights or something.  It is a mystery. 

We live close to the Essex River, a serpentine tidal river stretching sinuously from our town to its mouth into the great Atlantic, from which our town gets it name.  Recently it has been covered in ice. 

The meandering Essex River. Panoramas taken a week apart, from the same vantage point.

There are many words in the English language.  It has the most words of any language because of its origins, as it subsumed foreign words as it grew like a large organic creature swallowing everything in its path.  The Oxford English Dictionary describes it in a more polite, mathematical way: "The Vocabulary of a widely diffused and highly cultivated living language is not a fixed quantity circumscribed by definite limits... there is absolutely no defining line in any direction: the circle of the English language has a well-defined centre but no discernible circumference."  A beautiful concept, exquisitely explained.

I love my language and studied it formally for years. Even grammar fascinates me, syntax, structure, the theory of it all.  I can be reduced to tears by a line of a poem, or touched by words uttered by my husband or children. I can sink into a book until I am in that world of words, so far removed from the ordinary present world.  But there are many experiences for which there is no language, or there are only limited words.  Perhaps we don't know enough words, our vocabularies are too small.  Out of the 1,022.000 English words, estimated by the people of Google, we only maintain a small percentage in our brains.  And although as human beings we use language to express ourselves and communicate with one another, although we use the same word, for example, the word "love", we probably all mean very different things when we say it.  We can't even be sure that when we say "That is a yellow wall", we are seeing the exact same colour.

Matthew and Nick were my last children to leave home, almost three years ago now.  Nick lives in the city, about 50 minutes' drive away.  Matt lives a bit further, just over 2 hours' drive from our home.  They are both away from home.  Each day I think of them, knowing that they are away, absent from my daily life.  I picture them in their rooms, walking, biking, taking classes, because I have visited them both and have these experiences to inform the pictures in my head.  But now Matthew is in Senegal, the "away" takes on a different meaning.  On the one hand he is still away from home, as he would be at university, but he is somehow more "away" because he is so far afield.  He is more "away" because I can't see where he is, I can only imagine the streets of Dakar, his room, his host family, his new friends, the classrooms. 

My daughters and granddaughters are away in a different, faraway sense too.  It is the nature of our "Global Village", some say, and yes, people move around so much these days, all over the earth, but I would prefer them in my real village, where I don't have to wait for my vacation days, buy an expensive ticket and get on a plane to go and see them.

And now I will go up to bed, so tired from shovelling snow, and more to come on Wednesday and Sunday!  And I will fade "away" into delicious sleep, perchance to dream.

three three

This atheist walked to church this morning along the causeway, in the balmy 5C temperature, with the sometime sun glinting off chunks of ice in the swiftly flowing river. and a beautiful sky of swept clouds.

What was an atheist doing in church?  You may well ask.

This is the Unitarian Universalist church, known by some as the UU church.  It's a church founded in Massachusetts, and I like the ideas behind it. Ralph Waldo Emerson was a Unitarian minister.

Christian Universalism "denies the doctrine of everlasting damnation, and proclaims belief in an entirely loving god who will ultimately redeem all human beings."

Unitarianism denies the trinity of Christianity (the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost) adopted by the first Council of Nicaea in 325.  The Unitarians instead affirm god as a singular entity. The first Unitarian churches were formed in the 16th century. 

"Current concepts about deity, however, are diverse among UUs. While some are still monotheistic, often from a Judeo-Christian perspective, many profess Atheism or Agnosticism. UUs see no contradiction in open Atheists and Agnostics being members of their community because of the rich Unitarian legacy of free inquiry and reason in matters of faith. Still other UUs subscribe to Deism, Pantheism, or Polytheism. Many UUs reject the idea of deities and instead speak of the "spirit of life" that binds all life on earth."  - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitarian_Universalism

These are all such wonderful attitudes, so inclusive, so kind.  

The reason I went to church today was because my piano teacher is the pianist at the local UU church, and as Pete Seeger (who was a member of the UU church) died last Monday the church had decided to do a "special" on him this Sunday.  My cousin Rose had sent me a really beautiful Pete Seeger song, To my old brown earth http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VHVY8KOzuw , sung by Seeger himself to the accompaniment of his banjo, and then in four-part harmony by a choir of voices accompanied by the same simple banjo.  I showed this to Julie, my piano teacher, who was elated, as she had been looking for something to play during the offertory.  She spent hours transcribing it into sheet music, as she was unable to find it anywhere on the web, and today played it so exquisitely that my eyes were shining.  I wished my cousin had been there sitting next to me. 

I found the rest of the service utterly enjoyable too.  Music is a huge part of this church, and they have many great musicians: guitarists, flute players (who used to be called flautists but don't seem to be anymore), and pianists.  Pete Seeger believed in the power of song to bring social change, and worked much of his life as an activist.  We sang his songs Where have all the flowers gone? and If I had a hammer, which I had always thought was by Trini Lopez.  The powerful civil rights anthem which Seeger popularized, We shall overcome, was the last song.

The sermon was short and sweet and also filled with musical references.  As I was listening, I thought how my little blog entries are like my own short daily sermon (if I were a preacher).  And looking through the official hymnal, Singing the Living Tradition, I noticed conventional hymns and ordinary songs side by side, and in the back, where all the blessings, response pieces, words for funerals and weddings and so on are located, I was absolutely enchanted to find some of my favourite poets, like Mary Oliver and Adrienne Rich, Henry David Thoreau and Kahlil Gibran.  There is a hymn by Holly Near, called We are a Gentle, Angry People, which includes a verse which goes, "We are gay and straight together", which would cause apoplexy in most of the Christian churches I have frequented.

Church music is such a strong part of my culture, my roots, something completely familiar and comfortable. I rejected the religion which would not allow my dog a place in heaven, but I still went through Christian National Education where we had assembly every day with a hymn or two and a bible reading.  Hymns were the poetry of my school choir (where I fought so hard to stay, even as I was nearly expelled from school several times, and therefore lost my place in the choir too.  I didn't care about the school, but I begged [a rather difficult thing for a proud 17 year-old to do] our choir mistress for her forgiveness, and she succumbed, to my great delight and gratitude).  I sing hymns in my head while I'm running, perfect rhythm.  I sang them to all my babies to help them yield to sleep.

We had an annual carol service in the quadrangle of the school, beloved by everyone who attended, year after year, with the dusk coming on, little bats flitting through the warm air, nabbing mosquitos. and the pure eternal voices of girls floating away into the coming night.

My fifth choice for my Desert Island Disc is Mozart's Clarinet concerto in A. K622.  2nd movement.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QAAZ29cvfU   This adagio is so beautifully performed here by Sharon Kam with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra.

I am always drawn to the slower pieces, the minor keys, the segments which pluck and pull at your heartstrings, working them into a kind of emotional ecstasy.

32nd day

One month done.  Eleven to go!  Seems a very long time.  This quote from the book I am currently reading: "And apart from me, who else would care?  I mean, if I thought the world would want to know about old Jiko, I'd post her stories on a blog, but actually I stopped doing that a while ago.  It made me sad when I caught myself pretending that everybody out there in cyberspace cared about what I thought, when really nobody gives a shit.  And when I multiplied that sad feeling by all the millions of people in their lonely little rooms, furiously writing and posting to their lonely little pages that nobody has time to read because they're all so busy writing and posting, -- it kind of broke my heart."  -from A Tale for the Time Being: a Novel by Ruth Ozeki.

I remember this whole self-indulgent dilemma in 2010 as well and can't remember how I got over it, but obviously I did because I completed the year.  I suppose at the most basic level it is a promise I have made to myself and also a kind of dare, to see if I am capable of the curiosity and self-discipline required to continue for another 334 days.

So here goes....

I ran just over 2 miles (about 3.4km) on the elliptical machine, which Tim has persuaded me to try because it doesn't hurt your knees, and you exercise your arms at the same time.  It is quite a brilliant apparatus actually, except your toes can go a bit numb.  But my knees are smiling, so I will persevere.

Taking the clean washing out of the dryer today, I was aware of the reverence of folding garments.  When we first moved into this house, as I took clothes out of the dryer I made four orderly piles.  Now there are usually only two, except when the boys come home. Nick went back to the city a while ago and Matthew has been gone almost a week now.  Every wash seems to have had something of Matt's in it, and today his last shirt to be washed was brought out, scented with rosemary from the essential oils I put on the woolen drying balls.  Soft fabric neatly tucked and turned.  I wonder what he took with him, there seem to be so many clothes now sitting in neat stacks on the spare bed in his room, waiting for him to return and animate them again.  

I do not have immaculate cupboards.  I am not a fastidious person at all.  I do NOT iron.  But I always fold the clothes as I take them out of the dryer, I never just heap them out into a basket.  It is actually a rule in our house, my rule, that if you empty the dryer, you have to fold everyone's clothes.  It is part of being civilized, like eating with your mouth closed, like waiting your turn.  And the reverence comes in thinking of each person as I touch the worn jeans, smooth the softest old t-shirt, marvel at the lightness of the warm fleece, hang the formal shirt, or try to remember which undies belong to each boy.  I know those beautiful bodies which wear these clothes.  One is my beloved husband's, and the others are my two boys who have grown from tiny womb-mates to great tall creatures with big hands and broad shoulders.

My fourth choice for my Desert Island disc is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSmxBNFnvkM

Day 31

Lots of love from my 7th and 8th grade classes today.  To tame children seems to be about the same as animals, you just feed them treats.  Some middle school classes have Art twice a week for the first semester, then the second semester is spent at Informatique/computer studies.  It is the end of the semester and so we had a party and watched a movie.   Such a happy thing to do, to eat chips and cookies and drink juice or milk and watch a funny movie, Galaxy Quest, in the middle of the day, at school. 

The 8th grade voted to watch What's Eating Gilbert Grape?, which is a very strange movie.  I had forgotten that there are mild sex scenes in this movie.  It is PG13, so should have been fine, but I was a little shocked by a couple of scenes, worried that they would be too explicit, although the students didn't seem fazed at all.  I suspect that they watch much more than what went on in this movie. 

A murder of crows.

Yesterday evening, driving home through Gloucester, I noticed all these crows making such a racket, coming in to roost in the trees, quietening down, then becoming annoyed at something and taking off vociferously again, wheeling in the darkening sky, tumult of black screeches, loud through the dimming day.

Crows have very small brains, bird-brains, but in fact the frontal cortex is very similar to that of humans, and they are now considered one of the most intelligent animals on earth.  All that cawing and cackling, as unpretty as it is, is actually language.  Scientists believe crows even have regional dialects.  These blue-black birds are telling important information to one another, which is even passed down to new generations.  In Chatham, Ontario, crows were using the area as a rest-stop on their migration path.  As it is mostly a place of farms, and crows are considered enemies of farmland, people began to get rather upset and decided to have a crow-hunt, to try to kill off at least half the population of an estimated 500 000.  They shot one crow, and the word spread so fast that there was only that one crow that died.  The vast population of crows just vanished, winged away, never to return.  Apparently they don't stop there anymore, and fly high enough so that bird-shot cannot reach them.

This is a fascinating seven-minute video about experiments determining the intelligence of crows which use tools. 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M52ZVtmPE9g

Crows are used as symbols for all kinds of things, often dark and sinister happenings, probably due to the fact that crows eat carrion, which would suggest something malevolent, especially to people long ago.  However, many nomadic cultures see the crow in a positive light.  Amongst several North American tribes the crow is the personification of the Supreme Being, organising the world and causing the winds to blow with every flap of its wings. 

The Scandinavian god Odin, the father of all the gods, and the ruler of Asgard, sat on a throne with two crows, Hugin and Munin, (Thought and Memory) and two wolves, Geri and Freki.  Odin lacked depth-perception, being one-eyed, and was also forgetful, apparently.  The two crows would fly over the whole world each day and then return to tell all their news to Odin, so that he would know and understand what was happening in the world of man.  The wild hunting wolves were providers of food and nourishment.  Some theorists believe that together, these five formed one whole, a fine amalgamation of nature and man, the ancient alliance.

Illustration from an 18th century Icelandic manuscript.

My third choice for my Desert Island Disc would be another Chopin, because Chopin is somehow part of my heart.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhnRIuGZ_dc  It is Ballad number 1, which is quite long, but beautiful just the same, and a very old recording of Horowitz, and that vast empty stage before the master enters is just such a thrill, even watched on a small laptop screen, and then the wizardry of those fingers, the muscle-memory, and the sound, even on little speakers, is huge, makes your heart beat more frantically, beautifully, in time with the magnificence. 

30

Home so late last night that I gave myself a break and slept in on my day off.  Walked a bit along the beach this afternoon, thinking what a cold bed the Canada geese were sleeping on in the river.  But I suppose they come from Canada, so they don't mind a bit of ice.

This morning a Blue jay sat in the rhododendron for ages, just checking things out, and a squirrel came and grabbed a branch and began to eat it.  At first I thought it was taking leaves for its drey, but it really looked as though it was sitting there munching away.  I had no idea squirrels ate rhododendrons.

When we lived in Winthrop I was sitting on the deck one day watching a fat carpenter bee flying in her wonderful physics-defying way, no doubt checking out the old boards to see if she could see a good place to bring out her tools and carve out her T-shaped nest. I knew it was a female because she had a black face, and only females work. (Carpenter bees and bumble bees don't actually defy the laws of physics.  When they calculated this myth, they used the example of an aeroplane, which has stiff rigid wings.  Clearly a carpenter bee has both flexible wings and body, and if it actually defied the laws of physics there would be all kinds of scientists working on this problem.)  Suddenly, quick as a very fast shadow, a squirrel leaped up on to the deck and snatched the ill-fated carpenter bee out of the air, put her in his mouth, and munched greedily, then gave my astonished face a quick look of satisfaction and left as abruptly as he had arrived.   

My mother had a pet squirrel when my dad met her, which apparently bit him!  Squirrels are super-intelligent, defying people's attempts to keep them off bird-feeders, working out strategies like famous chess-players, always one or two steps ahead of the human.  I'm not sure why they are sweeter than rats, because they are very similar, but I do like them much more than I like rats.
They are quick, sweet-faced acrobats.

We were camping in Maine once, walking through an old forest, when we noticed squirrels squabbling overhead, in the canopy, about 30 meters up.  Without warning, one came plummeting through the air and landed with a hard thump on the ground just in front of Nick.  We all thought it was dead and stood there staring at it for about a minute, until life slowly and unexpectedly materialized in the little body, and the feet got themselves together and all the important parts which make up an animal rearranged themselves until it was a fully functioning squirrel again, which wandered off looking just a little dazed, but terribly lucky. 

The second piece I would choose for my Desert Island Discs, is Clair de Lune, by Debussy.  This piece is still my nemesis, but I love to hear it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ip64cG7gK4  There is something about Debussy that I just can't get yet, the cross-rhythms, although this piece is still my ultimate goal. 

Day 29

The cold continues.  Up at dawn, although it's not dawn, it's pitch dark still.  There is a message from Matt that we can call him and so we excitedly do, immediately, but he is unable to talk, visiting l'Île de Gorée, the island off the coast of Dakar, which is actually one of the 19 communes d'arrondissement (districts) of Dakar, which everyone associates with slavery but which was not actually the main centre of the slave trade in Senegal. 
So we go to gym and run and pull and push until it is time to go home to get ready for school.  And I think of Matthew on the island, and about the romance of islands in the human mind.

So many stories about islands: deserted islands where Robinson Crusoe found Friday and perpetuated the colonial mentality towards the dark-skinned man, even though he had been a slave himself, and should have known better.

Desert Island Discs is a BBC radio programme that we would listen to from when I was a little girl, in which some celebrity is invited on the show and asked to choose 8 pieces of music (originally records), a book and a luxury item which they would take with them if they were cast away on a desert island.  The show has been going 71 years!  It began in 1942, during the war, when imagining a deserted peaceful island to which you could retire with your favourite music would have been a lovely dream indeed.

England is called a little island, although it's quite a big one really.  It is the "green and pleasant land" for which my grandmother longed, and my mother too, and so much a part of my culture.  When we learned to read it was from books set in England, where all the lambs were born in April and May, which seemed a bit strange to me, why were they being born in Autumn?  Wouldn't they get cold?

Islands close to the mainland have been used as prisons for centuries.  Perfect prisons because they are almost impossible to escape.  Alcatraz, in the San Francisco Bay, was a military base and then a prison for about 30 years.  Robben Island, in Table Bay, just a few miles from Cape Town, was used as a prison from the 17th century until 1996, and is of course the place where Nelson Mandela was held for many years. The Chatea d'If in the Mediterranean, is the most romantic of all in my mind, as it played a large part in the Alexandre Dumas story, The Count of Monte Christo, which we listened to on a record so many times that I almost knew the entire melodramatic production by heart. 

The Maldives, a country composed of an archipelago of about 1200 coral islands, is under grave threat from rising seas caused by global warming.  Mohamed Nasheed, the new president, has set as his goal the buying of land in India, Sri Lanka or Australia to create a new homeland where he can relocate his entire nation.  Most new leaders face huge problems, but this must be one of the worst, finding a new home for 300 000 people.

Male airport in the Maldives

 If I had to choose 8 discs for my desert island stay, the first one would be Chopin's Nocturne in E Minor. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JG2tc-knlUs

28th day

Rushed from the house to the car in the early black icy morning, 14F (-10C), drove through the dry cold, headlights and brake-lights illuminating the streets, until a smudge of blue on the otherwise milky horizon indicated the arrival of dawn and announced there would be a weak winter sun later. When I reached school, I grabbed my bags and ran from the car to my classroom, and that was all my exercise today!  Apart from a few up- and down-the-stairs.

I have recently read two books in a row where the main protagonists are eight-year-old girls.  The first one was Orphan Train, which describes the lives of two women separated by about seventy years.  Their stories both begin when they are eight years old, at a catastrophic turning point in their lives.  One loses both her parents in a fire, the other her father to a car crash.  The other one is A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, which I didn't actually finish because it was far too horrifying and sad.  It begins with the murder of the father of one of the main characters, another eight-year old girl, and details the awful terrifying living conditions for people during the Chechen wars.

The age of eight seems to be a kind of turning point for many children, whether or not they suffer something calamitous.  When I became an adult and thought about when I first knew there was no God, nor a Father Christmas, or when I realised what sadness was, or fear, the answer would always be, "When I was about eight."  My friend said that she had come to the conclusion that she was a lesbian when she was eight years old.  Eight is no longer a little kid, but not yet one of the big kids, definitely the age of a certain type of cognizance, a recognition of the state of being human.  

When I was eight my mother left my father, taking me to England with her, leaving my brother in boarding school and my father alone with the dog.  My sister was a nurse and had already left home.  It was quite lovely in England, I loved my little school and my garden and living with my friend Penelope, going on road-trips to Scotland, two mothers named Joan and their young daughters, laughing and exploring lochs and castles and museums, with the long road stretching ahead of them, running safely away.   

But the sky was never that azure blue of Cape Town, we didn't live anywhere near the ocean, and my dad, my DAD, my big strong rock of a DAD was not there with me.

I missed that big man with such a sharp misery sometimes, especially at night, as he had always been the one to read to me and put me to bed, although of course I had been reading to myself for years, but I still loved that nightly ritual.  He was so strong and would lift me and make me into the best acrobat in the whole world, twirling me about effortlessly.  I couldn't fall asleep without his kiss.  But mentioning him caused my mother pain and anger and so I learned very quickly not to ask about him.

Technology was very primitive, and if you wanted to phone internationally not only did it cost a small fortune, but you had to book a "trunk call" (which made me think of an elephant, of the phone line going along the trunks of elephants) a few hours in advance!  So it was rarely that I got to speak to him.  I guess there were phone calls between my mother and my father discussing the state of their marriage, but I was kept in the dark about all that.  In August we received a tape from my brother and my father and we had to go to a HiFi shop to play it, not owning a tape-recorder, which was a very new-fangled gadget then. 

 

We stood there awkwardly and when I heard my brother talking I felt a lump rising in my throat, and then my dad came on and I felt as though I was falling apart, and my face was suddenly wet and I had to sit down.  

Huge things happen to us when we are children over which we have no control.  We are quite helpless, dependent on adults for kindness, for love, for example.  And just so lucky if we have good adults around us, people who care. 

Soon we were travelling back across the seas on a passenger liner, seeing flying-fish, whales, the wide wide ocean and once, passing another big ship near the equator. 

And as eight-year-old girls are both natural and man-made I will end there, back with Table Mountain, at home in Cape Town, where my parents' mended marriage lasted 64 years in the end.

27

It is so difficult to get up early when it is still dark, and you are still so sad.
But we do it anyway, drive to the gym through the burgeoning light filling the snowy world.  And we do all the awful gym things, with strange torturous devices and belts to run on like hamsters.

Then to an eye appointment, where I discover that my eyes are really "remarkable" for my age. The lovely doctor who has been trying to cure my post-menopausal dry-eye condition for years now, looking down his long friendly nose at me, cheerfully encourages me to try yet another possible "cure".  But everything is explained, nothing is taken lightly, and he seems to have a prodigious memory for my ocular history. 

The eye is an incredibly complicated organ, and often used to illustrate irreducible complexity, the theory behind the strange idea of "intelligent design" being responsible for life as we know it, as opposed to the theory of evolution.  Irreducible complexity argues "that certain biological systems  are too complex to have evolved from simpler, or "less complete" predecessors, through natural selections acting upon a series of advantageous naturally occurring, chance mutations."  -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreducible_complexity

The eye in all its wonderful beauty.

The eye is one of the most important parts of our bodies, definitely the most important of the face.  The eyes are what we look at when we talk to someone, and all kinds of things travel through eyes: lies, love, cruelty, lust, fear, kindness, humour. 

In the family of my childhood everyone had blue or blue-green eyes.  My British gramp had the most astonishingly bright blue eyes, inherited by my dad and several of his grandchildren. I have one brown-eyed child, due to more brown alleles on a gene-pair from a chromosome donated by her father, who has brown eyes. Her eyes are not so much brown as greenish-hazel.  When she has been crying they are very green.

All my other children have blue eyes, carrying on the Radford/Webster line, descending from the Scandinavians, whose sky-blue eyes apparently originated from a single mutation in a gene called OCA2, which arose by chance somewhere around the coast of the Black Sea in one single individual, about 8,000 years ago, according to a Copenhagen-based team of researchers published in the journal Human Genetics.

The oddness of Europeans is a kind of genetic mystery.  Europeans are the only people who have blue eyes and many shades of hair-colour.  Everywhere else in the world people are dark-haired and dark-eyed.

Recent genetic testing on a well-preserved skeleton of a hunter-gatherer who lived 7,000 years ago revealed surprisingly that the man had blue eyes and dark skin, and was most closely genetically related to people in Sweden and Finland.  Before his genome was sequenced, using DNA from one of his teeth, it was believed that light skin happened a long time ago, shortly after Africans moved into the higher latitudes of Europe, about 45,000 years ago.  Now it seems that the lightening of skin has only appeared in the last 7,000 years.

Fascinating, how the lines continue, Luna has bright blue eyes, Ella beautiful hazel ones.  The water and the earth.

Matthew, Nicholas and Tim gave me a silver ring with three elephants on it for Christmas.  As I put it on each morning I think of the givers, and every time I notice it I am happy about the three men in my family.  And I am also glad that there are still amazing creatures like elephants in the world.

Day 26

Walked all around Logan Airport because we went to the wrong terminal with Matthew this morning, on his way to Dakar, Senegal, by way of Washington D.C., so had to trek excitedly to Terminal C from Terminal A and then sadly back again once we had said our goodbyes. 

I also did some acrobatics at Angelina's birthday party, leaping from a swinging rope into a pit filled with foam cubes, which was lovely, until I found myself flailing around to try to get out of them again, trying hard not to look like a grounded beetle desperately attempting to regain its balance and decorum, and failing miserably, and losing my socks in the process, if beetles wore socks.

The gorgeous Angelina and Tim after her party.

 Today is the eighth anniversary of my mother's death.  And I watch  Matthew walk off down the concourse through airport security as he leaves on a study-abroad programme to Senegal for four months. 

And so there is all this high emotion, phenotype inherited from my mother (and others of my kin, no doubt),  nurtured by her, exemplified by her.  The great passions, the depths of despair, the whole high-flying ecstatic tumult. 

Making for a difficult day, watching my son fly away, physically and metaphorically, embarking on a brilliant adventure, but still my chick, hard to lift my wing and let him launch himself to such a far away destination, but necessary, perfect.

My beautiful boys, still the chicks to my Mother Hen.

And remembering my mother, brief moments of memories, like photographs in an album: singing nursery rhymes together in the car, soft warm cuddles in her bed in the morning, bright flashing smile as I finish reading her a James Thurber story, eyes crinkling with humour.  Bringing a chameleon she had found in the garden, on her hand all the way upstairs to my sick-room, when I was about ten, with great distaste written on her face.  So that I realised at that very specific moment in my life, how much she loved me.  She was doing something so alien to her disposition, just for me, her very ill lover of chameleons.

My mother and my daughters.

My mother hanging out the white bed-sheets so that they smelled of sunshine when you slipped into them at night.  My mother crying softly at the window, tears running down her soft cheeks for the death of our ancient old dog, the end of an era.  My mother falling and breaking bones, sinking into a shocking depression.  My mother, maker of lace and beautiful knitted garments.  My mother having a loud and passionate argument with my father on the top of Mount Pilatus in Switzerland, boldly ignoring our hushing and the sideways glances of others.  My mother, complicated human being, filled with  love for all her many progeny.  My mother skinny-dipping late in life.  My mother being kind to people.  And unkind to people.  My mother breaking her hip and lying lost in a bed in a hospital, the hospital where I was born 50 years before.  My mother giving up to Death with his ugly sickle, who took longer than she had expected, teasing her with pain, with agony, as is his wont, making her suffer.  Eventually he claimed her weakened bones, and also her strong heart. 

So tonight I miss my mother with my whole aching being.  I miss my son.  I miss all my chicks and grand-chicks too. 

And I ask the winds of the grand Atlantic Ocean to waft my son safely to his destination, the city of Dakar in Senegal where he will learn so much.  

Twenty-five

I did all the normal exercises and then ran just over 2.5 km on the treadmill today at the gym.  I felt sick at the end of it all.  When we went out to the car, it felt positively balmy, as the temperature had gone up to -2C! 

Yesterday I wrote about how the technology of streaming movies made teaching so much easier.  For example, my friend who teaches Biology can find just about anything she needs to explain on YouTube.  And the little movies explaining photosynthesis or evolution are beautiful, succinct, and perfect for adolescents.  I begin many of my art projects using little movies about artists, or about the process we are attempting.

But it is also easy for kids to stream movies and shows with no parental control, so I have heard really young kids in my class discussing gory violent shows like Dexter and Breaking Bad, and really explicit ones like Girls.   And I know I am part of the much older generation now, but I worry about their souls.  I worry about both sexes getting their sex education from porn and shows like Girls, and being so desensitized by the violent shows so that they don't care about anything deeply, they don't feel.  That there is nothing mysterious or fascinatingly beautiful about the opposite sex by the time they are 14 or 15.  They have seen everything, they know everything.  But the good, the kind, the lovely parts are left out. 

My son told me not to worry, that it would all even out in the end, that every older generation believes that the younger generation is at some terrible risk of degradation, but that it seems to work out in the end.  And although I am very worldly-wise in my older age, I suppose I do come from a fairly ignorant generation, having gone to an all-girls school, and having grown up in South Africa with no television and few movies.  I was in my twenties before I realised, for example, that men get erections about every naked woman, not just the one they are with.

Cape Town in the 1960's

Turquoise is a beautiful stone, an exquisite colour.   Turquoise forms by the percolating of acidic aqueous solutions, and the blue comes from the oxidization of copper in the minerals.  There are many mines in the United States, and the Native Americans used it as jewelry a long time ago.

When I was a chaperone in Vietnam a couple of years ago we were sitting at breakfast one day in the Mekong Delta and I complimented one of the girls, noting how lovely she looked in her blue-green top, and she responded by commenting on how good I looked in my sky-blue sandals and matching earrings.  I said thank you very much, and then she suddenly astonished me by sprouting forth with a litany of things about me, how I wear my hair every day, what I wear around my neck, the colour of my nail-polish, ending with the fact that I always wear something turquoise to match my turquoise eyes!  I was caught unawares, as she went on to tell me how shocked I would really be to realise how much the students watch, and notice about their teachers in general. I was secretly delighted at what she had said, but it was so strange to think of them discussing me, being so much older than them.

Turquoise is also the colour of robins' eggs, and the earth seen from space.

Day 24

No running today, no walking outside during my lunchtime, even outdoor recess was cancelled due to the extreme cold. So my little 7th grade advisory came rushing in after a recess spent cooped up indoors, spilling over with pent-up energy. 

We are doing a long project on elephants, which will culminate in a big fundraiser for Save the Elephants.  At the moment I am showing them a movie about the attempts, over several years, of a ringmaster to find a home for his solitary African elephant, Flora.  It's called One Lucky Elephant, and as I set it up to stream from my Netflix account, which even remembers exactly where we stopped last time, I thought how much things have changed with regard to educational aids since I started teaching at a black school called Jongilanga (which means "Seeing the sun" in Xhosa), 25km outside East London, such a long time ago, 32 years!

Jongilanga was a community-built school, with crowded classrooms which had no ceilings or electricity.  When a big storm pulled in, the rain on the corrugated iron roof drowned out all talk, and the dark clouds made it too murky to see the printed page.  I taught standards 9 and 10 (grades 11 and 12) English as a Second Language, and the "setbooks" (texts) they had to study were Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles in grade 11 and Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare, in grade 12.  Really?  The most complicated English texts available for native English speakers, and you prescribe them for second language learners?  For children who lead the cattle out to graze each morning, who walk kilometers to school every day, who are so eager to learn, but whose first language is isiXhosa?

A rural community very similar to where my school was located.

Starting with Tess of the d'Urbervilles, I spent much of my time drawing pictures on the ancient chalkboard, of the smocks that the shepherds wore, the crooks they used for the sheep, every page had about 100 things they had no knowledge of, and I could see we would never even get through the first 50 pages, let alone study the entire book, at the slower-than-a-snail's pace we were going.

I didn't even own a tv myself, but I made a plan.   A farmer who lived about 3 or 4 kilometers away from the school agreed to let us use a large shed he had which he used to store cattle feed.  It had the required electrical outlets.  I hired the biggest tv I could find, those huge old ones shaped like a brick which took about 3 people to carry them, and a video machine.  I hired the two movies, Tess, the 1979 Roman Polanski version of Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and the 1968 Franco Zefferelli version of Romeo and Juliet.  Together these two movies total 5 hours and 40 minutes!
 
The plan was for the 11th grade to watch Tess and then go home, and then the 12th grade would come in and watch Romeo and Juliet.  On the arranged day, all one hundred and seventeen students walked the distance from school to Mr van der Westhuyzen's shed, where they crowded in excitedly, sitting on old newspapers and straw on the floor, and perching on the sacks of feed everywhere.  Such a flurry of anticipation!  They then proceeded to watch with rapt attention for the entire 6 hours!

Most of my students had never even seen a tv before, let alone a movie.  (Television had only arrived in South Africa in 1976, and relatively few of the general population owned one yet.)   The power of a visual story is so compelling, and the plots of both books so universal, that they were just enchanted. They suddenly understood why shepherds wore smocks, how Romeo killed Tybalt, recognised Angel Clare and sympathized with Tess in her predicament.  So that afterwards we could concentrate on the language, the way the story is set out, the circular plotline.

And all this happened a long long time ago, when I was heavily pregnant with my second child, who was born in the middle of the year, and whom I had to leave when she was only six weeks old to go back to school, where they were very kind to me, the only white member of staff, and arranged my timetable so that I would only have to work in the mornings, and be home to spend time with my babies all afternoon.

And at the end of the year there was the best pass-rate in English that the school had ever had.  And I was adopted into a Xhosa clan, and I was very proud. 

Icicles are the beautiful natural things for today.  It is too cold for icicles right now, but tomorrow there will be a slight thaw and I expect there will be some more.

Icicles in the sun

Apparently they can be very dangerous and in 2010, five people were killed and 150 injured in St Petersburg, Russia.  The terrible murderer in the book The Lovely Bones is finally dispatched by an icicle, which is so satisfying.

In South Africa, listening to the Joni Mitchell song Little Green with the line, "There'll be icicles, and birthday clothes, and sometimes.... there'll be sorrow", I had no idea of icicles, they were just pictures, strange shapes in my mind. And now they are real, one of the curious pleasures of winter, and they shine in the sun outside my window.

23rd day

-16C.  A cold 45 minute tramp through the woods, eyes streaming from the icy air, nose red, frozen mouth unable to form words by the time I get back.  But here are the slow ambling tracks of deer, the sweet calculated hopping of rabbits.  Leading up to a tree and then disappearing with a confident leap are the long-toed tracks of a squirrel.  I follow the delicate paw-prints of two or more coyotes, sometimes cantering, other times loping, and here the marks of a scuffle, and there is where fear was, and death, shown by the presence of urine and faeces and blood. 

In Mouse Meadow there are the over- and under-ground tracks of mice, voles and shrews.  I remember learning with amazement that shrews are the fiercest creatures in the world for their size.  I fished a lifeless little Elephant Shrew out of our swimming pool in South Africa once and when I examined it, noticed a faint expanding and contracting of its little lungs. So I sat on the grass and gently rubbed it dry, warming it in my hands, marvelling at the sensitive dainty ears with their gossamer fur, the delicate long legs with their tiny-toed feet, the elongated nose, the soft white underbelly. After a while its eyes opened, then seemed to focus, and in an instant it looked directly at my large face looming over it, and shrieked loudly (well, loudly for a shrew)!  I too screamed with fright and let it fall from my hands on to the grass where it ran off as fast as it could go (which is surprisingly fast).  They are mostly solitary creatures, and the females usually give birth to twins (I can identify with that), sometimes twice a year.  They have a long gestation period for a small mammal, two months, but the babies can do almost everything they need to after only a couple of days, just tinier versions of the tiny adults. 

It is strange how upset we get when things go wrong. Well, depending on our characters, some people get more rattled than others.  Tim, for example, rarely becomes unglued.  The other night I had a series of mishaps on the way to bed (and no, alcohol was not involved), knocked over my teacup (empty) when I got up off the couch, tripped up the stairs, forgot something downstairs and had to come all the way down again, then it all culminated in me placing the bottle of laundry detergent on the little bathroom table and missing, like a monocular person with no depth perception, so that the bottle, although made of plastic, shattered and proceeded to leak white goo all over the floor.  

 (If you were to think about the state of the world you would just want to die immediately, it is so awful.  There is constant war.  There is always torture.  Elephants will be extinct within 10 years if poaching is not stopped.  There is the horror of Human Trafficking.  There is the inconceivable practice of Female Genital Mutilation.  Every drop of ocean has plastic suspended in it.  There are terrible leaders of countries, there are horrible fathers, there are nasty mothers, there are cruel aunts, atrocious guardians.  The trees are being decimated, frogs have too many legs in the Chesapeake wetlands.  We live in a world where children can be merciless and sadistic, where there are eight stage of genocide, so that it can't be declared a genocide until the country has reached a certain level of atrocity, like a video game. 

But it is impossible.  We can't live like that.  We can't carry the awful world on our shoulders.  We can't focus on the bad, otherwise we couldn't live.  We have to 'always look on the bright side of life, da-da, da-da, da-da, da-da!")

 

Matthew was brushing his teeth and laughed at my discomfort, and so I ended up laughing too, and it struck me that it makes no sense to get your knickers in a knot about things going wrong, little things.  Because it is no surprise really, even ordinary life never runs smoothly, it is filled with spilled coffee and broken promises, little accidents and big disappointments.  And the reason why life is so bloody marvellous sometimes is because we have these setbacks with which to compare the wonderful.  And we must hang on to this, the cat's pyjamas, the hunky-dory, the extraordinary in the every day.  

Luna and her daddy

My boykies!

22

Snow Day today, and so I'm sitting on the sofa next to the woodstove, my favourite place in winter, when all the birds at the feeder take sudden startled wing after one of them yells "HAWK", and there is a thump at the window.  I get up to investigate and my heart sinks to see a little dark-eyed junco flattened in the snow just outside the door.  It is -14C outside plus wind-chill, so I reckon if it can't move it will probably die quite quickly.  I put on my winter coat and boots and go outside where it looks up at me in a sort of stunned but interested sort of way.  I pick it up and wrap it in a towel, take it quickly inside to the warmth and wait a while.  Gradually she starts to move around and then suddenly escapes, flying straight for the greenery in the jungle corner, where she perches, terrified.  I manage to catch her again and hold her carefully, like my Uncle Maynard, who kept racing pigeons, taught me long ago, index finger and middle finger making a sturdy necklaced embrace, the rest of my hand cupping the little trembling body.  She seems to have come to her eager senses, so I take her outside, but she flies only a little way and then flops down again into the snow.  I repeat the procedure of warming her up, except that she doesn't escape this time, and then, when she is avidly struggling, her little wild heart beating furiously, desperate for her own element, I take her out into the cold, walk her down to the wood-pile, scattering her friends and relations who hide out there, and she hops delicately off my hand into a hiding-place out of the wind, to recover herself fully.

 Later I go out to check on her and she has gone, and there is no body in the snow, so I am hopeful.  I could have put her in a box and kept her warm, fed her even, but if I was a bird, I would want to be free to live or die in my own world, not inside a house, with a horrifying giant gazing down at me.

On cold days like this one I feel like reneging on all my duties, and sitting in front of the fire and knitting, although I am not all that good at it, well, nothing like my mum.   My mother taught me to knit and sew when I was little.  She was a master (mistress?) of knitting and crocheting and lace-making and sewing.  We used to make all our Christmas and birthday presents by hand, funny little felt cases for hair-combs, which people used to carry around in their bags, apparently, and embroidered handkerchiefs, crocheted doilies and knitted belts.  It was companionable, sitting quietly together, my mother and grandmother working on something far more complicated, while we listened to a play on the radio, perhaps, or a record.  They would be there to help unpick bad sewing, or to maybe go back down to the dropped stitch in the knitting in some miraculous way, and somehow pick it up!  I have a distinct glowing memory of  the great sense of achievement I felt when I completed an article, and the beaming faces of my elders were the reward. 

We were part of a tradition going back to Egypt at the end of the first millenium A.D., although I was pretty shocked to learn that only men knitted, until the 17th century or so!  So we weren't part of the very old tradition.

sock from Egypt knitted from cotton

When Emma was small she had to learn to knit at school, but because she was left-handed it was a struggle to teach her.  So I taught Tim, who is also left-handed, and can do anything he sets his mind to, who then managed, with his usual infinite patience, to teach Emma.  An unwilling pupil, she finally completed the required knitted article with a great deal of cajoling and pushing and reminding and help, (a bit like going down the slide) and never knitted again, as far as I know.  No companionable quiet knitting for us.

Jess is more patient and learned to knit and sew and sit companionably, although she is an eager starter of knitting projects but does not always complete them.  I am a bit like that too, I started a jersey for Tim in Grahamstown in 1990, and finally unravelled the wool a few years ago, and now the resulting balls of crimson sit in my cupboard awaiting a new beginning.

Matthew decided to learn to knit, just because he could, and knitted himself the funniest bumpy uneven scarf.   There must be so many of these in the world, as scarves are the easiest things to complete.  Just straight to and fro and to and fro and voila, you have a scarf!  

I learned that I am better able to complete small things, because knitting a large article of clothing takes too long for my soul to manage, so woolen hats are perfect for me, and I can even do fair-isle designs like my mother used to, although she made us all exquisite jerseys and cardigans, which I have never managed.   A few Christmases ago, the last Christmas we were all together, I made us all warm hats, and thought how proud my mother and grandmother would have been of me.

This is one of those awkward family photographs, but the only one I have of all the hats.  For some inexplicable reason we are all crouching down behind the couch!  And Tim has no beard!

When I heard I was going to be a grandmother I began knitting, because that was what my mother always did.  I planned to make a blue elephant toy and a beautiful blanket of squares knitted in strips.  I eventually finished the little blanket for Luna when she was about six months old, and the blue elephant is still sitting in my knitting bag, a flat body and legs, with ears but no head.  And poor Ella, the second granddaughter, is still waiting.

Luna's blanket, with such poor ungrandmotherly stitching that I had to cover the seams with ribbons to hide it.

21 today

Walked the halls and stairs of school during Faculty Development Day, then the aisles of Whole Foods, where I shop very guiltily once a month due to the huge expense.  The other day my friend Mohamed and I were walking into Whole Foods to have lunch.  A huge poster greeted us at the door inviting us, "Come Join Us For ...(something, I didn't notice what).  Mohamed quipped, "You see that sign, it says, "Come Join Us for The Most Expensive Food in the World!"  It was his 50th birthday today, which made him thoughtful, but with only a few regrets.  It is amazing how reaching that half-century mark always seems a day of reckoning. 

I was the first one home, just before the snow began, and hauled my old sled filled with wood until all the storage spaces available near the woodstove were filled with dry, albeit slightly snowy firewood.

We have firewood delivered every year by a lovely woodsman who has his own woodlot and also cuts down trees for people when they are dangerous or dying.  He is also a conservationist so tries to use only trees which are going to be cut down anyway.  We go through 3 or 4 cord of wood each winter, to heat our house,  making fire from wood, as human beings have done since our ancestors the Neanderthals.   The way we do it is (hopefully) the least polluting, as wood stoves are constructed to minimise particulate emissions, and our stove only emits less than 4.1grams an hour.

Quest for Fire

There is an astonishing 1981 movie called Quest for Fire by Jean-Jacques Annaud, which takes place about 80 000 years ago and concerns the encounters of several tribes at different levels of development.  The main characters are part of a tribe which loses their little scrap of protected flame which they keep alive and use to restart larger fires each day, as they don't know how to make fire.  They set off on a quest to find another flame, coming into contact with other people along the way, and the movie shows how they grow and develop from these connections.

Tim and I thought it would be a great movie to show the boys when they were about nine or ten years old, one wintry snow-day, although we were soon rudely reminded that there are quite a few pretty shameless sex scenes not really suitable for young boys!  Tim had to sit with his finger on the remote, fast-forwarding at the inappropriate moments! 

After hauling firewood I made a fire and supper and worried about Matthew and Tim driving home separately in the now crazily blowing snow.

The IB is the International Baccalaureate, a system of schooling in 11th and 12th grades which is recognised by the universities and colleges of most countries of the world.  The IB aims to promote global citizenship and this year in 9th and 10th grade we are having a two-week period of global awareness classes, all subjects, science, art, French, history, all based on the theme of Water.  I suggested that our school connect with a school in an arid country, and then thought how South Africa would be perfect, and that we may be able to communicate with my old beloved Nombulelo in Grahamstown. 

Nombulelo Secondary School,  somewhat resembling a prison.

Nombulelo (We thank you) Secondary School was the school where I taught for ten years.  Ten turbulent years in South Africa's history, 1984 - 1993. A decade of terrible repression by the state during the state of Emergency, rioting, murders, detentions, and the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990.  It is the decade which made me who I am.  During apartheid each race had its own schools, and the least money was spent on black schools and students.  For some reason Nombulelo was built as a new model school, opening its doors one year before I joined the staff.  Each morning began with assembly, the combined voices of more than a thousand students singing the Lord's Prayer in Xhosa, Bawo wethu osezulwini, very beautiful.  Nombulelo is the school where I taught, but where I learned more.