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.