Day 339

Sunlight painting the tops of the trees yesterday evening.

A hard slog today, trudge-jogging up that long steep hill nearly did me in, took me the entire meadow-circuit to recover each time!   A pathetic 3.77 km at 7.57 minutes per km.  Everything bleak, brown and black and bare.  And my soul reflecting all this.

This is a very singy (yes, I just made that word up, nice, isn't it?) time of year.  I have been to three concerts by Nick's a cappella group in the last four days!  Perhaps people always sang a lot to keep their energy and spirits up in the cold grip of winter! 

The a cappella group does an inspired rendition of Fa la la la la (Deck the Halls), which is very funny, with the boys in the group doing their own interpretive dance-walks in a circle around the girls, all the time singing "Fa la la la la la etc. at the tops of their lungs, then ending with each kid holding their hands together in front of them in that very formal singing pose. 





I remember when I was little, going to the Carol Service at my sister's school, where she sang in the choir.  It was an annual event which took place outside in the courtyard, everyone standing on the balconies to watch them, all the girls in their white dresses, or maybe it was their school uniforms, but I seem to remember all those angelic voices coming from a sea of white.  It was always beautiful weather, warm and still, with the last birds doing silent loops and twirls in the sky above, and probably towards the end of the evening, little bats flitting about, along with the stars slow flickering to light, and a scent of jasmine, and everyone hushed by the chorus of perfect sopranos and altos raising their pure voices, the old familiar melodies floating into the air all around us, trailing off into the deepening blue of that South African sky.

And years later I joined that same choir, and proudly took my place on those tiered benches in the alto section.  In 11th grade I carelessly missed two practices, which meant you were instantly expelled from the choir.  I didn't care about much at school by that time, but this one thing I treasured and so I grovelled (something which was in every other aspect of my life completely foreign to me) in front of the very strict, extremely dignified choir teacher, Miss Dosé, the same one who had taught my sister, who eventually gave me another chance, for which I was eternally grateful and respectful.  I remember that she thought about it for a endless moment, giving me one of those long meaningful looks which seem to touch your soul somehow, communicating an understanding, a knowledge of me, of the good person she could see inside the rebellious teenager, and I never let her down again.

Tonight an etching of Faun Bar, the view from our first house here in America, beautiful ocean, wonderful hill with places for boys to make forts, sycamore maples for birds, an Atlantic that warmed up enough for our family to swim in the hot summer that did eventually arrive!  But the big drawback: ugly aeroplanes taking off or coming in to land every few minutes, so close on occasion that we could almost put out our hands and touch them from the deck!