The Rearranging of Celestial Furniture

At this time of year, when the rains are here, our night skies can be spectacular. Big banks of cloud that have bulked all afternoon – so that we know the sun that bakes our backs as we walk the garden is the type that conjures storms – huddle on our horizons, bruised and brooding, like a sullen crowd that gathers menacingly, shoulders thrown, expressions darkly glowering.

I gaze heavenward, my palm shielding my eyes, ‘do you think it will come?’ I ask Mum, ‘the rain’. Mum squints up: I hope so, she says, it’s too warm.

Sometimes the sun wins out and dissolves the clouds away, stares them down with hot glares so that they skulk to some other lucky person’s horizons and by dusk my sky is peachy pink and eggshell blue and you’d never know there was ever the promise of glorious rain.

But some evenings the weighty congregation of clouds win out, they drop their black shoulders and storm the sun and push it clean from the sky. Their rough eviction is championed with applause that rumbles and growls and cracks loud bright whips to hurry it all on so that the night is illuminated with a thousand bolts of hot white light as it hurls itself to earth.

And I lie in bed and listen to the gathering pace of raindrops on my tin roof, like a featherlight dance of fairies at first, tiny feet that race above me and quickly gather weight and speed so that soon all I can hear is a roar, like a train, and I can smell Africa don her earthy scent in celebration as the blackness of my room burns neon with every flash and the rain pours down.

By dawn the sky is smokegrey, stilled, silent; the storm and her entourage with its victorious clapping and loud shouts and bright lights has ambled off to deliver her show elsewhere. I skip out across a wet lawn in my barefeet to inspect the rain gauge. Sometimes it will be almost full, others barely wet and then I will report to mum, over breakfast, ‘all blow, no go that Ma, just 5 mils’.

Yesterday she asked me, ‘what makes the thunder? is there something solid up there, it sounds as if something is being moved around’. I tell her, ‘the lightening, Mum, that’s what we can hear’. She looks doubtful.

And memories rush in. When I was little and storm-watched on the farm with dad, he taught me to count between lightening strike and thunder clap, ‘one … two … three’, the number of seconds that lapsed, he said, told you how near, or far, the strike had been. Sometimes in the Outpost there is no time at all, between one and the other, I have watched lightening strike trees, the electricity poles, the road directly in front of my car. I have heard it and seen it all at the same time, no ‘one … two … three’; no warning.

I think of Mum’s reasoning that something so loud must surely mean something more tangible than the lightening speed of electrons and I remember that when we were little, she told us that the crash of thunder was the sound of the gods rearranging their furniture and I imagined them, backs to a bulky wardrobe, shuffling it to a new corner.

Mum’s stroke means that her view of the world is sometimes a little off, except that at times I think her logic is spot on. That’s exactly what thunder sounds like: like something solid and heavy and concrete being hefted around above us.

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Come and Gone

Visitors come and visitors go and almost immediately it’s hard to believe they were here at all.

My sister C and her youngest arrived a week ago. And left yesterday. They travelled from their African Outpost to mine and the days rushed past in such a blur I cannot now remember what happened from one day to the next.

It was a joy to hear my small, too-quiet home ring with the sound of a child’s laughter, to watch K swim, to listen to her ceaseless chatter, to observe her, too-long -limbed, unbrushed hair, starfish sprawled on a bed rendered still and silent only because she had a book to hand. Immersed in some other far away world.

And I think of my Hat and how she filled all my Outpost days first time around. Ten years ago: I first arrived here ten years ago.

We walked on the dam, we ate too much ice-cream, we watched telly that made us laugh, we swam endlessly, we played cards and we teased Mum so that she responded in mock horror: ‘don’t give Gran another biscuit, she’s verging on the morbidly obese as it is’. K shrieks with mirth, my sister giggles at Mum’s expression. Precious, precious days of nothing and everything. Family touching hands, re-connection, brief, blessed. I want to distill these days, to bottle them as heavenly scent that I may pop the lid and inhale deeply whenever I need to feel less lonely.

And when they leave I am momentarily unhinged. A day of floating aimlessly. Until I can find my groove, where my head goes back down, my shoulder to the wheel and I get on with the business of Getting on with It.

Fat Africa

The southern Serengeti is fecund with life. Everything is fat: the wildebeest as they trail to and fro across these vast plains, so big you wonder that you don’t fall clean off the edge, honk and bleat and call. This is an ancient, circuitous route: each year a million of them meander across the savannah driven by primal instincts to eat, to breed. Almost all of the females are accompanied by a calf, pale newborns with black faces. They tumble to the ground on delivery and are up and racing almost immediately, such is the urgent life into which they are born.  We are always just too late to witness this extraordinary wild miracle of birth: the calf is getting to its feet, the afterbirth still evident.

The zebra are even more more fatbottomed than ever. The grazing here is plentiful, newgreen and tender. They eat, noses to the ground but rear pretty head up and skip skittish when they hear our vehicle, plump girls in a dance hall. Then from safer distance they regard us bashfully through long, long black lashes.

We come upon a male lion reclining in the shade. He is the most handsome specimen I have ever encountered, his eyes bright amber, his skin unmarked,  his mane thick and glossy and fully, L’Oreal Lion I think, because he’s worth it?

A little way off we encounter the youth, four plump males lolling, siesta still. They are so well fed – all those meandering wildebeest, heavy with life, all those zebra with their generous derrieres – they wear rolls around their middles. I have seen lion torn eared from fights over food, I have watched lioness savagely, hungrily, rip the last shreds from a carcass.  Here we find still born wildebeest still intact, not even the vultures are hungry enough to pick them apart.

Dung beetles roll their prizes – perfectly round brooding balls of dung, plentiful now on these well-fed plains – each pair busily tumbling so that when I pick them up in my hand I can feel the tiny might of their efforts in my palm. The females will lay their eggs inside.  The dung beetle is related to the scarab which the ancient Egyptians revered: the god Khepri renewed the sun every day before rolling it up above the horizon.

Our rising suns here are clouded in blankets of cloud which settle low on long horizons and deliver their bounty of rain each evening so that the greenness of this vast spreading place is topped up a little more. This is fat Africa, a place of such perfect balance that even in the harsh dealing of death to the weak and the slow, everything seems sated.

And we do too as we bounce the five hours home.