101

Rewild your life!  Today we did the organisation for a bake sale which we are having in May for our Save the Elephant fund, and the students were all super-good and listened like the best sets of ears ever, because they knew that the quicker we got that over and done with, the faster they could get out and run.

They were up and out of the door as soon as I said they could go, because I had told them that the only running was to the field, after that was a deep breathing exercise to be done quietly, with eyes shut.

They were all running about as far away as possible when I got there, but followed the obedient girls to sit in the shade against the wall of the old church and learn deep breathing.  It was lovely and quiet, and they all, after a little bit of giggling from the usual suspects, got really into it and said how good it had made them feel, making thoughtful remarks on our way back to school.

Except for one (there's always one) who is an athlete and thinks he knows everything anyway, so apparently it meant nothing to him, but that is fine, you can never win them all, can you?  One kid even saw blue when she opened her eyes finally, everything was blue!  Deep breathing into blue.

Our advisory has made posters for the Save the Elephant fund, and we are going to have two bake sale for these amazing creatures, to do our little bit, because "all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men (and women) do nothing" as Edmund Burke said in such a sexist way that I had to add "and women" for him.

Indeed, it is a woman actor in China who has spoken out against China's massive trade in ivory.  Her name is Li Bingbing, and you can watch her here.

At yet another elephant conference in London in February this year, the world moved ahead a little, as a contract was signed between many nations, including China, proclaiming a ban on ivory for 10 years. Also, several countries agreed to destroy their stockpiles of ivory.  Why for 10 years?  Why not forever?  People will just hang on to their ivory, and their schools for ivory-carving, and their grand businesses, for 10 years, and then we are back where we started.  It has all happened before. 

Anyway, it is something, it is a big something, so I and my little group are happy about that, and we will bake our hearts out and create some wonderful sweet concoctions to help these majestic, enormously wonderful creatures.

The amazing Iain Douglas-Hamilton, founder of Save the Elephants.

Today at school I found an old orange I had left on my desk for a while, so old that its skin was hard and wrinkled.  I really felt like eating an orange and so I decided to cut it open on the off-chance that it was still edible.  It took some sawing with the knife to cut through the skin, but once that was done the soft juicy flesh was absolutely delicious, cool citrus with a lot of luscious goodness!

And of course it became a metaphor, because us older people are always looking for things like that to make us feel better about this aging business.  So even though you are old and wrinkled, and you're rather tough and weather-beaten, there is still sweetness to be had. 

One hundred days!

No running or walking today, but a lot of sitting in the sun feeling pretty weak for some reason, like convalescing from a long illness, when it was just a cold!

There were so many spring visitors today, a pine siskin, a very pensive chipmunk (I have often watched them having philosophical thoughts while staring into space, remembering to wash their faces every now and then), my little red squirrel, and many other peeping, squawking, singing birds.

The best visitor was seen early this morning from the big bathroom window upstairs, a glossy-coated  red fox!  I think it was a male, as I could see no dugs, but he wandered around a little at the bird feeder hoping for scraps and then seemed to realise he was a bit close to the house and loped off in the direction of the pond until I lost him in the trees. 

And then later in the day I saw a turkey shape looming slowly through the forest, and Mr Tom arrive in his inimitable way, bringing his two ladies with him today.  I think he needed to find a good place to perform his beautiful dance.  As it turned out, the only female who was remotely interested was me!  I do so admire those feathers!

I got my hummingbird feeder all ready and dusted off, and I'll put it up in a few days' time.  The little ruby-throaters will be here any day, and hungry from that long long migration from Central America.  This is a ruby-throated hummingbird map that an enthusiast updates by hand whenever he hears word of another sighting.  What an amazing thing to do!

 

As you can see, they are nearly here, they just have to leap over that little hook on the right!

Some amazing Ruby-throated hummingbird facts:

Hummingbirds weigh about 3.1grams.
Their nests are about the size of a walnut.
They are very territorial about the feeders and will chase others away in a very fierce manner.  It is quite thrilling to watch.  And even more thrilling when they become accustomed to people and will whirr down past your ears sounding like a deep-voiced bee (if the buzzing of a bee was its voice). 
People wonder how to attract hummingbirds, but if you hang up a feeder, sooner or later a hummingbird will come to investigate.  It has been conjectured that, in a given year, every square meter of their territory in the US and southern Canada is checked by hummingbirds in their never-ending search for food.
They reach speeds of 100 km per hour in an escape dive.
Their wings beat about 52 times per second.
They fly non-stop over the Gulf of Mexico which is a flight of about 18 to 20 hours!
They enchant me every time I see them, the delicate little flying jewels.

99

A very "feeling-sorry-for-myself" day.  Awful cold with painful sinuses, and the most FRUSTRATING time trying to upload all my IB Visual Arts students' work to its electronic destination!  I wanted my mother, because that's what you still feel like when you are so miserable, even though you are 58 years old.  But the only person who could help me was of course Tim, my knight in shimmering armour once again, who multi-tasked several people on a conference call, then went off to have a root-canal, and then got back to make me tea with lemon, and then back with the several people on the conference call again, now with a slurry voice which sounded as though he was drunk, not numb from his chin to his nose, poor man.  And in between all this, finding out for me, as I was tearing out my hair, after many bloody tries, how to make a set of images into a pdf which is under 20MB! And explaining it all very kindly and softly, even when I shouted at him, and the computer, and the cold virus.  And teaching me how to do it so that I could do it for the next lot, and when I couldn't do it because I had forgotten some of the very unfriendly steps, he just showed me again. 

I started to feel like Julie Andrews in that song, "But somewhere in my wicked, miserable youth, I must have done something gooooood...."

But now it is all done, everything is uploaded to wherever it is meant to be, thank the gods of computers and patient men.

One variant of the rhinovirus, which causes the common cold, looks like a flowery bomb.

Yes, this is how I felt today.

pretty cold viruses

What a horrible thing, to enter your body and cause such problems!   Apparently the cold is the most common illness in the world.  Adults will get about 2 to 3 a year, and children between 10 and 12 a year!

When Emma was little she mistook the word "germs', thinking it was "germans', and after I had taught her about the virus-fighting cells which our body sends out like soldiers to fight the enemy disease, I heard her explaining to Gavin how soon she would not have a runny nose anymore because her "soldiers were fighting the germans"!

Well I hope my soldiers are fighting that good fight, and I shall wake up a new person tomorrow morning, all well and no germans to be seen!

Ninety-eighth day

Rewilding today.  We observed animal houses on our walk to the field today.  Well, we saw one nest high up in a maple tree.  It was mis-identified as a "bird's nest", a "hawk's nest", a "nest", until one boy came up with the correct answer of "a squirrel's nest".  No one knew what a squirrel's nest was called, let alone cared.  If I ask them on Friday, I'm almost certain no one will remember the word, "drey".  They were concerned that a squirrel is quite a heavy animal, and wouldn't it just fall through the leaves?  I explained how they kind of wove them together so tightly, because leaves are pliable, that they created a lovely warm kind of tunnel in which the squirrel's body, or the little brood of babies, fit quite snugly.

At the field there was a lovely red-tailed hawk hovering and no one knew what it was either.  Most of them knew that hawks ate mice though.

Everyone wanted to run but I hauled their minds in with descriptions of dream houses, and how we don't build sustainable houses, and what could we use to build a house right here.  Each person was instructed to run far away from everyone else and think about their house, which side would face the sun, what material they would build it out of, how big it would be.

One boy ran straight on to the baseball triangle and drew a large room in the sand.  Basically a bedroom, with a bed, a desk with a computer, and a tv in the corner.  He didn't think of a bathroom or a kitchen or anything else!  Priorities of a 12 year old!

Two girls built a hypothetical house together using the awning of a kind of clubhouse at the end of the field.  They used mud to block up the holes in the netting-wire.

My favorite was a hobbit-like house built by a short french boy, under the hill, with a tree growing on top and les racines, the roots, would come down through the roof and form shelving and hold up walls.  The side open from the hill would be all windows, to give a lot of light because the inside would be dark under the hill.  He had a bathroom and kitchen and everything sorted out, even heating.

Then they were to run a race but no one wanted to race the fastest kid, so we all just jogged back to school.

In perusing the Huffington Post at lunchtime, I sometimes get sidetracked by their weird side-stories, and today there was one about a 63-year old set of twins in Tennessee named Andrew and Anthony who lived together  as recluses.  They were found dead, each sitting in an armchair next to one another.

But the weirdest thing was that they had been dead for three years!

They lived in a quiet street in a town, not stuck out in the country far away from any neighbours.  No one realised that they were dead.

They had no family or friends who inquired about their whereabouts?  Apparently the mailman stopped delivering mail because he thought they had moved.  Many people in the neighbourhood believed that it was an empty house.   Someone continued to cut their lawn, although that is also a mystery, apparently.

And how did they die?  Did they commit suicide together?  Did they just both decide to die together and sit down and do it?  Were they overcome by fumes?

Until the toxicology reports we will not know how they died, and we will probably never know why.  

The connection between twins is such a fascinating phenomenon.  Nick sent me an article this evening about a pair of four-year old conjoined twins, craniopagus twins, joined at the head.  These two are particularly intriguing because they share a thalamus, which means that one twin experiences what the other twin eats or sees or feels.  So for example the mother can put her hand over one girl's eyes, show the other girl a toy, and the one with covered eyes can tell what it is!  Apparently they have difficulty knowing where one ends and the other begins, although they do use the pronoun, "I", not "we" when they talk about themselves, but this might mean "we".

When the boys were very little they didn't know who was Matt and who was Nick.  If you asked them, they would point to one another, and then themselves, and look confused.  When they were a little older, they would tell me their dream as they were eating breakfast, and it seemed that they had shared the same dream, although they were probably just enjoying weaving a story, in which they both took part, together.  If one woke from their afternoon nap before the other, he would always know as soon as the other was about to appear at the top of the stairs, it seemed he could "feel" him wake up.  And of course they had that wonderfully expressive and eloquent twin language in which they understood one another completely, although no one around them could make head or tail of what they were saying.

My little sweetie-boys!

Oh, Time.

Day 97

I went for a run/walk for about 2km today, feeling a little miserable with a cold.  Everyone was out today, even the wood-frogs and a pair of chickadees gave me a little concert at the pond, and the deer were there with their disgruntled white tails whipping the air as they sped away.

All my feeding stations and the two birdbaths were in high demand, and the somewhat scraggly goldfinches who are still growing out their yellow feathers, were very pleased that I finally filled the Nyjer seed feeder.

After I had filled everyone's plates I left the door open, for the first time this year!  I could hear all the bird-calls and woodpeckers tapping, and then the screeches as the bully blue jays arrived en masse, their intimidating stiff-legged sauntering scaring some little birds, but the chipmunks know they are all show.  

All the birds were lining up for their spring baths in the clean clear new water, and there was much splashing and dabbling and sploshing and slopping.  Even Turkey-Lurkey drank from the bird-bath.

Turkeys are these beautiful large birds that live wild here in Massachusetts.  I have written extensively about them in my 2010 blog, but I love their genial ambling, their serene demeanors, their slow thoughtful movements, like old ladies in too-big raincoats, going for a gentle constitutional through the quiet forest.

And look, in true crocus fashion, they have sprung up fully-formed overnight!

In South Africa, when there is a strange very light overcast sky, so that they sun shines through, it is called "'n vlies voor die son", a fleece in front of/across the sun, a soft lacy shining fleece.

The man-made thing is the amazing poem by Irish poet Eavan Boland that one of my students showed me the other day: 


Quarantine
In the worst hour of the worst season
of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking- they were both walking - north.

She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.

In the morning they were both found dead.
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
there is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:

Their death together in the winter of 1847.
Also what they suffered.  How they lived.
And what there is between a man and woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.

96

I actually went for a 2.8km run yesterday in the beautiful weather, which I forgot to mention.  Also, I built a dam until my fingers went numb from the icy-cold, lovely, babbling water pouring down the hill.  I succeeded in diverting the flow, to my engineering hearts' great satisfaction.

There are wood frogs already in the pond, and every year they delude me into thinking that there are ducks on the water, which is thrilling, and which does sometimes happen.  The thought of the ducks which I can hear but cannot yet see, causes me to stalk painstakingly up to the pond, like a jaguar, except with turquoise trousers, but no, it is the quacking wood frogs.   Which of course stop, alerted by my skulking presence, long before I can actually even see the their watery home, devoid of Mallards.

Wood frogs are amazing little things.  They hibernate in soil or leaf mould, and just before winter their bodies build up urea and glucose which act as "cryoprotectants" to limit the amount of ice that forms and to reduce osmotic shrinking of cells. These wonderful little creatures survive the whole winter like this, during which their bodies freeze and thaw several times.  They can survive if no more than about 65% of their total body-water freezes.

The frogs refused to sing their mating songs while I was the intruder, but a male cardinal and a tufted titmouse sang to one another.

There are also ticks, the scourge of warmer weather.  I don't like killing anything, but there are a few exceptions: ticks, mosquitoes, flies.  I picked several of them off my turquoise legs and happily crunched them all between stones.

I met a doe with two youngsters, who were very interested in me and let me walk towards them slowly for a few minutes.  They even started to approach me on their long skinny legs, and then, as I moved ever closer, the mother decided I was not safe, snorted and turned her white tail on me and the younger ones obediently followed suit. 

And today was a full day's painting at the course I am taking with my friend every Wednesday evening.  It is tiring painting for five hours in one day.  Long ago at Art school we used to paint for that amount or longer, every day. The perfect life!

So my painting today is the man-made object, and I hope no one is offended.  We were talking the other night with some friends, one American and one South African couple,  about how strangely different American society is in one way, that people are very prudish about nudity.  (Of course, it is a double standard because absolutely everything is highly sexualised: music videos, tv shows and a lot of advertising.)  The American woman explained that it is understandable because they are descended from the Puritans, but it is so very different from liberal little Grahamstown, where our children grew up running around naked in summer, and where all our friends' houses were filled with Art and paintings and some were always nudes.  It never crossed our minds that it was strange, it was perfectly natural.  In America, our boys had friends over who exclaimed how lucky they were to have pornography all over their house! I have never seen a painting of a nude in anyone's house I have visited here. 

Ninety-five, we're alive!

So it will have to be a 364-day challenge, or maybe even a 360 day challenge, which gives me four more days off along this year. 

Some days are just too long.  But they still keep racing eagerly by.  Luna is nearly fourteen months old already, Ella almost eight!  The boys are almost finished their junior/third year in college, which seems utterly bizarre, and I have about a year and a half to go before I turn 60!  I have known Tim for 30 years now, more than half our lives.  The rapidity of all this is very disconcerting.

Rewilding yesterday.  My eight little 7th-graders came bouncing in after lunch, anticipating something wonderful.  We talked about how everyone had felt on Tuesday going for that walk/run/lollop.  The main words which came out were "happy" and "fun".  "It was such a beautiful day, and we spend so much time in school sitting down,", "It was so nice to run about!", "I thought we had to notice things, like the pollution."  They all had really interesting and thoughtful things to say about why people should get back to nature. 

There are helpful activities recommended for each day of this rewilding challenge, but as I only see my kids twice a week, I can pick and choose.  There was a whole write-up about how it is therapeutic to walk barefoot on the earth because of the electrical impulses that can only enter your body when your naked feet touch the earth, a kind of grounding, which might be true, I suppose.  I just know that in South Africa we spent a lot of time without shoes on and that my feet are unhappy during the long winters here.

The students could barely believe that a teacher was commanding them to take off their shoes outside!  On a fairly cold day, too!

So we went out, everyone racing again (with me, the old teacher, bringing up the rear), to a little brown patch of grass which will soon be green, and several kids barely stopped to pull off their shoes, and then off they went, running, exclaiming how wonderful it felt, that it wasn’t prickly at all.    A few were less keen but all complied and suddenly there was a game of tag, which was exhausting, because as the slowest there I was constantly being tagged!   And then there was just time for a thrilling race, and afterwards, as we all sat and reluctantly clothed our feet again, they were all talking about how even ten minutes running around makes a huge difference, and that their feet felt so good, and that they were going to brag to their schoolmates that we had the best advisory.  I suggested that they just explain what we are doing, the back to nature theme and all that. 

But of course it feels so good to have everyone so happy, to be the facilitator of that delight.

And then Tim fetched me from school to meet up with friends and attend a concert by Johnny Clegg, a very famous South African musician, the "white zulu".  He is an astonishing performer still, after all these years, even though his 60-year old body has widened as many of us in older age do.  He still dances energetically all over the stage, demonstrates the Zulu warrior dances, and is generally a very enthusiastic performer, belting out the beautiful songs which are old now, from that familiar country which is no longer ours, songs which rend your heart.  

Johnny Clegg tells wonderful stories before each song, about the birth of the song, or how it came about, and he is an excellent storyteller and reminds me of Keith James, our friend in South Africa who Nicholas is named for in his second name.  

The entire packed theatre went wild at the end, and of course there was an encore.  Tim wanted him to play Impi, which is the song that blew him away when he first heard him in concert in 1982 in Cape Town, and I wanted Asimbonanga, because of Mandela's recent death, and because of its grace.  And I got my wish.  He ended with Dela, which went on and on, to crazy clapping and stomping and dancing.  

And being there, I thought what an amazing life Johnny Clegg has had.  To be a link between black and white, to blend the musical cultures of two segregated and diverse races,  to bulldoze his way against the apartheid laws, to travel all over the world and have people fall in love with his music.  

And I thought too what an amazing life I have had, to have lived 45 years in that astonishing, crazy, awful, beautiful, messed-up country, to have worked for years and years in black schools, to have loved those students, and proudly seen some of them go on to great success,  and then to have left our home and trekked across the world to settle in a new strange country.  

We have been brave pioneers in our own way, all six of us travellers.


 

Quatre-vingt quatorze.

Too late tonight, I will do two tomorrow. Have some kisses, everyone!

Day 93

The trees are all getting ready, standing like ballet dancers, feet together, arms out, fingers poised in elegance, ready for the curtain to open.  The name of the show.....SPRING.

I have a daily calendar of Art from the Metropolitan Museum's collection.  There is a beautiful sculpture of a smiling woman from the Ptolemaic period in Egypt, circa 400-2-- B.C.

 It struck me that it is very unusual for sculptures to be smiling.  Here are some other old examples, all unsmiling.

Found in a tomb in Gizeh, made in about 2700 B.C.  She could be an Olympic swimmer.

Beautiful youth with eyelashes, a bronze charioteer found in Delphi from about 470 B.C,

Praxitiles: Head of Hermes, probably his eromenos.

The amazing Rodin!

How different sculpted or painted portraits are from photographic portraits, which so often show grinning faces.  In the 21st century, even little children know to smile when you point the camera at them.

And here is a lovely smile from Paul Klee!

Day 92

It is extremely interesting and a discussion for another day, how we become who we are.  Most people I know have no idea of the amazing transformation of the humble little American goldfinch from a drab brown nondescript winter bird to a bright canary-yellow beauty who glitters in the spring sunshine. I love this fact about this dear little bird which reminds me so much of the South African Cape Canaries, who came to my feeders in the same way. 

The American goldfinch in spring and summer.

The American goldfinch in winter, with just a tiny little beard showing its golden potential.

South African Cape canary.

My dad always told me how things worked, even when he didn't really know, I think.  He just made up a long story on the spur of the moment.  My mother told me the names of things, flowers, birds, trees, people.  She loved birds, and so I loved them too, because that is what you did. 

It was expected that we would remember all these things because they were interesting, and so we did.  I loved finding out about everything.  Learning is in reality self-education.  It is a curiosity and the desire for knowledge that leads you to find out what you want to know.  It is the knowing that you can question things, that everything is worthy of your curiosity, that we owe it to the world to know the names of our places and the animals and all the green and growing things around us.  That we should understand things as much as we can, that we should be observant, and aware, and enlightened. 

I tried to teach the boys the names of flowers but they were never that interested in flowers and therefore only two stuck in their heads, as Nick's boss, the flower-shop manager, recently found out.  Forsythia, because we laughed about it every spring when it lined the roads, and remembered how Matthew had thought it was such a lovely name, "For Cynthia", no doubt named after someone's girlfriend or wife!  And hyacinths, because I used to buy them one each year to keep watch over in their rooms, and to take note of the little bell-like florets unfurling into the beautiful purple-blue cones of fragrance. 

Recollections of people can be tricky things.  Especially if you don't know the people that well and have had some kind of shocking encounter with them.  If that is the case, that picture will always be the one you recall.  I recently walked in on a teacher sitting on the toilet in the staff-bathroom.  It is just one little room with a toilet and a urinal and a sink.  She had forgotten to lock the door and was utterly horrified when I barged in unknowingly, entirely innocent of any wrongdoing.  The look on her face was instant shock and embarrassment, and I left as fast and as apologetically as I could.  But now whenever I meet her in the passage she sets her eyes to downcast mode and sidles past trying not to be the picture in my head.

In Grahamstown when I was pregnant with the boys I went to ante-natal classes and one of them was specifically meant for couples, so Tim came along with all the other partners, and a man we knew who taught at the university gave a little talk about sexuality and our sexual life during pregnancy and after the baby is born.  Which is, of course, all very helpful.  Except that, as an example, he gave us a glimpse into his sex-life with his wife, which was a very odd personal anecdote, and one that I would rather not have glimpsed, and which, of course, when I saw him in the supermarket the following day, was the only image I could think of, and forever after actually, that was how I saw him. 

Day 91

April Fool's Day in our school is called Poisson d'Avril, which is a French tradition on this day and involves children trying their best to stick a paper fish on someone's back without their knowledge.  No one quite knows why a fish, but it might have something to do with the end of the zodiac sign of Pisces, and the beginning of the new astrological year.

Some people hate having the fish, because it implies that you are so stupid you don't even feel when someone touches your back.  But some take it as a point of honour.  I had a whole backful one year, just decided to see how many I could get, but this year there was only one and a kind child told me about it and took it off for me.. 

Nick was the only one to play a trick on us, but he also did it after the noon deadline so it didn't really count! (although he did give me a huge fright!)
Virgin Atlantic had a lovely prank today.

There is a company which is encouraging people to take the 30-day challenge and rewild your life.  I suppose this does not really qualify as a natural thing as opposed to a man-made thing, but today this is what I am going to talk about.  The challenge involves going into a natural place, or even just a little back garden, and spending time with trees and sunshine, or rain, or walking on a windy day.  Thirty minutes is specified, in order to re-connect with our wildness, which we sometimes forget.

I have decided to do this with my advisory group, a little group of 7th graders, so today when they arrived in the Art room I said, "Ok, let's go!" and they followed me blithely, like those children followed the pied piper (except that I am not a horrible weird person dressed in a nightie getting revenge on the town of Hamelin).

I led them downstairs and out of the door, and toward the main road.  They were all chattering away and so happy to be out on this bright sunny day without coats or gloves!  It was beautiful.  I asked one of the boys to press the button for the pedestrian crossing which he did very ceremoniously, and then we all hurtled across the road like lolloping puppies, the stunned stationary cars looking on.  We were on a path which leads down to a little stream, like a canal really, and suddenly they all took off, running like the wind, just because there was a long stretch, just like dogs on the beach.

We only have twenty minutes, so I walked for 9 minutes, during which time most of the boys found themselves big staff-like sticks and carried them for varying times, and in the beginning the girls walked behind me and wondered what we were doing, but thought it was very "cool" anyway.  We went and looked at the little river, which no one knew the name of, until one girl tried out, "Alewife Brook"? and she was right.   One girl commented on the smell, like "those stones you rub together to create light", a fact which we learned about quartz on a 4-day camp at Nature's Classroom.  Perhaps it was the newly-warm sun striking a pile of stony gravel which might have had quartz in it, but what a great observation, what a good nose!

And then we turned around so that I could get them back to school in time for French class, and a game of tag began, and I stood at the end of the path where it meets the main road and felt very powerful as I held out my arms in a Christ-like gesture and all seven of these joyful creatures came to a laughing stop and kind of hung on and around me.

And on Friday maybe we will talk about what made it such a jubilant little interlude, and do something else just as delightful!

Ninety

I did not go to the gym today.  I did go for a walk through the meadows with my ghost-dog Molly, to see all the consequences of so much water falling from the sky - water burbling down the dirt road, digging dongas, raising pond-lines, making mud and softening up the paths into spongy leaf-clung trails.

Babbling brook coursing down road.

Pond melting.

Actual buds about to burst into blossom!

Leaf-buds with a long way to go still.

Six pairs of geese honking their way home.

On our way from dropping off my car for its service this morning, little balls of ice were mixed in with the rain on the windscreen, and everywhere in the fields there were sad-looking cows and miserable horses standing in the cold and wet.  Tim said, "Oh, I love this, just think, it's the breakfast of all the plants, all this rain, it's the spring's breakfast, and soon everything will be growing and green!"  He is a rather enthusiastic man.

And in the bank, the teller said, "Oh well, another cold and horrible day!", so he told her his "breakfast" story and her eyes lit up and she smiled a great big grin, and when we left she said, "I love that breakfast story!  I'm going to tell everyone who comes in today that they shouldn't worry about the rain anymore. It's the spring's breakfast!" 

And later on Tim found some Tennis biscuits which must have been there since we got back from South Africa at the end of August, and which were hiding on the top shelf of the kitchen cupboard.  We were both very happy at this find, and we made Rooibos tea and ate our tennis biscuits and both floated off into South African nostalgia.  Tennis biscuits are the taste of childhood, the treat in your lunchbox at school, the delicious flavour of getting warm on the beach when you are a little shivering skeleton after staying in the sea too long, and your aunt wraps a big towel around you, gives you a good rub, hands you a tennis biscuit in one shaky hand, and a plastic mug with hot milky tea in the other, heavenly liquid that goes straight to your arteries and floods your body until you glow with it.  And later, when you are a parent, you do something you had never before felt possible, when your toddler generously hands you the soggy remains of his tennis biscuit, expecting you to gratefully eat it, you do. 

They are that good.

89

Oh this is hard going.  My sister loves the rain, and I do too, with all its life-giving abundance and its very wateriness, but when it goes on for days it feels as though the sky is crying and I cry along with the sad clouds.  The thought of having the discipline to write this blog for another 276 days is a heavy black gloom hanging over my head on this bleak day. 

I remember learning about the water cycle at school, and that there was a pretty picture which is probably everyone's first encounter with this phenomenon, looking something like this:

I remember thinking that this was why we got so much rain, because we lived right next to a mountain, Devil's Peak in Cape Town. According to the picture, it only rains over the mountain!  It was a revelation that the water I encountered was not new.  That it just went round and round in this amazing cycle, the same water, just changing form constantly, just like all the energy of the world.

It was the same type of epiphany as when I suddenly understood that the light from stars is actually old light, that the stars shining in our sky, the romantic impossibly numerous stars, might actually be long gone, dead suns.  It is only their little photons which they sent out all that time ago, finally striking the photoreceptors which send the signals to the optic nerve at the back of our eyes and finally to the visual cortex at the very back of the brain which creates the image we see.  Magnificent.  Such beautiful knowledge.

When I was young I loved walking in the rain. My dog and I would go for long solitary (the dog and I were of the same mind in this) rambles through our deserted suburb.  There would be few people out, as not many shared this desire for the knowledge of dripping hedges, singing trees, happy frogs, the luscious smells of wet grass and sodden soil, and your own intricate thoughts which seemed to flow easier with all that flowing on and around you. 

It had begun when I was quite small, four or five, and we would get cabin fever from the wet weather, so my dad would take me for long walks and teach me how to engineer dams in gutters in the back-roads, or in little streams in the veld.  Such streams only existed while the rain came down, then dried up soon after in the South African sun and wind.  Later in life I took my own children for similar walks, and we spent hours making dams with sticks and stones and mud, getting drenched in the process and happy as dripping seals.

We were in the city today and Tim always asks me which way I want him to drive home.  Today I chose Route 1, because we get to go over the Tobin Bridge, the enormously high bridge linking Boston and Chelsea, built between 1948 and 1950.

Tobin Bridge

I love bridges.  Such an incredible end-result of abstract thought, the problem of getting from here to there over a previously impossible obstacle, a chasm, a river, a stretch of ocean. My dad loved them too and always told me (in his protracted way of telling stories, inherited by his grandson Nicholas), how they were made.  He would explain how suspension bridges hold themselves up, or how the cantilevers on bridges like the Tobin work, which Benjamin Baker, the famous British civil engineer, demonstrated like this:

The Tobin Bridge spans the Mystic River, its highest point is 250ft (76m), and when you are travelling southbound on Route 1 over the bridge, you travel more than 100 ft (30m) from the top of the bridge to the tunnel exit into Charlestown.

High winds travel through the bridge by design, and you can feel the lift sometimes on rough days when you are near the toll-booths on the southbound level, the top deck of the bridge. 

It is so high so that ships can go by happily underneath, and its navigable waterway opening measures 340ft (103m) wide by 100ft (30m) high. 

85000 cars go over the Tobin every day, and here is a picture of the very first morning traffic.

Bridges span actual stumbling blocks, but of course bridges are also a wonderful metaphor for how to get over something in life, or be helped to, as in Bridge over Troubled Water, the wonderful song by Simon & Garfunkel. They also show our faith in the human being's ability to create these amazing structures, and the conviction that we have in crossing them, both literally and figuratively.

Footbridge over the Storm River Mouth, South Africa.

88

My dad was this age when he died.  He almost made it to 89, just about a month to go. He was a big strong old tree.  It took a lot of years to fell him.

We were going to get up early this morning to go to the gym, take the rubbish to the dump, and clean the house, but in fact, we got up so late that about half an hour later we had to leave to get to our lunch date in the city in time.

Tim went to California on business and arrived back yesterday evening.  I missed coming home to him.  I said, "Hello!" cheerfully to the house as I came in at the door.  I missed sleeping with his arm wrapped around my waist.  I put a hot-water-bottle with a cushion at my back and pretended it was him.  I missed seeing his face.  He was often in my thoughts and the entire long day of teaching on Friday was filled with little glittering moments of excitement when I remembered that I would see him that evening.  We are very different people, but I am glad every day to be in my thirtieth year together with him.

This evening there was a celebration of poetry at my school, called Le Printemps des Poetes, Springtime of the poets.  It is a concert with poetry and music and art, a francophone event that began in 1999 and takes place mainly in France and Quebec, but there are little celebrations like it all over the world where people speak French, I expect.  Each year there is a different theme.  We have been celebrating for four years now, and it is always astonishing to me to see the talents of all these people, and especially of my students.  One girl sang La Vie en Rose accompanied by a trio, a pianist, double bassist and a trumpeter.  Such passion, it made me cry. 

The theme was The Heart of the Arts, and this is the painting I finished for that:

Ritual

Day 87

"I act as a sponge. I soak it up and squeeze it out in ink every two weeks." Janet Flanner, a columnist who was the New Yorker's Paris correspondent for fifty years.

On the BBC last night while I was brushing my teeth, I heard an interview with Jamal Mahjoub, who writes novels under the pseudonym Parker Bilal, a series of mysteries about a Sudanese detective.   Mahjoub has a Sudanese father and a British mother, lived in Cairo for years and now lives in Barcelona.  He said that being an outsider is actually a good thing, because it makes you much more aware of things, of how people act, how they see you, about all the nuanced differences of your everyday life.  

It made me think about how this is very true.  My whole life has, for one reason or another, been spent mostly as an outsider, not a crazy faraway outsider, but definitely not one of the easygoing "normal" people, if there are any of those.  I am not bragging that I am some amazing original or anything like that, just that certain circumstances have made it so.  And so I have been observant, and somewhat thoughtful.  

And now because I am writing this blog I am often aware of everyday events as potentials for subjects.  It is as though one's awareness is heightened, one experiences life twice, during the day in real time, and then in hindsight, writing about it. 

And though I would dearly love to continue this idea, I can't keep my eyes open.  As Nick used to sing, to the tune of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, "What a day, oh what a day!"

The Outsider is close to my heart and I will discuss it, but until then, here are some beautiful images of  my trees:

Lone Ancient Apple Tree in second meadow

Frost flowers (through my windscreen/shield)

The mysterious Big Tree where a huffing puffing creature lives.

 

The edge of the sky.

Laden.

Tree with decorations

86

Eighty-six. How old my mother was when she died.

I went for a walk on the cold beach with my ghost-dog Molly this evening, beautiful waves, my old ocean, and a light on the shining sand that made me gasp in wonder when I turned around to see it.

There were happy friendly dogs chasing each other, or a ball or frisbee, or just running for the joy of it, for the big empty space where you can feel your legs loping, your body singing with the speed of it all.

And when I came back over the little wooden bridge, there were two pairs of Mallards in the water below me, dabbling away, chatting amiably with one another.  All of a sudden there was a swoop of wings and another duck swept over my head and landed in the water.  He started swimming excitedly towards the group, until one of the males quacked loudly at him and he turned around and began swimming hurriedly in the opposite direction.  I wonder what he said to the stranger?  "Bugger-off! These are OUR women!"

Mallards pair off in October and November and stay together until the start of the nesting season, which is in April.  They are like the pigeon, the fox and coyote, which have thrived in urban areas, and because they need a safe spot for their eggs, they will often lay them in window-boxes or on roof-gardens, where the ducklings need human intervention in order to leave the nest!  The ducklings are precocial, which means that they can do more or less whatever the adults do almost as soon as they are born, like swimming, but they can't fly off rooftops quite yet.

Apparently they learn about migration from their parents, because they don't always stay with them until everyone flies off, but they still know the way.  Mallards which are raised in captivity somehow lose that ability, that instinct.  You can't help but wonder about long duck-language conversations about which way is the best, and where is a good place to stop, and "are we there yet?" questions.   

On Thursdays I Skype with my daughters. It is something I always look forward to, so lovely to see and talk to my darley girls, even though I can't hold them.

A few years ago Skype didn't work in Jessica's area, or there was not enough bandwidth. And the phone line was horrendous, so Jess and I would have these frustrating phone conversations where we couldn't really hear one another, or one of us could hear but the other was listening through fuzzy cotton-wool.  If you concentrated extremely hard you could sometimes get the gist of a sentence and make a pertinent answer, but sometimes after a while I would give up and just say, "Really?", or "Mmmhmmm," because I felt it was so tedious and soul-destroying for Jess to have to repeat herself all the time. 

My mother phoned me for a weekly catch-up every Sunday night, and I have continued the tradition, although I get to do it twice a week.  My mother would call and I would spend an hour or so chatting about my children, and myself, because that is what you do with your mother, she wants to hear everything, she is proud of the granddaughter who is doing well in piano-playing, happy to hear which baby has started to clap, sympathises with the latest exploits of the older granddaughter, and laughs at the story of the other baby's first tantrum.  And then I ask her about her week, and hear how she went to Book club, and what she is busy knitting at the moment, about the lace-making which she learned at the tender age of seventy, of her friends who pop in, of outings with my cantankerous old dad whose driving is getting worse.

Today I heard of a very sweet pigeon who has adopted the veterinary surgery where Jess the animal-whisperer works, after they fixed his injury.  He waits on the roof of the church hall near the office, and when they open for the day Frikkie the pigeon marches in and takes over.  Jess did a very good rendition of the sound of his clicking feet on the floor or the counter, and how he cocks his little head to assess the situation.  I could envisage Frikkie, undeterred as he tries to make friends with the decidedly antagonistic parrot,  and how he is equally friendly to and unafraid of man and dog.  A credit to his species.

Talking to Emma later we somehow remember the knitting she had to do for school in Standard Four, when she was eleven, of which I have already written somewhere in this blog. Tim had to learn how to knit because he is left-handed and then he could teach the leftie Emma who by this stage had a mental block against the hapless knitting needles.   Each pupil in her class had to learn the basic steps and then use what they had learned to create a knitted article, like a scarf (very popular) or a jersey/sweater, which some ambitious children attempted.  Emma ended up after a few months with a small rectangle, about the size of a photograph, which I judiciously helped her roll up and sew together into the shape of an owl, if you were very imaginative and noticed the button-eyes and cinched "ear-tufts".

What we hadn't realised was that a "show" had been arranged where the girls all got to model their new articles of clothing, so the parents had to attend and everyone was so proud to see their daughter swanning across the stage in all her hand-made finery, neck wrapped elegantly in the knitted scarf, or flouncing across in the lovely pink jersey she had made, and then there was Emma, stylishly modelling a tiny knitted owl on her outstretched hand. 

Day 85

A blustery day of freezing gales.

High winds and a blizzard on Cape Cod, although the snowstorm sailed right past us this time.

Driving down to school I noticed all the leaves dancing.  Around every corner was a new celebration, all the ancient leaves of brown and russet, which had been lying under their winter blanket of snow, woke from their long sleep to shimmy and spin in the crazy currents of air.  These rusty grandmothers and skeletal grandfathers whirled and fluttered, glistened in the shining sun, spumed like water-spouts then fell about gleefully.

And deep inside the trees, and just under the soil's surface, the green listened, spoke to the pink and white, told the babies, the new generation who are about to blossom, that their grandparents were dancing for them, the dance of spring, listen.......listen.........

The dance of Spring

The man-made thing is this drawing by me.  A woman-made thing, in fact.  And the colours did not come out very well in the photograph.  Much of the white is spring-green.  You will just have to imagine the green, just as we are doing right now, waiting for those buds to plume forth!

Die vier-en-tagtigste dag

Another momentous day.  Tim and Nicholas became naturalized citizens of the United States today, using Whatsapp to take the other four members of their family with them through the process.  Tim said there were over 700 people there and as a result it was much noisier and harder to organise, so the officers were not as friendly as those at my ceremony. The seats were also awfully narrow and hard, so that an adult man couldn't sit up straight in them without touching the person next to him.  This meant that they spent a couple of very uncomfortable hours hunched forward waiting for the event to begin.

So three down, one to go, and hopefully one day the other two and their people will be at one of these shindigs!

Whatsapp is my favourite app, an instant messaging app that has 400 million users per month. It uses a customized version of the open standard Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), costs $1.99, and then forever after you can text your daughters and sons and sisters in foreign lands for free!  Which is a massive saving!

It is the only way Emma and I could communicate when she was in hospital just before Luna was born when I was not allowed in.  Through Whatsapp I have seen bathtimes, the first delicious taste of real food as well as the subsequent meltdown, the weighing of the baby, and daily photographs of my little darlings, which of course do not make up for not actually being on the same continent, let alone in the same town, but which go a little way to assuage the sadness of long distances.  Sometimes we whatsapp about serious topics for ages, when it is not convenient to skype, like the middle of the night when everyone is sleeping. Texting is silent, enabling huge loud conversations to take place in total quiet, over this funny little pocket computer. 
 

Luna in the pink.

Ella in a pink hat.

These are my pictures of my granddaughters from Whatsapp today.  Luna is developing an independence which will test her parents' patience, no doubt, getting very cross when they help her hold the handlebars on the tricycle, for example.  And Ella is her own sweet little person, sitting proudly with her new straight back. 

Blood of my blood.

83

It is -8C  this morning, and it's supposed to be spring. A sparkling sunny morning, as the rainbow-maker on the window causes little rainbows to course around the room, and all the indoor plants radiate their greenery.

But the news is sad, it has now been determined that the Malaysian flight 370 went down in the South Indian Ocean, Russia is arguing with the rest of America and Europe, and it's 25 years since the Exxon Valdez went aground and destroyed the Prince William Sound, killing "as many as 250,000 seabirds, at least 2,800 sea otters, approximately 12 river otters, 300 harbour seals, 247 Bald Eagles, and 22 orcas and an unknown number of salmon and herring." -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon_Valdez_oil_spill

And your heart takes that deep aching plunge into despair.  What is to be done?  Why is Obama fighting Putin when nothing has been done about Syria? The poor relatives of the passengers on the plane, hoping against hope that their people were still somehow safe and alive.  I myself use oil so I am partially responsible for Exxon Valdez and BP and all the other constant "spills" of the world.  Until I live in a house which is self-sufficient, like this one that Californian students have dreamed up, until I stop driving a car, until I stop using many products which use oil in their manufacture or in their journey to my door, I am as guilty as the next person.  And so, sadness and helplessness.

Otters are the most wonderful creatures, full of life and play, similar to children. The name stems from the old English word "wodr", which  also gave birth to the word, "water".  This is very apt as otters are all semi-aquatic animals, the sea otter spending most of its life in the ocean.

River otters

Sea otter.

 All over the world otters have been hunted for their pelts since the 1700s, almost to extinction.  They are protected now in Europe but the Asian otter is almost extinct.  Their skins were made into coats and mittens especially for the upper classes, in China and in England.  In England, the prized trophy that hunters would take from the otters was the penis bone, which was used as a tie-pin.  This is one of those indescribably stupid and awful things like gavage, that I just don't understand.  Apparently some animals, like otters, have penis-bones, which assist them in mating for a long time, and for men it was probably a status symbol and also a symbol of their own stiff manhood. Just so sad that the otters had to die for that, just like the rhinos for their horns, and the poor little sea-horses used in chinese medicine to cure impotence.

Otters enjoy themselves, playing just for the sake of it, like many other animals. They have been observed forming slides and then all taking turns to slide down into the water, doing it again and again, just like children.  They also have a complicated social system, and live on average about 15 or 16 years.

I heard a story on the radio the other day where two women were interviewed as they had been volunteers in Cordova on Prince William Sound, after the Exxon Mobil spill in Alaska.  They said that every day they had just gone home and cried, the work had been so hard and so long and so many animals had died.  There was  a long silence as they remembered.  And then one of the women said, "But then, one day, about 3 months later, we took all these cages filled with cleaned and healthy otters down to the beach, and opened all the doors, and there was such a happy milling and mewling and frantic rush towards the ocean, and in they all piled and swam and played and were home!  And that was a happy day, that day we cried tears of joy."

What wonderful women.  What marvellous otters.

When I talked to Matthew in Senegal on Sunday he told me that the latest book he is reading is American Gods by Neil Gaiman, and it is now his favourite book.  I have loved several of Gaiman's books but have never read that one.  So I have put it on my list.

Matt mentioned that there is a wonderful part where he talks of dealing with these awful feelings of despair like an oyster deals with an aggravating piece of sand,  "We draw our lines around these moments of pain, and remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearl-like, from our souls without real pain."  Which is a lovely way of putting it, because we feel the hurt, we experience the full extent of the pain, whatever it is, and then we deal with it, by covering it up, even though it is still with us, it sits there not able to harm us anymore. (Psychologists need to teach people how to do this, don't they?)

And so I will concentrate on the good, like the good women who helped the otters, the fact that people invent rainbow-makers to delight us, and the radiant green leaves of my inside trees which will soon spread to the world outside, when spring flies in, on its little green wings.   

Day 82

I went for a short walk and hauled wood, yesterday gym and 2.60 miles.

The going down of the sun must have been extremely frightening before the discovery of fire.  If even now, in the 21st century, the bogeymen come out after dark, imagine the dire possibility of sabre-tooths and other nocturnal hunters for our long-ago ancestors.  Now we can switch on electric lights, close the curtains to block out the night, lock our doors and windows, and bask safely in our own little patches of brightness for as long as we want to.

When I was little, I was allowed to read in bed after my bath, and then at a certain time my mother would come upstairs to kiss me goodnight and warn me not to put the light back on to read, because I was supposed to go to sleep.  I didn't put the light back on, but most nights, as soon as she had vanished down the stairs and the coast was clear, I would go and sit on the floor in the hall and read by the light which was always left on there. Such a strange logic. My brother might come out of his room where he was doing his homework occasionally and give me a funny look, or try to make me laugh out loud, but generally I was safe in the knowledge of that silent agreement of siblings not to "tell on" one another.

At about 10.30 or 11 my parents would begin stirring from their chairs where they had been knitting or reading or working on something, and when I saw the lights being turned off in the same nightly sequence, I would tiptoe back to my bed, climb quietly in and expertly feign sleep.  I don't remember ever being caught, and perhaps I conned them completely, but being a parent myself I think they must have discovered what I was doing at some stage. Maybe they just turned a blind eye, because you can't really be angry with someone for reading! 

To go back to film, it is just another version of the stories I craved as that child who would not go to sleep.  When I was little, movies were solemn important occasions and happened very infrequently.  We would dress up in our Sunday best to catch the train into the city where we would go to the grand Alhambra theatre or the more seedy Monte Carlo, on the foreshore.

The beautiful Alhambra Theatre in Riebeeck street in Cape Town, which closed down in 1972

I remember once my sister arranged to meet me at the Alhambra to take me to a movie as a special treat, my elegant big sister, who was 23 or 24 already.  I dressed specially in the dress my mother had made which was of the same fabric as my sister's, and my dad drove me into the city for our Saturday afternoon date.  But of course my sister was late (she was notoriously late and still is, although now I am almost as bad), and there was nowhere to park in the busy street, so my dad just told me to jump out and wait on the pavement (sidewalk in American) for her.  Amazing now to think of that, imagine dropping off a 9 or 10 year old girl in the city of Cape Town to wait on the street for a big sister who might never arrive!

But she did, and when I saw her walking towards me up the street my heart leaped happily, because she had worn the same dress, and when she arrived she put her arm around me and told me we were twins, even though I was a tiny skinny mite and she this tall blonde goddess. 

South Africa didn't have television until I was grown-up, so watching a film was even more magical than for other children my age in the western world who watched tv every day.  Sitting in the theatre on those rare occasions, my best friend Trish and I would always look at each other and say excitedly, "The lights are dimming!" when they weren't really, and then we would roll about laughing at our own silly joke, and all her siblings would think we were ridiculous, but we didn't care because we loved each other and we were so excited and happy to be there, about to watch a wonderful story like Mary Poppins, or The Sound of Music, and to be enchanted. 

And now, all these years later, I can watch a movie at the click of a remote, with  a Netflix subscription which allows me to stream films into my own living room!  My dad would be astonished!

I think I have always been disappointed by movies of books that I have read.  When you read you create a whole world in your head, and then it is sometimes hard to accept someone else's interpretation.

It is difficult to pick a favourite movie, but I have always loved Children of a Lesser God, since I saw it in 1986 in the Odeon Theatre in Grahamstown.  It was the first time I realised that sign language is so beautiful and eloquent.  In some ways it is more expressive and sensual than the spoken word. It is also one of those perfect movies which tells a fascinating story and then loops it all up at the end in a pleasing conclusion.  A narrative that stays with you for years. 

In the 21st century the visual world is ever present, we are constantly bombarded with images.  And none so lusciously presented as those in movies, from such different perspectives: dramas, documentaries, educating us on areas we will probably never visit, crazy action movies, science fiction, and history.  There are creatures which do not actually exist, portrayed in such blatant reality that you cannot quite believe, when the movie is finished and you are back in the real world, that there are no dragons, giants, or blue alien people called Na'vis.

 I believe film informs our memories, enlightens how we perceive the world.