Day 31

Lots of love from my 7th and 8th grade classes today.  To tame children seems to be about the same as animals, you just feed them treats.  Some middle school classes have Art twice a week for the first semester, then the second semester is spent at Informatique/computer studies.  It is the end of the semester and so we had a party and watched a movie.   Such a happy thing to do, to eat chips and cookies and drink juice or milk and watch a funny movie, Galaxy Quest, in the middle of the day, at school. 

The 8th grade voted to watch What's Eating Gilbert Grape?, which is a very strange movie.  I had forgotten that there are mild sex scenes in this movie.  It is PG13, so should have been fine, but I was a little shocked by a couple of scenes, worried that they would be too explicit, although the students didn't seem fazed at all.  I suspect that they watch much more than what went on in this movie. 

A murder of crows.

Yesterday evening, driving home through Gloucester, I noticed all these crows making such a racket, coming in to roost in the trees, quietening down, then becoming annoyed at something and taking off vociferously again, wheeling in the darkening sky, tumult of black screeches, loud through the dimming day.

Crows have very small brains, bird-brains, but in fact the frontal cortex is very similar to that of humans, and they are now considered one of the most intelligent animals on earth.  All that cawing and cackling, as unpretty as it is, is actually language.  Scientists believe crows even have regional dialects.  These blue-black birds are telling important information to one another, which is even passed down to new generations.  In Chatham, Ontario, crows were using the area as a rest-stop on their migration path.  As it is mostly a place of farms, and crows are considered enemies of farmland, people began to get rather upset and decided to have a crow-hunt, to try to kill off at least half the population of an estimated 500 000.  They shot one crow, and the word spread so fast that there was only that one crow that died.  The vast population of crows just vanished, winged away, never to return.  Apparently they don't stop there anymore, and fly high enough so that bird-shot cannot reach them.

This is a fascinating seven-minute video about experiments determining the intelligence of crows which use tools. 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M52ZVtmPE9g

Crows are used as symbols for all kinds of things, often dark and sinister happenings, probably due to the fact that crows eat carrion, which would suggest something malevolent, especially to people long ago.  However, many nomadic cultures see the crow in a positive light.  Amongst several North American tribes the crow is the personification of the Supreme Being, organising the world and causing the winds to blow with every flap of its wings. 

The Scandinavian god Odin, the father of all the gods, and the ruler of Asgard, sat on a throne with two crows, Hugin and Munin, (Thought and Memory) and two wolves, Geri and Freki.  Odin lacked depth-perception, being one-eyed, and was also forgetful, apparently.  The two crows would fly over the whole world each day and then return to tell all their news to Odin, so that he would know and understand what was happening in the world of man.  The wild hunting wolves were providers of food and nourishment.  Some theorists believe that together, these five formed one whole, a fine amalgamation of nature and man, the ancient alliance.

Illustration from an 18th century Icelandic manuscript.

My third choice for my Desert Island Disc would be another Chopin, because Chopin is somehow part of my heart.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhnRIuGZ_dc  It is Ballad number 1, which is quite long, but beautiful just the same, and a very old recording of Horowitz, and that vast empty stage before the master enters is just such a thrill, even watched on a small laptop screen, and then the wizardry of those fingers, the muscle-memory, and the sound, even on little speakers, is huge, makes your heart beat more frantically, beautifully, in time with the magnificence. 

30

Home so late last night that I gave myself a break and slept in on my day off.  Walked a bit along the beach this afternoon, thinking what a cold bed the Canada geese were sleeping on in the river.  But I suppose they come from Canada, so they don't mind a bit of ice.

This morning a Blue jay sat in the rhododendron for ages, just checking things out, and a squirrel came and grabbed a branch and began to eat it.  At first I thought it was taking leaves for its drey, but it really looked as though it was sitting there munching away.  I had no idea squirrels ate rhododendrons.

When we lived in Winthrop I was sitting on the deck one day watching a fat carpenter bee flying in her wonderful physics-defying way, no doubt checking out the old boards to see if she could see a good place to bring out her tools and carve out her T-shaped nest. I knew it was a female because she had a black face, and only females work. (Carpenter bees and bumble bees don't actually defy the laws of physics.  When they calculated this myth, they used the example of an aeroplane, which has stiff rigid wings.  Clearly a carpenter bee has both flexible wings and body, and if it actually defied the laws of physics there would be all kinds of scientists working on this problem.)  Suddenly, quick as a very fast shadow, a squirrel leaped up on to the deck and snatched the ill-fated carpenter bee out of the air, put her in his mouth, and munched greedily, then gave my astonished face a quick look of satisfaction and left as abruptly as he had arrived.   

My mother had a pet squirrel when my dad met her, which apparently bit him!  Squirrels are super-intelligent, defying people's attempts to keep them off bird-feeders, working out strategies like famous chess-players, always one or two steps ahead of the human.  I'm not sure why they are sweeter than rats, because they are very similar, but I do like them much more than I like rats.
They are quick, sweet-faced acrobats.

We were camping in Maine once, walking through an old forest, when we noticed squirrels squabbling overhead, in the canopy, about 30 meters up.  Without warning, one came plummeting through the air and landed with a hard thump on the ground just in front of Nick.  We all thought it was dead and stood there staring at it for about a minute, until life slowly and unexpectedly materialized in the little body, and the feet got themselves together and all the important parts which make up an animal rearranged themselves until it was a fully functioning squirrel again, which wandered off looking just a little dazed, but terribly lucky. 

The second piece I would choose for my Desert Island Discs, is Clair de Lune, by Debussy.  This piece is still my nemesis, but I love to hear it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ip64cG7gK4  There is something about Debussy that I just can't get yet, the cross-rhythms, although this piece is still my ultimate goal. 

Day 29

The cold continues.  Up at dawn, although it's not dawn, it's pitch dark still.  There is a message from Matt that we can call him and so we excitedly do, immediately, but he is unable to talk, visiting l'Île de Gorée, the island off the coast of Dakar, which is actually one of the 19 communes d'arrondissement (districts) of Dakar, which everyone associates with slavery but which was not actually the main centre of the slave trade in Senegal. 

So we go to gym and run and pull and push until it is time to go home to get ready for school.  And I think of Matthew on the island, and about the romance of islands in the human mind.

So many stories about islands: deserted islands where Robinson Crusoe found Friday and perpetuated the colonial mentality towards the dark-skinned man, even though he had been a slave himself, and should have known better.

Desert Island Discs is a BBC radio programme that we would listen to from when I was a little girl, in which some celebrity is invited on the show and asked to choose 8 pieces of music (originally records), a book and a luxury item which they would take with them if they were cast away on a desert island.  The show has been going 71 years!  It began in 1942, during the war, when imagining a deserted peaceful island to which you could retire with your favourite music would have been a lovely dream indeed.

England is called a little island, although it's quite a big one really.  It is the "green and pleasant land" for which my grandmother longed, and my mother too, and so much a part of my culture.  When we learned to read it was from books set in England, where all the lambs were born in April and May, which seemed a bit strange to me, why were they being born in Autumn?  Wouldn't they get cold?

Islands close to the mainland have been used as prisons for centuries.  Perfect prisons because they are almost impossible to escape.  Alcatraz, in the San Francisco Bay, was a military base and then a prison for about 30 years.  Robben Island, in Table Bay, just a few miles from Cape Town, was used as a prison from the 17th century until 1996, and is of course the place where Nelson Mandela was held for many years. The Chatea d'If in the Mediterranean, is the most romantic of all in my mind, as it played a large part in the Alexandre Dumas story, The Count of Monte Christo, which we listened to on a record so many times that I almost knew the entire melodramatic production by heart. 

The Maldives, a country composed of an archipelago of about 1200 coral islands, is under grave threat from rising seas caused by global warming.  Mohamed Nasheed, the new president, has set as his goal the buying of land in India, Sri Lanka or Australia to create a new homeland where he can relocate his entire nation.  Most new leaders face huge problems, but this must be one of the worst, finding a new home for 300 000 people.

Male airport in the Maldives

 If I had to choose 8 discs for my desert island stay, the first one would be Chopin's Nocturne in E Minor. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JG2tc-knlUs

28th day

Rushed from the house to the car in the early black icy morning, 14F (-10C), drove through the dry cold, headlights and brake-lights illuminating the streets, until a smudge of blue on the otherwise milky horizon indicated the arrival of dawn and announced there would be a weak winter sun later. When I reached school, I grabbed my bags and ran from the car to my classroom, and that was all my exercise today!  Apart from a few up- and down-the-stairs.

I have recently read two books in a row where the main protagonists are eight-year-old girls.  The first one was Orphan Train, which describes the lives of two women separated by about seventy years.  Their stories both begin when they are eight years old, at a catastrophic turning point in their lives.  One loses both her parents in a fire, the other her father to a car crash.  The other one is A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, which I didn't actually finish because it was far too horrifying and sad.  It begins with the murder of the father of one of the main characters, another eight-year old girl, and details the awful terrifying living conditions for people during the Chechen wars.

The age of eight seems to be a kind of turning point for many children, whether or not they suffer something calamitous.  When I became an adult and thought about when I first knew there was no God, nor a Father Christmas, or when I realised what sadness was, or fear, the answer would always be, "When I was about eight."  My friend said that she had come to the conclusion that she was a lesbian when she was eight years old.  Eight is no longer a little kid, but not yet one of the big kids, definitely the age of a certain type of cognizance, a recognition of the state of being human.  

When I was eight my mother left my father, taking me to England with her, leaving my brother in boarding school and my father alone with the dog.  My sister was a nurse and had already left home.  It was quite lovely in England, I loved my little school and my garden and living with my friend Penelope, going on road-trips to Scotland, two mothers named Joan and their young daughters, laughing and exploring lochs and castles and museums, with the long road stretching ahead of them, running safely away.   

But the sky was never that azure blue of Cape Town, we didn't live anywhere near the ocean, and my dad, my DAD, my big strong rock of a DAD was not there with me.

I missed that big man with such a sharp misery sometimes, especially at night, as he had always been the one to read to me and put me to bed, although of course I had been reading to myself for years, but I still loved that nightly ritual.  He was so strong and would lift me and make me into the best acrobat in the whole world, twirling me about effortlessly.  I couldn't fall asleep without his kiss.  But mentioning him caused my mother pain and anger and so I learned very quickly not to ask about him.

Technology was very primitive, and if you wanted to phone internationally not only did it cost a small fortune, but you had to book a "trunk call" (which made me think of an elephant, of the phone line going along the trunks of elephants) a few hours in advance!  So it was rarely that I got to speak to him.  I guess there were phone calls between my mother and my father discussing the state of their marriage, but I was kept in the dark about all that.  In August we received a tape from my brother and my father and we had to go to a HiFi shop to play it, not owning a tape-recorder, which was a very new-fangled gadget then. 

 

We stood there awkwardly and when I heard my brother talking I felt a lump rising in my throat, and then my dad came on and I felt as though I was falling apart, and my face was suddenly wet and I had to sit down.  

Huge things happen to us when we are children over which we have no control.  We are quite helpless, dependent on adults for kindness, for love, for example.  And just so lucky if we have good adults around us, people who care. 

Soon we were travelling back across the seas on a passenger liner, seeing flying-fish, whales, the wide wide ocean and once, passing another big ship near the equator. 

And as eight-year-old girls are both natural and man-made I will end there, back with Table Mountain, at home in Cape Town, where my parents' mended marriage lasted 64 years in the end.

27

It is so difficult to get up early when it is still dark, and you are still so sad.
But we do it anyway, drive to the gym through the burgeoning light filling the snowy world.  And we do all the awful gym things, with strange torturous devices and belts to run on like hamsters.

Then to an eye appointment, where I discover that my eyes are really "remarkable" for my age. The lovely doctor who has been trying to cure my post-menopausal dry-eye condition for years now, looking down his long friendly nose at me, cheerfully encourages me to try yet another possible "cure".  But everything is explained, nothing is taken lightly, and he seems to have a prodigious memory for my ocular history. 

The eye is an incredibly complicated organ, and often used to illustrate irreducible complexity, the theory behind the strange idea of "intelligent design" being responsible for life as we know it, as opposed to the theory of evolution.  Irreducible complexity argues "that certain biological systems  are too complex to have evolved from simpler, or "less complete" predecessors, through natural selections acting upon a series of advantageous naturally occurring, chance mutations."  -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreducible_complexity

The eye in all its wonderful beauty.

The eye is one of the most important parts of our bodies, definitely the most important of the face.  The eyes are what we look at when we talk to someone, and all kinds of things travel through eyes: lies, love, cruelty, lust, fear, kindness, humour. 

In the family of my childhood everyone had blue or blue-green eyes.  My British gramp had the most astonishingly bright blue eyes, inherited by my dad and several of his grandchildren. I have one brown-eyed child, due to more brown alleles on a gene-pair from a chromosome donated by her father, who has brown eyes. Her eyes are not so much brown as greenish-hazel.  When she has been crying they are very green.

All my other children have blue eyes, carrying on the Radford/Webster line, descending from the Scandinavians, whose sky-blue eyes apparently originated from a single mutation in a gene called OCA2, which arose by chance somewhere around the coast of the Black Sea in one single individual, about 8,000 years ago, according to a Copenhagen-based team of researchers published in the journal Human Genetics.

The oddness of Europeans is a kind of genetic mystery.  Europeans are the only people who have blue eyes and many shades of hair-colour.  Everywhere else in the world people are dark-haired and dark-eyed.

Recent genetic testing on a well-preserved skeleton of a hunter-gatherer who lived 7,000 years ago revealed surprisingly that the man had blue eyes and dark skin, and was most closely genetically related to people in Sweden and Finland.  Before his genome was sequenced, using DNA from one of his teeth, it was believed that light skin happened a long time ago, shortly after Africans moved into the higher latitudes of Europe, about 45,000 years ago.  Now it seems that the lightening of skin has only appeared in the last 7,000 years.

Fascinating, how the lines continue, Luna has bright blue eyes, Ella beautiful hazel ones.  The water and the earth.

Matthew, Nicholas and Tim gave me a silver ring with three elephants on it for Christmas.  As I put it on each morning I think of the givers, and every time I notice it I am happy about the three men in my family.  And I am also glad that there are still amazing creatures like elephants in the world.

Day 26

Walked all around Logan Airport because we went to the wrong terminal with Matthew this morning, on his way to Dakar, Senegal, by way of Washington D.C., so had to trek excitedly to Terminal C from Terminal A and then sadly back again once we had said our goodbyes. 

I also did some acrobatics at Angelina's birthday party, leaping from a swinging rope into a pit filled with foam cubes, which was lovely, until I found myself flailing around to try to get out of them again, trying hard not to look like a grounded beetle desperately attempting to regain its balance and decorum, and failing miserably, and losing my socks in the process, if beetles wore socks.

The gorgeous Angelina and Tim after her party.

 Today is the eighth anniversary of my mother's death.  And I watch  Matthew walk off down the concourse through airport security as he leaves on a study-abroad programme to Senegal for four months. 

And so there is all this high emotion, phenotype inherited from my mother (and others of my kin, no doubt),  nurtured by her, exemplified by her.  The great passions, the depths of despair, the whole high-flying ecstatic tumult. 

Making for a difficult day, watching my son fly away, physically and metaphorically, embarking on a brilliant adventure, but still my chick, hard to lift my wing and let him launch himself to such a far away destination, but necessary, perfect.

My beautiful boys, still the chicks to my Mother Hen.

And remembering my mother, brief moments of memories, like photographs in an album: singing nursery rhymes together in the car, soft warm cuddles in her bed in the morning, bright flashing smile as I finish reading her a James Thurber story, eyes crinkling with humour.  Bringing a chameleon she had found in the garden, on her hand all the way upstairs to my sick-room, when I was about ten, with great distaste written on her face.  So that I realised at that very specific moment in my life, how much she loved me.  She was doing something so alien to her disposition, just for me, her very ill lover of chameleons.

My mother and my daughters.

My mother hanging out the white bed-sheets so that they smelled of sunshine when you slipped into them at night.  My mother crying softly at the window, tears running down her soft cheeks for the death of our ancient old dog, the end of an era.  My mother falling and breaking bones, sinking into a shocking depression.  My mother, maker of lace and beautiful knitted garments.  My mother having a loud and passionate argument with my father on the top of Mount Pilatus in Switzerland, boldly ignoring our hushing and the sideways glances of others.  My mother, complicated human being, filled with  love for all her many progeny.  My mother skinny-dipping late in life.  My mother being kind to people.  And unkind to people.  My mother breaking her hip and lying lost in a bed in a hospital, the hospital where I was born 50 years before.  My mother giving up to Death with his ugly sickle, who took longer than she had expected, teasing her with pain, with agony, as is his wont, making her suffer.  Eventually he claimed her weakened bones, and also her strong heart. 

So tonight I miss my mother with my whole aching being.  I miss my son.  I miss all my chicks and grand-chicks too. 

And I ask the winds of the grand Atlantic Ocean to waft my son safely to his destination, the city of Dakar in Senegal where he will learn so much.  

Twenty-five

I did all the normal exercises and then ran just over 2.5 km on the treadmill today at the gym.  I felt sick at the end of it all.  When we went out to the car, it felt positively balmy, as the temperature had gone up to -2C! 

Yesterday I wrote about how the technology of streaming movies made teaching so much easier.  For example, my friend who teaches Biology can find just about anything she needs to explain on YouTube.  And the little movies explaining photosynthesis or evolution are beautiful, succinct, and perfect for adolescents.  I begin many of my art projects using little movies about artists, or about the process we are attempting.

But it is also easy for kids to stream movies and shows with no parental control, so I have heard really young kids in my class discussing gory violent shows like Dexter and Breaking Bad, and really explicit ones like Girls.   And I know I am part of the much older generation now, but I worry about their souls.  I worry about both sexes getting their sex education from porn and shows like Girls, and being so desensitized by the violent shows so that they don't care about anything deeply, they don't feel.  That there is nothing mysterious or fascinatingly beautiful about the opposite sex by the time they are 14 or 15.  They have seen everything, they know everything.  But the good, the kind, the lovely parts are left out. 

My son told me not to worry, that it would all even out in the end, that every older generation believes that the younger generation is at some terrible risk of degradation, but that it seems to work out in the end.  And although I am very worldly-wise in my older age, I suppose I do come from a fairly ignorant generation, having gone to an all-girls school, and having grown up in South Africa with no television and few movies.  I was in my twenties before I realised, for example, that men get erections about every naked woman, not just the one they are with.

Cape Town in the 1960's

Turquoise is a beautiful stone, an exquisite colour.   Turquoise forms by the percolating of acidic aqueous solutions, and the blue comes from the oxidization of copper in the minerals.  There are many mines in the United States, and the Native Americans used it as jewelry a long time ago.

When I was a chaperone in Vietnam a couple of years ago we were sitting at breakfast one day in the Mekong Delta and I complimented one of the girls, noting how lovely she looked in her blue-green top, and she responded by commenting on how good I looked in my sky-blue sandals and matching earrings.  I said thank you very much, and then she suddenly astonished me by sprouting forth with a litany of things about me, how I wear my hair every day, what I wear around my neck, the colour of my nail-polish, ending with the fact that I always wear something turquoise to match my turquoise eyes!  I was caught unawares, as she went on to tell me how shocked I would really be to realise how much the students watch, and notice about their teachers in general. I was secretly delighted at what she had said, but it was so strange to think of them discussing me, being so much older than them.

Turquoise is also the colour of robins' eggs, and the earth seen from space.

Day 24

No running today, no walking outside during my lunchtime, even outdoor recess was cancelled due to the extreme cold. So my little 7th grade advisory came rushing in after a recess spent cooped up indoors, spilling over with pent-up energy. 

We are doing a long project on elephants, which will culminate in a big fundraiser for Save the Elephants.  At the moment I am showing them a movie about the attempts, over several years, of a ringmaster to find a home for his solitary African elephant, Flora.  It's called One Lucky Elephant, and as I set it up to stream from my Netflix account, which even remembers exactly where we stopped last time, I thought how much things have changed with regard to educational aids since I started teaching at a black school called Jongilanga (which means "Seeing the sun" in Xhosa), 25km outside East London, such a long time ago, 32 years!

Jongilanga was a community-built school, with crowded classrooms which had no ceilings or electricity.  When a big storm pulled in, the rain on the corrugated iron roof drowned out all talk, and the dark clouds made it too murky to see the printed page.  I taught standards 9 and 10 (grades 11 and 12) English as a Second Language, and the "setbooks" (texts) they had to study were Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles in grade 11 and Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare, in grade 12.  Really?  The most complicated English texts available for native English speakers, and you prescribe them for second language learners?  For children who lead the cattle out to graze each morning, who walk kilometers to school every day, who are so eager to learn, but whose first language is isiXhosa?

A rural community very similar to where my school was located.

Starting with Tess of the d'Urbervilles, I spent much of my time drawing pictures on the ancient chalkboard, of the smocks that the shepherds wore, the crooks they used for the sheep, every page had about 100 things they had no knowledge of, and I could see we would never even get through the first 50 pages, let alone study the entire book, at the slower-than-a-snail's pace we were going.

I didn't even own a tv myself, but I made a plan.   A farmer who lived about 3 or 4 kilometers away from the school agreed to let us use a large shed he had which he used to store cattle feed.  It had the required electrical outlets.  I hired the biggest tv I could find, those huge old ones shaped like a brick which took about 3 people to carry them, and a video machine.  I hired the two movies, Tess, the 1979 Roman Polanski version of Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and the 1968 Franco Zefferelli version of Romeo and Juliet.  Together these two movies total 5 hours and 40 minutes!
 
The plan was for the 11th grade to watch Tess and then go home, and then the 12th grade would come in and watch Romeo and Juliet.  On the arranged day, all one hundred and seventeen students walked the distance from school to Mr van der Westhuyzen's shed, where they crowded in excitedly, sitting on old newspapers and straw on the floor, and perching on the sacks of feed everywhere.  Such a flurry of anticipation!  They then proceeded to watch with rapt attention for the entire 6 hours!

Most of my students had never even seen a tv before, let alone a movie.  (Television had only arrived in South Africa in 1976, and relatively few of the general population owned one yet.)   The power of a visual story is so compelling, and the plots of both books so universal, that they were just enchanted. They suddenly understood why shepherds wore smocks, how Romeo killed Tybalt, recognised Angel Clare and sympathized with Tess in her predicament.  So that afterwards we could concentrate on the language, the way the story is set out, the circular plotline.

And all this happened a long long time ago, when I was heavily pregnant with my second child, who was born in the middle of the year, and whom I had to leave when she was only six weeks old to go back to school, where they were very kind to me, the only white member of staff, and arranged my timetable so that I would only have to work in the mornings, and be home to spend time with my babies all afternoon.

And at the end of the year there was the best pass-rate in English that the school had ever had.  And I was adopted into a Xhosa clan, and I was very proud. 

Icicles are the beautiful natural things for today.  It is too cold for icicles right now, but tomorrow there will be a slight thaw and I expect there will be some more.

Icicles in the sun

Apparently they can be very dangerous and in 2010, five people were killed and 150 injured in St Petersburg, Russia.  The terrible murderer in the book The Lovely Bones is finally dispatched by an icicle, which is so satisfying.

In South Africa, listening to the Joni Mitchell song Little Green with the line, "There'll be icicles, and birthday clothes, and sometimes.... there'll be sorrow", I had no idea of icicles, they were just pictures, strange shapes in my mind. And now they are real, one of the curious pleasures of winter, and they shine in the sun outside my window.

23rd day

-16C.  A cold 45 minute tramp through the woods, eyes streaming from the icy air, nose red, frozen mouth unable to form words by the time I get back.  But here are the slow ambling tracks of deer, the sweet calculated hopping of rabbits.  Leading up to a tree and then disappearing with a confident leap are the long-toed tracks of a squirrel.  I follow the delicate paw-prints of two or more coyotes, sometimes cantering, other times loping, and here the marks of a scuffle, and there is where fear was, and death, shown by the presence of urine and faeces and blood. 

In Mouse Meadow there are the over- and under-ground tracks of mice, voles and shrews.  I remember learning with amazement that shrews are the fiercest creatures in the world for their size.  I fished a lifeless little Elephant Shrew out of our swimming pool in South Africa once and when I examined it, noticed a faint expanding and contracting of its little lungs. So I sat on the grass and gently rubbed it dry, warming it in my hands, marvelling at the sensitive dainty ears with their gossamer fur, the delicate long legs with their tiny-toed feet, the elongated nose, the soft white underbelly. After a while its eyes opened, then seemed to focus, and in an instant it looked directly at my large face looming over it, and shrieked loudly (well, loudly for a shrew)!  I too screamed with fright and let it fall from my hands on to the grass where it ran off as fast as it could go (which is surprisingly fast).  They are mostly solitary creatures, and the females usually give birth to twins (I can identify with that), sometimes twice a year.  They have a long gestation period for a small mammal, two months, but the babies can do almost everything they need to after only a couple of days, just tinier versions of the tiny adults. 

It is strange how upset we get when things go wrong. Well, depending on our characters, some people get more rattled than others.  Tim, for example, rarely becomes unglued.  The other night I had a series of mishaps on the way to bed (and no, alcohol was not involved), knocked over my teacup (empty) when I got up off the couch, tripped up the stairs, forgot something downstairs and had to come all the way down again, then it all culminated in me placing the bottle of laundry detergent on the little bathroom table and missing, like a monocular person with no depth perception, so that the bottle, although made of plastic, shattered and proceeded to leak white goo all over the floor.  

 (If you were to think about the state of the world you would just want to die immediately, it is so awful.  There is constant war.  There is always torture.  Elephants will be extinct within 10 years if poaching is not stopped.  There is the horror of Human Trafficking.  There is the inconceivable practice of Female Genital Mutilation.  Every drop of ocean has plastic suspended in it.  There are terrible leaders of countries, there are horrible fathers, there are nasty mothers, there are cruel aunts, atrocious guardians.  The trees are being decimated, frogs have too many legs in the Chesapeake wetlands.  We live in a world where children can be merciless and sadistic, where there are eight stage of genocide, so that it can't be declared a genocide until the country has reached a certain level of atrocity, like a video game. 

But it is impossible.  We can't live like that.  We can't carry the awful world on our shoulders.  We can't focus on the bad, otherwise we couldn't live.  We have to 'always look on the bright side of life, da-da, da-da, da-da, da-da!")

 

Matthew was brushing his teeth and laughed at my discomfort, and so I ended up laughing too, and it struck me that it makes no sense to get your knickers in a knot about things going wrong, little things.  Because it is no surprise really, even ordinary life never runs smoothly, it is filled with spilled coffee and broken promises, little accidents and big disappointments.  And the reason why life is so bloody marvellous sometimes is because we have these setbacks with which to compare the wonderful.  And we must hang on to this, the cat's pyjamas, the hunky-dory, the extraordinary in the every day.  

Luna and her daddy

My boykies!

22

Snow Day today, and so I'm sitting on the sofa next to the woodstove, my favourite place in winter, when all the birds at the feeder take sudden startled wing after one of them yells "HAWK", and there is a thump at the window.  I get up to investigate and my heart sinks to see a little dark-eyed junco flattened in the snow just outside the door.  It is -14C outside plus wind-chill, so I reckon if it can't move it will probably die quite quickly.  I put on my winter coat and boots and go outside where it looks up at me in a sort of stunned but interested sort of way.  I pick it up and wrap it in a towel, take it quickly inside to the warmth and wait a while.  Gradually she starts to move around and then suddenly escapes, flying straight for the greenery in the jungle corner, where she perches, terrified.  I manage to catch her again and hold her carefully, like my Uncle Maynard, who kept racing pigeons, taught me long ago, index finger and middle finger making a sturdy necklaced embrace, the rest of my hand cupping the little trembling body.  She seems to have come to her eager senses, so I take her outside, but she flies only a little way and then flops down again into the snow.  I repeat the procedure of warming her up, except that she doesn't escape this time, and then, when she is avidly struggling, her little wild heart beating furiously, desperate for her own element, I take her out into the cold, walk her down to the wood-pile, scattering her friends and relations who hide out there, and she hops delicately off my hand into a hiding-place out of the wind, to recover herself fully.

 Later I go out to check on her and she has gone, and there is no body in the snow, so I am hopeful.  I could have put her in a box and kept her warm, fed her even, but if I was a bird, I would want to be free to live or die in my own world, not inside a house, with a horrifying giant gazing down at me.

On cold days like this one I feel like reneging on all my duties, and sitting in front of the fire and knitting, although I am not all that good at it, well, nothing like my mum.   My mother taught me to knit and sew when I was little.  She was a master (mistress?) of knitting and crocheting and lace-making and sewing.  We used to make all our Christmas and birthday presents by hand, funny little felt cases for hair-combs, which people used to carry around in their bags, apparently, and embroidered handkerchiefs, crocheted doilies and knitted belts.  It was companionable, sitting quietly together, my mother and grandmother working on something far more complicated, while we listened to a play on the radio, perhaps, or a record.  They would be there to help unpick bad sewing, or to maybe go back down to the dropped stitch in the knitting in some miraculous way, and somehow pick it up!  I have a distinct glowing memory of  the great sense of achievement I felt when I completed an article, and the beaming faces of my elders were the reward. 

We were part of a tradition going back to Egypt at the end of the first millenium A.D., although I was pretty shocked to learn that only men knitted, until the 17th century or so!  So we weren't part of the very old tradition.

sock from Egypt knitted from cotton

When Emma was small she had to learn to knit at school, but because she was left-handed it was a struggle to teach her.  So I taught Tim, who is also left-handed, and can do anything he sets his mind to, who then managed, with his usual infinite patience, to teach Emma.  An unwilling pupil, she finally completed the required knitted article with a great deal of cajoling and pushing and reminding and help, (a bit like going down the slide) and never knitted again, as far as I know.  No companionable quiet knitting for us.

Jess is more patient and learned to knit and sew and sit companionably, although she is an eager starter of knitting projects but does not always complete them.  I am a bit like that too, I started a jersey for Tim in Grahamstown in 1990, and finally unravelled the wool a few years ago, and now the resulting balls of crimson sit in my cupboard awaiting a new beginning.

Matthew decided to learn to knit, just because he could, and knitted himself the funniest bumpy uneven scarf.   There must be so many of these in the world, as scarves are the easiest things to complete.  Just straight to and fro and to and fro and voila, you have a scarf!  

I learned that I am better able to complete small things, because knitting a large article of clothing takes too long for my soul to manage, so woolen hats are perfect for me, and I can even do fair-isle designs like my mother used to, although she made us all exquisite jerseys and cardigans, which I have never managed.   A few Christmases ago, the last Christmas we were all together, I made us all warm hats, and thought how proud my mother and grandmother would have been of me.

This is one of those awkward family photographs, but the only one I have of all the hats.  For some inexplicable reason we are all crouching down behind the couch!  And Tim has no beard!

When I heard I was going to be a grandmother I began knitting, because that was what my mother always did.  I planned to make a blue elephant toy and a beautiful blanket of squares knitted in strips.  I eventually finished the little blanket for Luna when she was about six months old, and the blue elephant is still sitting in my knitting bag, a flat body and legs, with ears but no head.  And poor Ella, the second granddaughter, is still waiting.

Luna's blanket, with such poor ungrandmotherly stitching that I had to cover the seams with ribbons to hide it.

21 today

Walked the halls and stairs of school during Faculty Development Day, then the aisles of Whole Foods, where I shop very guiltily once a month due to the huge expense.  The other day my friend Mohamed and I were walking into Whole Foods to have lunch.  A huge poster greeted us at the door inviting us, "Come Join Us For ...(something, I didn't notice what).  Mohamed quipped, "You see that sign, it says, "Come Join Us for The Most Expensive Food in the World!"  It was his 50th birthday today, which made him thoughtful, but with only a few regrets.  It is amazing how reaching that half-century mark always seems a day of reckoning. 

I was the first one home, just before the snow began, and hauled my old sled filled with wood until all the storage spaces available near the woodstove were filled with dry, albeit slightly snowy firewood.

We have firewood delivered every year by a lovely woodsman who has his own woodlot and also cuts down trees for people when they are dangerous or dying.  He is also a conservationist so tries to use only trees which are going to be cut down anyway.  We go through 3 or 4 cord of wood each winter, to heat our house,  making fire from wood, as human beings have done since our ancestors the Neanderthals.   The way we do it is (hopefully) the least polluting, as wood stoves are constructed to minimise particulate emissions, and our stove only emits less than 4.1grams an hour.

Quest for Fire

There is an astonishing 1981 movie called Quest for Fire by Jean-Jacques Annaud, which takes place about 80 000 years ago and concerns the encounters of several tribes at different levels of development.  The main characters are part of a tribe which loses their little scrap of protected flame which they keep alive and use to restart larger fires each day, as they don't know how to make fire.  They set off on a quest to find another flame, coming into contact with other people along the way, and the movie shows how they grow and develop from these connections.

Tim and I thought it would be a great movie to show the boys when they were about nine or ten years old, one wintry snow-day, although we were soon rudely reminded that there are quite a few pretty shameless sex scenes not really suitable for young boys!  Tim had to sit with his finger on the remote, fast-forwarding at the inappropriate moments! 

After hauling firewood I made a fire and supper and worried about Matthew and Tim driving home separately in the now crazily blowing snow.

The IB is the International Baccalaureate, a system of schooling in 11th and 12th grades which is recognised by the universities and colleges of most countries of the world.  The IB aims to promote global citizenship and this year in 9th and 10th grade we are having a two-week period of global awareness classes, all subjects, science, art, French, history, all based on the theme of Water.  I suggested that our school connect with a school in an arid country, and then thought how South Africa would be perfect, and that we may be able to communicate with my old beloved Nombulelo in Grahamstown. 

Nombulelo Secondary School,  somewhat resembling a prison.

Nombulelo (We thank you) Secondary School was the school where I taught for ten years.  Ten turbulent years in South Africa's history, 1984 - 1993. A decade of terrible repression by the state during the state of Emergency, rioting, murders, detentions, and the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990.  It is the decade which made me who I am.  During apartheid each race had its own schools, and the least money was spent on black schools and students.  For some reason Nombulelo was built as a new model school, opening its doors one year before I joined the staff.  Each morning began with assembly, the combined voices of more than a thousand students singing the Lord's Prayer in Xhosa, Bawo wethu osezulwini, very beautiful.  Nombulelo is the school where I taught, but where I learned more.

20

Early this morning, dark outside.  I got my breakfast and through the windows it was suddenly dusky pink, dense winter branches in silhouette, softly glowing sky.  Then off to gym where I exercised all my muscles, then ran 1.4 miles (2.25km). 

On the way home I spotted a hawk in a tree over Bothways Farm pond, so rushed home for Tim's long lens and slithered and slid back down the icy hill and around the corner, where I smiled to find it patiently waiting for me. 

Wallpaper: Hawk and visitor

Still too far away really, but beautiful to see, the red-tailed hawk.  Even though they are the most common bird of prey in North America I am still thrilled every time I see one.

We have occasionally had them attacking birds at the bird-feeder and once when I returned from a conference I was pleased and surprised that Tim had maintained the seed in the bird-feeder.  I thanked him but he guiltily revealed that he had had an ulterior motive.  He had seen a hawk in the area and had been hoping to lure it by feeding its potential prey! 

And that is part of their fascination for us, aside from their aerodynamic perfection, their prodigious wingspan, it is that they deal swift termination, these beautiful raptors, death in their talons, pure purpose in the eye.  And although I feel sorry for the little vole, or mouse, or dark-eyed junco which meets a violent bloody death, a few of them who are many, are worth the survival of these magnificent creatures at the top of the chain.

This is the photograph I would have liked to have taken!

My other resolution was to really become proficient at music theory.  I learned quite a lot when I was a child, but we learned the British version, whose basic notes are the romantic sounding breves, semi-breves, minims and crotchets.   The American system uses the much simpler and easier to understand whole notes, half notes, quarter-notes, etc.  Which seems ironic in a way, because America still insists on using the ridiculously antiquated English Imperial measuring system instead of the simpler metric one.

It is like learning another language, filled with strange names and symbols. Did you know that there are things called Diatonic Modal Chords?  And that modes come in seven forms: Lydian, Ionian, Mixolydian, Dorian, Aeolian, Phrygian and Locrian?

This is frighteningly incomprehensible to me, and luckily it is quite far into the book, where I have not yet travelled.  Hopefully by the time I get there I will be accomplished enough to decipher this befuddlement.

I am still at the clapping and counting phase, drawing rests and time signatures and whatnot.  Some of it is so difficult, and then all at once it will make sense, like finding a puzzle piece which suddenly fits.  So I struggle, from sudden bursts of sense through bogs of foggy quicksand, on to the welcome light-bursts of more sense.

I am hoping that I will have a better understanding of the music that I play, and that it will enhance my interpretation and expression, so that the notes from my fingers will unfurl like colourful soundwaves into the room, wafting into the ears of the listeners, floating, enchanting... 

19th day

A lovely cold walk on Singing Beach today.  So strange to walk at the shore without a dog in attendance. Singing Beach, a short drive from our house, is a beautiful sandy cove flanked by mansions, where many dogs are walked in the winter. 

Strange vortex on our way back.

It gets its name from the sand which sings, or squeaks rather, when you walk on it.  Apparently this phenomenon is not entirely understood, but it is thought that it takes place when the sand is made primarily of quartz and when the actual grains of sand are all uniformly spherical.  It's a beautiful name, much prettier than Squeaking Beach.  When we went to Prince Edward Island two summers ago, on the eastern point of the island we came across the same squeaking sand phenomenon, and the beach is called Souris, a perfect name, the Mouse.

The biggest dog on the beach, Max, a mastiff, the size of a small pony.

The smallest dog on the beach, with a miniature ball.

Tim had been taking these photographs of all the dogs, when we met a couple with whom we are acquainted, whom we haven't seen for a long time.  We were standing chatting with them when the mastiff, who was lolloping about with another dog, ploughed into our friend who screamed with pain and exclaimed that the dog had broken her leg.  But after a couple of minutes she was fine, and the owner of Max was, I expect, very relieved.  There would have been a lot of litigation, this being America.  

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
I discovered audiobooks a couple of years ago with a great deal of excitement because they contribute to the ultimate in multi-tasking.  You can read a book while driving a car to school, you can paint a picture and listen to a novel at the same time, you can do the tedious washing-up while you are far away inside a story.  

The Goldfinch (Het Putterje) by Carel Fabritius 1654

 I have been dipping in and out of the world of The Goldfinch for quite a while and finished it today while folding the washing.  It is 32 hours long, beautifully read, and with a wonderfully wrought young protagonist, Theo Decker.  I am always impressed by authors who write as the opposite sex in such a seamless, believable fashion. 

This little painting survived a gunpowder explosion which killed Fabritius at the age of 32, and destroyed most of his work.  It is a very sad painting, when you notice the thin chain which keeps the bird a prisoner, but the little finch still stands there as itself, the viewer feels the personality of the tiny creature, the delicate beauty of the yellow stripe in the feathered wing, the knowing eye.  The book is about many things, friendship, catastrophe, how the lives of the rich are so far removed from those of the general public.  But it is mainly about Art, and how all the sentiments and experience contained in a work of art come down to us through the centuries, and by appreciating the artwork, by loving it, being enthralled by it, we all become part of that enormous human sensibility, we are richer for loving and appreciating that beauty. 

Day 18

I ran 3.5km today, in the cold and pouring rain which turned to sleet and then into huge snowflakes the size of potato chips! 

Some days we wake up to a whole empty Saturday, and lie in bed planning the day.  This morning Tim asked, "What is your heart's desire for today?"  My heart's desire was to have lunch with my daughters and granddaughters.  When I asked him his, he said, "to go back to the time before we came to America."  I thought he meant that we shouldn't have moved countries, but he said no, it was so that we could have come earlier and understood the restrictions and had time to organise for the girls to have come with us. Wishes.

When I was little I attended a school modelled on British schools, and we had to learn pages of interesting things which children don't have to learn anymore, like collective nouns and proverbs.  In grade 3, which was called Standard 1 then, we were tested on proverbs one day by having to "fill in the blank".  I got them all right except for one, "If wishes were horses, ....", for which I wrote, "...then beggars would fly".  Which made perfect sense in my head, because I saw Pegasus, the winged horse, when I read that line. And wishes were thoughts that flew through the air, not really connecting with anything real, in my experience.  I had wished for many things not to happen which had just gone right on happening, despite my fervent hopes. 

Anyway, the day's plans were laid and halfway through the day they changed, as plans tend to do, and instead there were friends and a movie and dinner at a restaurant, which is always a treat, as the older I get, the more I dislike cooking.  Tim and I both long for a wife who loves cooking!  When I think that I only have about 20 years left of my life I really want to spend the least time possible in the kitchen.  I have cooked so many many meals for seeming armies of people, friends and relatives and children and children's friends and I've just had enough now.  I am happy for my lunch to be a plate of steamed brussel's sprouts, quick, easy and delicious, to the horror of my family. 

Of course, like anyone else, I love food, but cooking has always seemed such a terrible waste of time.  You spend hours preparing a meal that is gobbled down in about 20 minutes, nothing left!  Yes, it is lovely to eat, and to sit chatting at the table with wonderful scents and sensations as the food is appreciated and devoured, I am just tired of being the architect of that endeavour. 

Day 17

On playground duty today I walked around watching all the kids running about on the soccer field, others climbing the enormously tall climbing frame, and a little group of girls playing a made-up game which involved balancing precariously, legs far apart, on the wooden frame of the steps up to the slide, and leaping off to try and beat the line, scratched in the sand, of the best jumper.  I think it is a game which would have been stopped by any other teacher, but I am not that teacher.  They lined up patiently without anyone telling them to, and then when it was their turn, strove with their entire young bodies to spring off as high as possible, like pronking skinny young deer, ponytails bouncing and hair shining in the sunlight, joyful shouting laughter.

A girls' playground in Ohio a long time ago.

A British school playground

Hopscotch, a universal game

I remember the kind of dangerous excitement of going to the playground in Pinelands, we used to edge into it on our bikes on the way to somewhere else, slightly uncomfortable.  We would rush for the swings, swinging higher and higher, daring each other,  then, tiring suddenly of them, we would climb the steep and endless thin metal stairs of the high slide, shrieking inwardly as we let go of our hands to sweep down and land balanced on our two feet.  It was not "cool" to shout with excitement, or to fall on your bum at the bottom!  And then we were off again, never staying very long because it was a strange place, quite dark and foreboding, very secluded, tall pines everywhere, and there were sometimes teenagers behaving badly, smoking and swearing, scaring us.  And we were not actually supposed to go there, I can't remember why, but I seem to remember that it was a vaguely forbidden spot.

When I was nine months pregnant with Jess, my heaviest baby, (really heavy) who also made her entrance two weeks late, I was for some reason in a playground in East London with little Emma, nearly three.  She was very brave until she got right up on to the tall platform before the slide, but once she realized how she had to descend, where I was waiting, huge tummy and all, to catch her, she lost her nerve and refused to come down on the slide or by going back and using the steps.  After half an hour of cajoling, bribery, shouting, pleading, talking to both reasonably and unreasonably, I was forced to clamber up something like a rope-ladder looking like a clumsy fat penguin, in order to rescue her.  Once I had hefted myself up there I decided that the easiest way down was the slide, which we took, both shrieking with laughter and fear, a bountiful-bellied woman clutching her crazy white-blonde daughter to her, and then running the gamut of disapproving faces as we waddled back to the car.

Absence is hard to bear some days.  It is the nature of life and death, of course, and also our global society, but the acceptance of that fact doesn't make it any easier.  So here are my two little daughters who are now grown and far away with daughters of their own, but I have been writing about their smaller selves and feeling nostalgic for those little cherubs, so full of vivacious energy and dancing delight.