One year here. And a month of Live Music

Leaving Boston for the last time.

It is one year today since we arrived to occupy our new home here in Portugal!  Vivemos aqui por um ano.

( In Spanish, which we learned before Português, a year is un año, and woe betide the person who forgets the tilde, because ano means anus.  So we laugh about it sometimes, because bums remain a source of laughter your whole life.  This jollity is probably shared by millions of Spaniards.  The Spanish and Portuguese people are not particularly fond of one another, and will disparage each other whenever the opportunity arises.)

Our house as it was advertised before we bought it.

What we have learned in the past year (in no particular order): 

a) How to use an Aga woodstove in the kitchen which also heats our water and provides underfloor heating.  (We didn't have hot water until three days after we arrived last winter!)  

 b) That we don't want it anymore so will be switching it out in the near future.  Asthmatics and smoke don't really suit each other.

I have a love/hate relationship with 
this dinosaur.

c) That people are really friendly, most of the time, we have so many wonderful stories to prove this.  [Except when they are driving, when they become the same raging monsters found all over the world.

And also when they hunt.  Every Sunday is hunting day in this predominantly Catholic country (weird) and I personally want to eliminate all the hunters, as they shoot everything that moves, including birds, even little ones.  They say for example that thrushes eat the olives, but honestly, generally speaking, there should be enough to go round for everyone (same for the earth, right?).  I am trying to make my garden, an ongoing project from scratch, into a haven for all the animals to hide on Sundays.]

d)We have learned to negotiate tricky things like the particular panic of buying an old Toyota for cash from a seemingly dodgy car-dealer, who turned out to be really sweet in the end, and also easier things like ordering food in a restaurant.  

e) We miss our friends, the old familiars we left behind all those years ago in South Africa, and now as well, those dear ones in America, where everything has gone mad.  Shared histories are valuable as gold.  Hooray for video calls and shared memories, conversations, poetry, articles, photographs.  

Tim digging, having wielded the
jackhammer, seen leaning against
the wall behind him.

f) We have discovered that the earth is full of stones and rocks here, so you have to dig holes for trees with a jackhammer!  Actually for anything you plant.

g) That we have chosen a beautiful place to live, with big skies and that gorgeous late afternoon sunlight that slants with shadows.  A place where we welcome the rain as the friend it always was in South Africa.  A place with new people inviting us on walks and for meals and giving advice when needed.  There is the ocean nearby.  The country uses renewable energy for 81% of its electricity needs.  

Late afternoon light with shadows. 

h) That politicians are corrupt everywhere, and shitheads abound here as they do everywhere else.  

i)  That we are brave and strong and true, like the song says.  We are challenging ourselves in our older age, to learn a new language, to make a garden, to make new friends, to put down roots, again, even with all the stones.    

 

And February has been a month of concerts! Also Rain!  

Every weekend we have attended a gathering of people playing music and an audience watching and listening, swaying, tapping their feet, bursting out with whistles and "bravos!" and applause at the appropriate moments.  Clapping is such a very basic human activity to celebrate something, isn't it?  We teach it to babies and everyone smiles and laughs. Apparently clapping releases dopamine in the brain because we feel ourselves to be a part of something lovely, something beautifully human. 

 

I bought Carmen Souza's LP, but don't 
know if I will love it or not, as we
don't have a record player yet. 

Live music, played well, is magical. It is entirely different from listening to it afterwards on a record or cd, or streamed. Many people are so inspired by the live performance that they avidly purchase a CD directly after the concert, only to discover later that the music sounds so different, maybe they don't even like it anymore. That wonderful live experience sometimes can't be recreated. 

 

The Gershwin orchestra.

The first concert of the month was a performance of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue by the wonderful pianist, Raúl da Costa, accompanied by a symphonic orchestra. The conductor was a delightful Spanish man, Jose Rafael Pascual Vilaplana. 

(Spanish and Portuguese people tend to have really long names, because they choose family names from the mother and the father of the child.

Definitely a Jessica.

My daughter Jess asked me the other day why her name is so long, as she has four names, while all her siblings have only three. I joked back that maybe it was because she was the favourite [All four of my children think they know my favourite, and some think it is themselves. For the record, AGAIN, I do NOT have a favourite.] It turns out I couldn't decide on my second daughter's name for about a month. She started life as Catherine, which faded away after a few days, and then I named her Zoe for about two weeks, because I loved that name, but it just didn't suit her, she was such a contented sweet baby. I had always loved the name Jessica, since watching the Australian movie "The Man from Snowy River", and so she just fitted that, the beautiful mysterious heroine of the story. I couldn't let go of Zoe though, and wanted Margaret too, to honour my mother's family. This is the story I told Jess, how she got lumped with all those names!) 

 José Rafael Pascual Vilaplana was a very demonstrative conductor, who kissed and hugged all the principal players at the end, and who gave an emotional speech in Spanish, which was lovely because we understood it all! Portuguese is still difficult for us, but we are persevering with the help of our lovely teacher Marta, and managing little conversations with people like cashiers and waiters and physiotherapists!

The wonderful Carmen Souza and Pas'cal!

The next week our new friends Lucille and Eric told us they had two spare tickets for a Portuguese jazz singer-songwriter of Cabo Verdean descent, Carmen Souza, who used her voice like an instrument, and held the crowd spellbound, and endeared herself particularly to us as her last song was Miriam Makeba's Pata Pata!  She is in partnership with a wonderful bass player too, which thrilled Tim, our own bass player.  Theo Pas'cal is of short stature and wears a floppy little hat.  When he played the double bass the instrument was quite tall compared to him and he wielded great symphonic beauty from it.  

The following weekend we drove out to Ralph Vogelsang's lovely property on a hill near Loulé, where Sara Esperito Santo Vieira sang like a nightingale with the Fernando Tavares Trio, in the amazing little amphitheatre Ralph has built.  When we lost the sun it was very cold, but the audience of about 60 people was warmed by the beauteous singing of the exquisite Sara, pregnant with her third boy, she told us!  I imagined the little one inside her floating blissfully in the wonderful music surrounding him.  She had an interesting repertoire, comprising songs in three languages, even singing My Favourite Things, from the now 60 year-old movie, The Sound of Music, which sent me into the rich memory of being a young child, singing loudly and word-perfectly with my mother, in the car on the way to somewhere or other, far away in another time.  

The double bass contingent.

Our last concert was Os Planetas, The Planets, by Gustav Holst, which features such a huge orchestra that the musicians filled the entire stage right to the edges, and the conductor had to weave in and out of the violin players for quite a while to get to his podium!  The Planets is in seven parts, and Holst, a British composer who was great friends with Ralph Vaughn Williams, another favourite of mine, was inspired to write it after becoming fascinated by astrology.  

I watched all the musicians, and some stand out, like one percussionist who made an art out of playing the bass drum, his arms seemingly connected to the mallets as they flew up and down in a mesmeric way.  I love watching the percussion players, as they are so important but not always noticed by a listener, like the clash of the cymbals at a dramatic coda, or the pure light sounds of the glockenspiel, xylophones and vibraphone in Mercury.  

Holst was an innovative 20th century composer who died too young, at 59.  For the seventh and last piece, Neptune, he had two women's choirs who sang wordlessly in an adjoining room, unseen, and the way in which the song died out was that the doors to the room were slowly closed.  Our conductor decided to have ten women singers standing at the back of the orchestra.  It was lovely to watch them, such a strange notion of Holst's to put them behind doors.  The piece ends with the orchestra falling silent and the unaccompanied voices slowly fading out pianissimo.  Glorious.

Floating into the blue - I've been
trying to paint light in water.

How lucky are we, to watch and listen to these beauties.  While on the opposite side of the Atlantic, Nero is burning down Rome.  

And we don't forget that at all, we are concerned citizens of the earth, always.  But just for these brief moments, we can float into the blue....  

Find the brief moments.  

Friends and Mothers and Children and Families and Husbands, all the weavers.

It's a new year.  Already 7 days in, ....   Already 18 days in, ....  Already February now!  I keep restarting this blogpost, which seems like an inordinately difficult thing to do somehow.  It's the new year and already I am behind on so many things I wanted to do.  I am also behind in this blog, supposed to have 52 by the end of August, so I'm way behind with that.  And so what?

Amaryllis bringing light

The year has had an awful start for so many people in the world.     

So, believing that we should eat, drink and be merry, to counter all the negativity around us, we were supposed to spend New Year in Madrid with my forever-friend Cindy, but I picked up a virus from a coughing child on the aeroplane coming back from England to Portugal, and you can't really be much fun when you feel like you've been run over by a bus and can't breathe very well either.  I really really looked after myself and went actually to bed for 5 days.  

I ended up coughing and wheezing for 25 days, but then gradually it all petered off and I DID get better.  I still feel like one of those TB patients in a home in the alps, sitting out in the sun with a blanket over my knees.  Fragile and a little weepy now and then. The older I become the more I am prone to these illnesses that drag on and on, it would seem.  

Foreverfriends

However, I managed to see Cindy in Sevilla, just before she flew back, just for one perfect amazing and wonderful day.  She is one of the best people in the world, I think, so warm and kind and interesting and deep.  I have been friends with her for 32 years, and even though we live on different continents now and don't see each other very often anymore, we do the proverbial picking up where we left off.  

What is it about friendships, what is the glue that joins two people so powerfully, such a connection that you know will last as long as you live?  I would have liked to stay with her for a week or more, to have all the conversations, to eat all the delicious food, to laugh and walk and wonder and understand everything together, two women who love each other. 

We managed to see the great Catedral de Santa Maria. which Cindy and her sister told me would (temporarily, probably) change my religious views!  

It is the most astonishing edifice.  It is the largest Gothic Cathedral in the world.  Of course it was first a mosque, built in the 1100's, during what is called here, on the Iberian Peninsula, "The Occupation", although it was a pretty long occupation of nearly 800 years!  

The Royal Chapel holds the remains of the city's conqueror, Ferdinand lll of Castile, his son and heir Alfonso the Wise, and their descendent, King Peter the Cruel.  How awful, to be remembered forever in historical documents as "The Cruel".  What a horrible person he must have been.  Also Christopher Columbus and his son are buried there, who were also horrible people.  I have no time for these relics, these nasty old men.  Where are the women buried, where are those who achieved wonders, the women artists and poets and makers?  

My lovely big strong sensitive dad.

Even though the world seems horrifying right now, I am so glad I was born in this time, in that place, where my dad believed in girls, in their great brains, their powers, their capability for anything, and pushed his daughters to read and learn and study, not just know how to do the washing and cooking and all those boring things which women all over the world mostly do.  Where he supported our independence, our agency, even our wild emotions.

This time where modern medicine assures my life, enables my lungs to breathe, removed the cancer from my breast,  gave me new lenses when I was going blind with cataracts.  

This time where I have an equal partnership with my husband, where we share cooking and cleaning and all those boring bits of life, as well as all the good stuff.  

Only one missing!

My daughters came over in January for 4 days, to say goodbye to their baby brother, (still their baby, at 32) who was leaving for Mexico.  It was the loveliest time.  I don't think I laugh with my children how I laugh with anyone else.  It's a deep laughter of my whole body and soul, sometimes it hurts we laugh so much, falling on the floor laughter!

I think what families (and friends ) do is to mend each other when we are broken, when we are hurt.  I think that is our purpose.  We weave our people whole, again and again.  

I wrote a poem about this, about Tim, it's called The Weaver, but I can't reproduce it here because there are some rude bits, the in and the out of it all.  

My lovely clever complicated
mother with her three children.

I am so glad to have all these weavers in my family.  I think it is in our blood, as my mother's last name was Webster.  And she taught me how.

The time it takes ...

I am sitting in the sun on the verandah of our house in the Algarve, which is still such a surprising thought, that we have a house in Portugal.  It is a wintry sun, lovely and warm and consoling.  The laptop is living up to its name, and sits comfortably on my lap as I type.  

I designed our new gate!

I love the sun, understand the ancient Egyptians completely, would celebrate the sungod Ra if believing in gods was something I did.  

I think I am like my gramps, who worshipped the garden, the trees.  He quoted this little poem by Dorothy Frances Gurney: 

"The kiss of the sun for pardon, 

The song of the birds for mirth, 

One is nearer god's heart in a garden, 

Than anywhere else on earth."

While granny went to church and played the organ there every Sunday, gramps refused to ever set foot in a church again, after surviving the Battle of the Somme.  Who would?  

A tree-god

I find gardens very soothing.  Whenever I feel sad in my life, the beach or the garden have always reassured me.  It's something about green and blue, all those elements that make up a person are mirrored in the Outside.  

Illustration for a book never published.

Our salty blood loves the ocean, our bones recognise their green nourishment in vegetable gardens.  Our little souls have such a need for roots, just like the trees have.  And sunshine lights our eyes, performs magic with our bodies as it does with every plant on earth.  

Hope Jahren in her book Labgirl, wrote this amazing paragraph about leaves: 

"The leaves of the world comprise countless billion elaborations of a single, simple machine designed for one job only – a job upon which hinges humankind. Leaves make sugar. Plants are the only things in the universe that can make sugar out of nonliving inorganic matter. All the sugar that you have ever eaten was first made within a leaf. Without a constant supply of glucose to your brain, you will die. Period. Under duress, your liver can make glucose out of protein or fat – but that protein or fat was originally constructed from a plant sugar within some other animal. It’s inescapable: at this very moment, within the synapses of your brain, leaves are fueling your thoughts of leaves. "

Which is an absolutely gobsmacking thought. 

Creating a cyanotype

A cyanotype of leaves.
Sunlight creating an image.

I was observing our resident Orange Orbweaver the other day, as she is extremely beautiful and has been in the same orange tree for 4 months now.  I read that they can live for two years!   

I was also checking on the little orange tree because it seems that pests are only interested in that tree for some reason.  There was mealybug a while back, and now there are aphids with their attendant ants, which are causing the shiny new leaves to curl up.  There are, however, some tiny buds, about the size of my pinkie-nail.  When we arrived in March we harvested several oranges over the next month or so.  I thought about how long it takes a tree to grow  these incredible fruit that we eat with relish, such a huge source of vitamin C, such juicy beauty. 

We take so much for granted, seeing the cornucopias of fruit and veggies set out in supermarkets and stalls whenever we need them, never thinking of the long green flow of life from the sun and the roots and the bees and the rain.   

nasturtiums

So much time it takes to grow things.  I have all these baby plants, small trees and climbers in pots, and every day I check on them all, and they reward me with new green sprouts, with flowers, nasturtiums bobbing in the wind, the honeysuckle settling down into its new spacious pot to climb and please all lovers of orange flowers, large and small. 

And Time itself such a strange construct, linear in my culture, circular in others, part of our systems of meaning.

 

Leafprint

When I was 43 I had four children, a husband, a domestic worker who was ill and whom we were trying to help, plus a full-time job writing and illustrating books for adult learners, and I was also studying for a Masters Degree in Education!  One Saturday afternoon Tim rushed me off to hospital because my heart was seemingly going mad, and I went through a barrage of tests for a frightening couple of days.  I had been fairly healthy as an adult, especially since the advent of steroid inhalers, and now I was going to die from heart failure?  

After a couple of days of worry it turned out that my heart was absolutely fine, and the doctor informed me that I was probably having panic attacks, not heart ones.  I had never imagined such a thing, that I would experience these strange things which had only recently been accepted as diagnoses.  Not just hysterical women being their usual weird selves.  And then of course it just kept happening.  It's so frightening when your physical body acts out your mental state.  

 A beloved tree in my old home.

One day after many such struggles, the same sweet doctor just quietly advised me to have a conversation with myself when my heart started racing and the madness of that panic began.  He suggested that I go outside into a quiet space and just talk myself out of it.  Tell myself I was ok, breathe, watch the birds.  This was perfect advice for someone who loved always to be outside!  

Little frog in our pond we built during lockdown.

So I learned quite quickly how to do that, and occasionally over the ensuing years I have had setbacks, but I know what to do, how to right myself.  I know to go into the garden, or walk on the beach, or just watch a flower for a while, breathe through my imperfect nose with its deviated septum, breathe into my lungs scarred by asthma and radiation, breathe the sweet air, set my roots into the earth, and let the panic drop away.  Take time.

Nasturtium paintings I did for three friends 
for the first group lunch after lockdown.  

Why crowds are not for me, but clouds are.

 Tim and Nick drove to Lisbon over the weekend to see Jacob Collier in concert at the Meo Arena.  He is the latest musical genius, plays all the instruments, including the audience, whom he converts into a giant choir.  

He is a phenomenon, and people are amazing by his "playing" the instrument that is the audience, 

The beauteous Cape Town City Hall

I was about 12 or 13 (more than fifty years ago) my dad and I went to a Symphony concert in Cape Town where they gave everyone at the door something to play a beat with, a wooden spatula, clappers, a paper cup to use as a drum, for example.  At a certain time of crescendo the members of the audience had to participate by tapping their little "instrument", which was so exhilarating!  Then the audience was divided into three and we were all taught a simple series of notes, and then suddenly we were all singing this beautiful harmony, the amazing sound rising to the magnificent high roof beams of the Cape Town City Hall!  My dad and I spoke about it years later, this astonishment of being a part of such a grand melody.  

The phenomenal Bobby McFerrin

McFerrin demonstrates this common human ability beautifully in a talk he gave at A World Science Festival event.  He gives an audience four notes of the pentatonic scale and everyone is intuitively able to grasp how it works On top of that, the audience just naturally knows how the scale continues, above and below the range he gives them. Bobby McFerrin says that this works with audiences anywhere in the world! Which surely speaks to a profound collective unconscious that all of us share.

If only crowds always worked in harmony to do good.

Nombulelo students at the school
where I taught.

When we had the twin babies in 1992, I had been teaching at a black school in Grahamstown for ten years, where I was a head of department. After my maternity leave my headmistress kindly arranged my timetable so that I had time to go home mid-morning to breastfeed the babies. I was happily driving our old VW bus down the hill towards the town, anticipating seeing and feeding my beloved little ones, when I saw a boy dressed in school uniform in the road, shouting and looking distressed. I slowed down, thinking something was wrong with him, only suddenly horrified to see him take careful aim and throw a massive rock straight at my car, and the look on his face was actually one of enraged hatred!

A VW bus like ours

With this terrifying realization, I drove on, but as I came around the corner, there were hundreds of school students streaming towards me, all armed with rocks, pelting me, mass manic hysteria! As rocks bombarded the car and broken glass showered over me, my mind went into self-protection mode, and I remember actually voicing to myself, in some little calm part of my head while everything went mad around me, "I have four children, I want to live! I have four children, I HAVE to live!" And so I put my foot down on that accelerator, scrunched down in my seat, ducking the missiles of rocks and glass, and drove through the crowd as fast as I could!

I just carried on driving, once I was through the mob, blood pouring from my face and hands, past the police station, not a thought to stop there! I just needed to get to Tim's office, where I half-fell out of the car, made my shocked way up the stairs, only to find he wasn't there! I sort of slid down the wall in one of those movie moments, and wailed. A very surprised man came out of the office next door, took one look at me and ran for Tim, who went into dealing with a crisis mode, put me back in the beaten-up car and took me to the doctor, where a nurse gently vacuumed glass shards from my hair and carefully extracted them from my hands. The doctor examined the iris of my left eye which had been scratched by a passing shard but would recover.

When Tim examined the car he found that the babys' car seats both held rocks, and every window in our family's sunshine yellow bus was smashed except for one tiny triangular side one. There were more than 20 rocks scattered all over inside the car, and it frankly looked as though a bomb had hit it. Amazingly I had survived!

The students who had stoned several cars, of which mine was the first, were from another school than the one I taught at. They had just attended a hearing in the town for one of their comrades and it had not gone well, so they took it out on the white people in their cars coming down the hill.

So this is why I couldn't go to the concert. I really am uncomfortable in crowds. Also some other experiences have reinforced my deep aversion. Like that mass hysteria in America which has just changed the future of the world forever.

My mother.

And so now I prefer clouds. I will concentrate on the beauty, Truth and Beauty, as Keats reminds us. I think of my mother when I gaze at beautiful clouds.

When I was 8 my mother took me to England for several months while she and my dad sorted out the future of their relationship. My brother went to boarding school and my sister was 21 and a nurse already, with her own little flat. It was such a strange time. I both flourished and declined. School was easy, everyone loved the little girl with the funny accent, and I won all the swimming races in the unevenly heated public pools, I had a little garden of my own, and there was the magical hypnotism of television, sometimes. (South Africa only got television when I had already left school, it was banned by the oppressive Nationalist Apartheid Regime.)

Me and my siblings last year in England.

But I longed for my dad, crying myself to sleep some nights, and I wanted my siblings, and my best friend Trish, and all the familiarity of home. After we had been in England about six months my dad gave my brother one of the newfangled AKAI tape recorders for his birthday. They were enormous things, with huge reels like film reels.

My brother immediately set about making a tape for us, so we would hear his voice and my sister's and my dad's. When we received it in the mail, we had to go to a store which sold tape recorders in order to listen to it. I remember my mum and I standing next to a demo tape recorder, in front of everyone, although we were oblivious to them, listening to the sweet voices of our beloveds. I remember being surprised to find our cheeks wet with tears.

Me and my dad.

The thing about England was that almost every day, it rained. While my little garden grew well with all that water, I really missed being outside constantly in my own country. I remember asking my mother, when I was absolutely frustrated with the weather, "Is the sky EVER blue here, like it is in South Africa? Just blue wide sky as far as the eye can see?"

Clouds with trees.

So she told me that we would go for a walk, and we went along a path and up a hill where there was a view, and we looked at the sky. The big wide sky, with scudding clouds. There were little blue bits, but mostly clouds. She told me to maybe think that clouds make a sky quite interesting, especially if you know what kind of clouds they are. And then proceeded to teach me the names of all the different clouds, which I still look at every day and name to myself.

Seascape with clouds

Homes and their people

Home. 

A bedroom on our travels.

 I am so lucky in that I have always had one.  (Well, there was a period of 18 months when we didn't have one at all, but still we always knew we could find shelter in many different places, so yes, still fortunate.  It amazes me how many people, besides your own family, will just take you in with open arms!)

My very young mum and dad, long
before I arrived.

My very old mum and dad, when they came to 
visit us in Boston, a few years before they died.

I also had really loving parents until I was 50 (my mum died) and 52 (my dad died).  More blessings.

Home for me is synonymous with family.  It takes up an important place in your mind when you are away from it, because it is your nest, your constant.  It has your own people, your own colours, your own bed, your own bathroom.  It is where you think and make and eat and talk and grow children.  A home keeps you warm and safe in the midst of thunder and lightning. 

When people travel they usually leave home to go somewhere else for a while.  Usually quite a short while, and then they return home again, glad to be back.  But when we traveled for nearly one and a half years we had sold our house and only had our suitcases and backpacks.  And after about a month we both really longed for home, a place which was no longer there.  

All the items I deemed necessary for our long long voyage.

We were going to travel for two years to find a new forever-home, but we realised that we needed one sooner than that, and, after searching quite a lot, we finally found one here in the warm Algarve, in Portugal, which reminds us very much of South Africa.  

This is my dream for our garden.  The house is
perfect right now but the garden is a large project.

Now I have a home again I barely want to leave it.  My face is full of smiles every time I enter the gate, walk up to the house, and come through the front door to all our colours, our beloved books and paintings, our place.

My first home was 10 Forest Drive, Pinelands.  Pinelands was created based on a "garden city" design, with five or six houses all backing on to a kind of spare plot that remained empty.  Our "field" was a wide meadow, to my small child's perception, with grass and wild flowers and tall tall pines.  We didn't have a fence so it seemed like a continuation of our garden.  I knew it so well, as only children can know a place, the shadows and sunshine, the trees' ancient presences, their bark, the caterpillars, and all the small creatures who lived there. 

My parents had been suddenly shocked by my mum's pregnancy with me, as she was quite old for those times to have a baby, (34, imagine!) and they had thought their family complete, a gorgeous girl and a beautiful boy.   So when they discovered another baby was about to join them, they knew they would never all fit in the little house they were in and decided to make a brave leap to a larger grander house with four bedrooms, which they moved into just before I was born.  My mum and dad lived there until I was 34, so they (and I as a child) had the same home telephone number until they died in their retirement home, having kept that number, which I phoned every Sunday after I moved out, until their deaths.    

10 Forest Drive from an applique wall hanging I 
made for my parents' 55th anniversary.

10 Forest Drive had a thatched roof and those strange faux-Tudor leaded-paned windows.  There were enormous prolific fruit trees, fig and guava, lemon, loquat, and mulberry (the bane of my mother's life as the starlings loved to eat the mulberries and then defecate purple inky stains on to her lovely white clean sheets hanging on the washing line drying in the sunshine!). My dad always had a little vegetable garden too, and we proudly ate his produce of mainly beans and potatoes.  There was a tall Silver-Oak, which was my friend, and I learned to climb this tree and sit reading or drawing for hours, high up.  I have always loved to be high up when something is not going so well, maybe I was once a bird.  

I went back about 20 years after I had left home and my parents no longer lived there, and the people who lived there kindly showed me around "their" house.  What had been a home with enormous rooms and space and light now seemed much smaller and more crowded.  And there was a house in our field!  And high walls with locked gates everywhere, which had been fences or nothing.  So no more dappled meadow.

My Lemon Tree painting in Casa Aveleira.

My Lemon Tree painting in 
90 Southern Ave.

When people move into a house or an apartment we move in all our "stuff", we put up pictures, our books line the bookshelves, our comfy sofas slot into their places, our beds are under the window so that the light plays on the wall as we wake to the dawn.  We make it ours.  But I always wonder who was there before me, because you hardly ever know, everything with the sale or rental of the property is done by intermediaries.  But does the home miss its people, is it happy to have new ones laughing, weeping, having sex, arguing, creating, washing, cleaning, eating?

Our apartment in Mexico City.

Moving around so much during our travels,  I always tried to make the impersonal apartments home-like, with one of my colourful sarongs as a cover at the end of the uncomfortable bed or sofa, or a little prism my granddaughter had given me, hanging up at each new window.  

We make maps in our heads, all through our lives.  I can walk through all the houses I have lived in, know what is under the desk in the ironing room where my brother used to do his homework, know the specific light reflected off our garden into the window of the kitchen in 16 Cross Street.   We have maps of all our towns, all the places we love, the rooms we stay in.  (Although the city maps may well become a lost knowledge to the new generations, the street maps indelibly etched in the brains of only earlier generations, because now there is GPS?)  

In Santerem, traveling.

You have so many maps in your head, and sometimes still you wake in the night and have no idea where you are.  You have to climb up with effort, from a very deep dark to know who you are, before you even have time to re-orient yourself, because you go on such faraway journeys in your dreams, don't you?  And gradually you find yourself, that Anne, the one who carries all her selves of 69 years in her head, in her heart.  And you are in your own bed, in your new country, where the sky is a dim line along the side of the darker window-blind, and the indistinct shapes of familiar furniture are all sleeping around you.  And your dear husband of 40 years is warmly and easily lining your body with his, his heavy arm softly across you.

Long-ago Childhood and the Joys of Water

Well it's happened again. Tim thoughtfully mentioned my blogspot on his Facebook account and they shut down the link. And meta owning both FB and Instagram (which was the biggest disappointment when it happened), the link doesn't work on my profile now either. What the actual? So now, if you are dedicated enough and really want to read my blogs, please type the link (in the old-fashioned way, one letter at a time) into your web-browser to get there. annebouwer.blogspot.com 

 I had quite an idyllic childhood, besides all the asthmatic episodes. (It is still incomprehensible to me that while I had such an comfortable childhood, there were children just a few kilometers away from my house where everything was very far from idyllic, and that I grew up with no idea whatsoever about them. Apartheid in South Africa was a very well-organised oppressive regime, and if you were a little kid going to an all-white school, living in an all-white suburb, reading highly censored text books and library books, and with no TV {the govt only allowed television to enter the country in 1976, less than 50 years ago. I was already at university when my parents got their first television set, and the programs were heavily censored and controlled until the 90's.} Growing up like that it was not likely you would know anything the govt didn't want you to know.)

Me with my dad and sibings.

I was the baby of my family, and although I was the apple of both parent's eyes, I had so much freedom, as most children did then. We were expected to look after ourselves and only go home if anything went wrong that we couldn't deal with, like someone broke an arm falling out of a tree, or fell horribly while performing a bicycle trick, or was trying to make the swing wrap around the top bar and lost hold and got dragged by the chain for a while. 

 While riding down a hill one day on the way to my friend's house when I was about nine years old, I was distracted by a set of twin toddlers playing on their front lawn (twins have always fascinated me). As I gazed at them I failed to notice the back of a small truck (we called them bakkies) parked on the side of the road, that I was rapidly accelerating towards. The next moment I found myself head over heels in the back of the bakkie, struggling to regain the breath which had been knocked out of me when I rode straight into the stationary vehicle and was somersaulted into the bed of the truck! When I had managed to get my lungs over their shock, I climbed carefully down, found my bike with its front wheel completely buckled, and hobbled the rest of the way (about 1 km) carrying the front of the bike and wheeling it on the back wheel. It was just another day in the independent life of Anne Radford. 

Another time when I was about six and walking to the shops to do an errand for my mother, a man kept on driving slowly past me and then stopping his car, opening the passenger door, and sitting there grinning at me, playing with his thumbs in his lap. I just kept walking, and he kept slowly passing me and doing the same thing. The third time it happened, I had a good look and it seemed as if he had a really big thumb! I arrived at the shops and bought the bread, or sugar, or whatever it was, walked back and casually told my dad what had happened. He became very irate, demanded from me the make and model of the car (I had no idea, it was just blue, I thought I remembered) and he then rushed off in his car and arrived back about half an hour later, shaking his head at my mother, giving me no explanation. 

 A few years later there was a man who exposed himself to all the schoolgirls in the subway which led from one side of the train station to the other, and which numerous schoolgirls who took the train, had to pass through on their way to our school. Mostly girls walked in groups, so the general reaction was to laugh at him, and he became known among my fellow pupils as "Wobbles" Some of us who didn't even take the train just went down there to have a look! 

 It happened to me so often as a young girl, men standing in lonely spots exposing their penises to me. What a strange thing to do! Apparently it is really common, ask any woman my age. We didn't see it as dangerous, because we were so ignorant, so protected, compared to the children of today, who know so much from movies and tv and youtube etc., including watching pornography by the age of 10 apparently, according to recent statistics mentioned in a Guardian article. 

 We knew so little about things like rape and violent murder and all those things which you gradually learn about as you become a teenager, and now which the information age puts so unfortunately, so very thoroughly into our heads every day. There is so much I would rather not know about, would love to forget. I can't watch violent movies because all that happens is so real to me, even though others tell me, "it's just tomato sauce!" or "It's only a movie". 

 But we were lucky indeed to grow up so innocent. The worst swearword we knew was "bloodyfuckinshit" which we thought was one word, having no concept of what any of it meant, except the"bloody" part!  We never dreamed of using it, only knew of it somehow from one of our older brothers,  We played long imaginary games, we read books, we drew pictures with all the art materials we desired, we went for walks, we stole sweets from the shops up the road, we travelled to school on the bus from the age of 6, we played hide and seek and climbed trees and stretched our limits and learned our capabilities and our gifts. 

When I was four I learned to swim in Kalk Bay Baths, man-made constructed tidal pools, which was very scary to begin with but another great endowment my parents gave me. (I believe it is as important as learning to read, and wonder why we lost the knack. After all most mammals can swim, excepting apes {I suppose there is the answer}, giraffes and hippos.) 

 

Dalebrook from above.  We would stand
on the seawall with the waves
breaking over us, to see who
could stand there the longest
without falling in !

Thereafter my love affair with water continued, and as a little girl I spent long days during the summer holidays and weekends with my parents and my best friend and her large family at the beach, usually Dalebrook, which is near Kalk Bay. They were the proverbial halcyon days, pure bliss, getting so cold from swimming for hours, and being warmed by some woman's arms, my mother's or my aunt's, rubbing me with a towel and handing me a plastic cup with sweet hot tea which they had brought in a flask. It is still the most delicious tea I have ever tasted. Then playing in the rock pools, watching all the creatures, little fish, crabs, limpets, anemones, periwinkles and even an octopus once or twice. And going home warm and sunburnt, lying in the back of my friend's station wagon next to her, the two happiest little girls ever. That station wagon took 3 or 4 adults and a whole bunch of childrn, all just piled in, no one had heard of seatbelts yet! 

 

Matt and Leo swimming a length underwater.

During this past summer Jess and her family stayed in a beautiful AirBnB nearby with an amazing swimming pool, and one day Matthew and Nicholas took the little ones on their backs and proceeded to swim a length underwater, to everyone's amazement, including the little boys'! 

 
To this day when I see a body of water, the ocean, a lake, I usually want to get into it and float and swim around a bit, be held in its arms. It is a desire that is maybe genetic, as my mother was like that and so are my children and grandchildren, four generations that I know of. Tim thinks I am secretly a selkie, as he does not share my love of water and the ocean.   When the granddaughters were small, every summer they would come to our house in Massachusetts.  It was near the beach, where we would go every day, and the five of us, my two daughters, the little granddaughters and me, called ourselves the Mermaids.  So perhaps Tim is right.

The selkie

 Every culture has myths about gods and goddesses of the lakes and oceans, and I love the one about Sedna, the Inuit myth, although it is really violent and cruel. Afew years ago I made an image of Sedna, triumphant over her disabilities!  I think if I had to choose some god or goddess to worship, it would be one of the water goddesses.

Sedna Triumphant