Day 59

Our family on George's Island, 16 June 2001

Today is 9 years since we arrived in America.  This was our first outing as a whole family on Jessica's 19th birthday, to the Boston Harbor Islands.  Emma had come to visit and Jess was about to leave for England for the last 6 months of her gap-year before beginning her studies at Rhodes University in 2002.  The boys would soon be 9 years old.  The photograph (the first of all 6 of us in America) was taken by another immigrant, a little old Chinese man with soft wrinkled cheeks and a shy smile.

Everything was new and foreign then and many things still are.  Amazing how years just flap off into the distant past so swiftly, like geese vanishing into the dark horizon.

I do love my new home, but still miss the land of my heart, the country of my soul.

I wish my daughters could be part of our lives in America, that is the very hardest part of living here.  I miss my friends with the same societal history, the same understanding of our shared difficult past in apartheid South Africa.  I miss our beautiful old stone home of many-coloured rooms and a blue swimming pool and an avocado tree at 16 Cross Street in Grahamstown, where friends were always just a walk around the corner, and you didn't have to make an appointment.  I miss my family, although only my sister is left in Cape Town now, as both my parents have died.  I miss the beautiful warm Indian Ocean with its constant waves. I miss the sunny weather and the light.

Today our oldest American friends came for lunch, and afterwards we went for a walk through my 'territory', I made them bundu-bash (pushing through thorny branches and clambering over stone walls at times, stepping over (and through) running streams), and showed them all the wonderful sights to be seen every day, as the seasons change, as the sap runs or thickens, as the meadow bursts into exuberant life and again is shrouded in a snowy-white blanket.

Last year in August we had a party to celebrate Tim's 50 years.  It was a wonderful celebration, with all four children making funny, touching speeches about what a good dad he has been, and with lovely messages sent from friends in South Africa and England.  For some weird reason all the photographs taken on that day have vanished into the ether, and this is the only one which remains of the six of us, taken by someone with Emma's camera.  That was the last time we were all together.  Tim looks a bit shell-shocked from all the attention!  This is the most recent picture of the 6 of us in America.