Autumn.

Within days, the weather has turned.

Every morning I see with relief that the flamingos are still here. Their feathers have faded to a pale, pale pink. Yesterday, I saw two herons in the morning mist... CAN playing on the radio: She brings the Rain.

 

Two weeks ago, my mother fell off a step ladder and broke her wrist. In her efforts to save me from worrying, I only heard about it while she was waiting to go into surgery. Sleepless nights.
 

I went to fetch her from the clinic and we stopped by her place of work - a frail care facility. I met a man in his nineties who has emphysema. He is bedridden, but so gracious, with a twinkle in his eye. A lady in her nineties - sprightly, reading in the sun. Then, as we sat down for a cup of tea, a bearded man came racing down the hill in an electric wheelchair. Raised eyebrows from me to my mother: "Oh, he's Italian."

On my mother's dressing table there is a line of photographs. I see my father in dreams, but it has been a long time since I saw his smile, like that, straight at the lens. Flanking him, my sister on her wedding day and a much younger me, holding a favourite cat, it's limbs akimbo.

One afternoon, as I was driving back from set at high speed, I had to brake unexpectedly and felt myself losing control of the pick-up. No life events flashed before my eyes, just my voice in my head, saying not yet, not yet. And then the voice of my father saying don't break hard, stab and stab.

With a sense of great longing, I drove over the Salt River and past the bus stop with the handmade sign: Madiba is God.

The days fly by: on set we are surrounded by horses, Comanche braves and 1840's settlers with cellphones, skydivers with flapping parachutes. At night it all jumbles up in my dreams. Easter with egg-hunting and the fragrance of lamb and herbs, and damson plums with insides like beets or kidneys or hearts.