Day 75

The sun came out today!  Yay, drying things out a bit.  There are images in the paper of people with their washing machines floating in the basement, people canoeing along a street to their houses, people being evacuated from a house disintegrating into the water on the beach, people being rescued by firemen, cars in a parking lot up to their windows in floodwater!

Today was Teachers' Appreciation Day at  my school, so there were beautiful flowers on every windowsill and an amazing spread all day in the faculty room.  A huge variety of cheeses and breads and biscuits and Belgian chocolates and gorgeous things to drink and more delicious things to eat and a fine time was had by all our tastebuds!

I was excited for this day to go by because after school I went to the airport to pick up Stephen, our good friend from long ago, who now lives in Manchester, England.  He came here about three years ago and at that time I hadn't laid eyes on him him for 10 years!   It is sad that we can't live with all our best friends just around the corner.  Instead they are scattered here and there over the globe.  My heart is full, seeing him again.

I met Tim and Stephen more or less at the same time, in 1984, when we all taught together at Nombulelo, a township school in Grahamstown, South Africa.  They were both so lovely that they restored my faith in men. Some years later Stephen's girlfriend of 7 years broke up with him and he moved in with us for five years.  The three of us became inseparable friends.  I consider these my 'informative' years, where I learned about men and women and life and reality.  We found out later that many people thought that we were a 'ménage à trois'.

So my self-portrait tonight is a cut-out of the 5 of us who lived in that wonderful spacious old stone house,16 Cross Street in the late 1980's, where it was always sunny, and the blue swimming pool beckoned, strawberries grew in the garden, three cats and a mongrel dog were about, and the girls swung happily on swings made for them by Tim.

No, Nostalgia, that is not all, is it?  There were also hard times in that house,  political detention, interesting arguments, black clouds of worry, fear of the apartheid regime, court cases, where snails ate the strawberries, and rats took over the ceiling. 

And yes, Nostalgia, we are made up of all these things, the dark and the light, and we will choose to remember more of the blue sky coming in at the window, the good times around the kitchen table, the growth of knowledge and understanding, the invisible threads of affection that still bind us together.