And I wish I felt more connected. When I go out into the hot brilliant streets and se the oaks greening and smell sweel mauve alyssum, that intense honied fragrance, I want to come back to life.
But it is adjustment and can’t be rushed.
Sine I have been away, there have been changes in the small village in the mountains. A new pub has opened, calling itslf The Green Dragon and I think of the Welsh national flag and the hotel named The Green Dragon in Hereford. The latter a terrible place to stay with lumpy beds, mildewed sheets and shabby furnishings, from all accounts.
Then there is the new establishment to be called The Fat Lady, on the site of the Old Mill. Trepidation about the food because the previous owners served excellent pizzas.
And then there is Dagbreek, meaning ‘daybreak’ in Afrikaans. A television actress has bought the old Cape Dutch gabled house and is planning a club with theatre suppers and a cosy intimate atmosphere. She is anorectic and nobody holds out much hope for the food, although some look forward to months of sultry Piaf by candlelight.
But the main street has not changed, it still smells of hot tar and eucalyptus, the mountains swim in a noon haze and everything is very quiet and I walk down Kerkstraat trying to connect. I have left part of myself elsewhere, I am at a loss, I feel as if my energies have ebbed.
This will pass and I breathe in deeply as I walk past gardens filled with the honey-sweet fragrance of mauve alyssum. The sky is lead-white and boiling with sun. Here I am adrift in memory, in the rubble of my past again, and I take another breath, just to stay in the present moment.
Things have been much worse than this. And I have survived the unimaginable so many times. I look hard at the pink and deep red of the flowering raphiolepsis in my neighbour’s garden. I think about my own garden wrecked and neglected during myabsence and that old despair comes over me again.
I have loved untrustworthy people, I am myself untrustworthy. Just notice the moods, I say to myself, and let them pass. I don’t want to cry hot tears while walking down a village street at noon. Words like ‘bereft’ come to me and I shrug them off. It is not that bad. Other women have lived through this loss of love and come through.
There is the feeling of a deadend, a cul-de-sac, but it is only a feeling. Another neighbour, an elderly man in a felt hat, frowning, drives past in his battered pick-up truck and I wave to him. After the stroke he should not be driving.
Walking country roads. I have lived in South Africa, here in the Cape, for almost 30 years, longer than I lived in Kenya or Zimbabwe or Scotland. I am at home here and I understand the landscape and its people from within. For so long I thought of this place as home, worked hard at belonging, at deciphering the subtext of the continent.
Now I am no longer at home here, I am adrift. It is rather like finding myself tossed out to sea by the insouciant hand of a goddess, so that I might be carried elsewhere. Not an easy time and the waves aimless and eddying around me like a riptide.
But I need to trust the process. Something has shifted within me. I am a sojourner without a map or destination, a traveller crossing borders and frontiers and exploring the veiled places of the psyche. Neither here nor there. A time of walking between dream and reality, crossing back and forth. More will be revealed, I tell myself, and until then I am just treading water.
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