On the road.

It took some time to exchange the familiar
for the unfamiliar.

In the shadowy dips of Sir Lowry's pass there was thick hoarfrost on the bushes. Then, in the marshy, sunlit parts, steam rose and turned the world prehistoric.

We flashed past ostriches and sheep exhaling white puffs of air, speechless.

We crossed a river called the Maandagsout. Monday Salt.

Sleepy towns like Bonnievale, where people live without fences and sit in the sun of an afternoon. The mountains around Ashton were covered in snow. It made me long for things in my grandmother's kitchen, things that I hadn't seen since I was a child.

(via Bidorbuy)

Autumn has stripped the trees of their leaves, although in Tradouw, some of the fruit trees still hang in bright yellow tatters. There are things that I knew once, but have forgotten. How I love the smell of a dusty road. How aloes in all of their glory make my heart catch.

There are many places in the Karoo where once there was human life and now there is none. A railway station with a peeling sign: Vondeling.

"Foundling"

This is what you see as you descend into the valley of the small town called Nieu Bethesda.

We camped in a small padlocked paddock, surrounded by a herd of very vocal sheep. Like humans, determined by gender and age, they have different voices. They express surprise, fright and resignation. 

They call out and they answer.

This I never knew.

We pitched our tent under a big willow tree. The milky way was very bright, and there was a thin sliver of a moon - a short fingernail clipping of a moon.

I woke in the night and the wind in the willow

sounded like rain.

When you walk through the quiet streets, there are clues that lead you to the Owl House.

But that house, and the lady who built it, deserve a story of their own.

The best laid plans.

The night before we were to leave:

New batteries in Maglite.

Swiss Army knife honed.

Wooly socks all in a row.

Camera battery charged... lens error.

In it's eagerness, it hums and beeps and won't retract.

I wish for a life more organic. For machinery that is self healing. After a smear of something, a kind word, some rest, all is well again. Or for the days when machinery was simpler. The days when our gardener, Samuel, kept the lawn mower going with a piece of wire.

When spit was an ingredient that worked.

When pantyhose could stand in for a fan belt.

A time when enterprising men made cameras out of cardboard and cotton reels.

Photograph via http://www.messynessychic.com

Sometimes it only takes one small thing to unzipper the teeth of God. Take my good friend Mr Owl's fishing trip. Everything was going swimmingly until the starboard motor's throttle broke. As they drifted, Mr Owl and his friend heard the other fishermen bragging about their wonderful catches.

They finally made it back to shore, only to find a baboon in the front seat of the car, eating their lunch. Mr Owl's friend grabbed a stick to hit the baboon. The baboon got such a big fright that he shat all over the seat. The stick shattered without maiming anyone - it was riddled with fire ants. And so Mr Owl and his friend sat in rush hour traffic, itching and scratching. No fish for the pan.

Snow-blind.

Photograph by Bianca Haarhoff, via WhatsUpCapeTown.

I can't believe, that while I was out carousing on the southern peninsula yesterday, this is what was happening in town...

Sure, we had thunder and lightning, hail big as peas. But no snow!

Snow in Africa is confined to far away blue mountain tops, not cities. Double glazing is unheard of, central heating, insulation - what is that? We shiver through two coldish months of winter and that's it.

I remember years ago arriving in small town Canada and being terribly disappointed that there was no snow. So much so, that by the time it fell, the check-out lady at the small supermarket said to me: "So you got your snow dear!" I didn't know her from a bar of soap.

In Germany I once woke the entire household

to alert them:

"It's snowing - it's snowing!!!"

They were pretty decent about it, but immediately went back to bed after a few hmms and ahs.

I stood at the window for a long time, watching it drift down. Because snow is magic.

Photograph by Nicole Attridge, via WhatsUpCapeTown.

I live a short ten minutes walk up this road, to the right. Back in the city today, it's nippy out, but all that remains is a shiny wet broth.

The world in my pocket.

On Skype, I talk to a man in Berlin. His other phone rings and, through layers of static, I hear the voice of Miss Sunshine. I pulled a string and now two beloved strangers will meet and talk.

My oldest friend in the world sends me a message from Istanbul: Sitting next to the Grand Bazaar, eating stuffed peppers. I send him to the Arasta Bazaar to buy towels from Antakya.

He sends me pictures of the food he's eating. He knows me well.

In my dropbox I find pictures of a house near the sea. Find furniture please!

I make a mood board on Pinterest. Somewhere in America, someone likes this shelf and re-pins it.

I peek into houses in Dubrovnik and Barcelona for a place to rest my head. Some day.

I see babies turn into children, without ever hearing their voices. Instantly, birthday wishes fly across oceans and continents.

Also in my pocket today: 1068 photographs, at the swipe of a fingertip.

Flotsam and jetsam. Breakfasts and coffees. The clutch of ostrich eggs we found in the dunes, long forgotten and spotted with lichen. Discarded gloves and shoes. Little Miss Sunshine sniffing the camomile lawn. A porcupine skull resting near a thick pelt of quills. shells of ears and megapixels of skin. Rope, feldsalat, flowers, autumn leaves, fingers of light, juicy fruit, scissors, chickens, parrots, snakes, maps, cotton reels, a stuffed giraffe, cracked earth and four eggs in a pan.

Your knee bone connected to your thigh bone.

My fear of needles stems from early childhood. One of the doctors at my father's small town practice used to chase the children with syringes. As a joke. I took it so seriously that I refused to go in and would sit in the car, waiting for my mother. She'd leave Springbok Radio playing, and so began a life-long love affair with music.

I convinced myself that I could never bear to have acupuncture - that house in Plumstead filled with human pincushions, the doctor who spoke no English. But perhaps I was just waiting for the right person. This calm, compassionate man, who can tell, from taking my right pulse and then my left, from the set of my shoulders, that my stress levels are down. Then he says: "But your heart has nervous energy - what's up?"

I lie there in the half light, with ten fine needles in my body while he is at his desk, working on his notes. Behind closed eyelids I see bursts of colour and try to imagine the messages flitting furiously from muscle to brain and back again. And I wonder what it must feel like to live without fear.

There has been a spate of burglaries at the apartments where I live. Someone bypassing a security code, the violent tearing open of gates and doors. Every little sound makes me jump.

The letting agents are astounding in their apathy. (Steer & Company - you suck!)

This is what people say to me, over and over again: TRUST NO-ONE.

I hate that.

It's a major kick under the butt and time for change. While I decide what to do, I Spring Clean.

And take a few days off, away from the big, bad city.

To the magical place where the doors have no keys. We find fragments of other lives. A rusted fork, ancient little bottles. The houses are mostly empty, waiting.

If, instead of words, I could have a photograph as epitaph - this would be it:

In the hour preceding, we took the yellow kayak and paddled out onto the lagoon. Surrounded by flamingos and their chatty honking: they flew up and circled around us, the sound of their wings like the rustling of many taffeta skirts.

The Beekeeper's Cottage.

 

A strange and charming little house
beneath giant oak trees.

The door was open and I walked in, standing for a moment to get accustomed to the half light. Packed full of old beehive frames, the intense fragrance of honey. Dessicated bees crunching underfoot.

We transformed it for a few days into an 1840's German tavern. Both beekeepers were amazed by the process and often popped in to chat. A hard profession, they said, to be a beekeeper.

But they were of such an even keel, with their twinkly blue eyes and grey hair, that I felt calmer after speaking to them.
 

It's been a project of ups and downs and dubious politics. I have become aware, more than ever before, of the different energy we each possess, and how powerful it is.

I'm feeling depleted. There are big decisions to be made. But all I want to do for now is lie in bed and read a book.

Bossieskraal.

It has been many years since I stayed in a house next to the sea. A house with no key, a house with an outhouse. Where, if you need water, you take a bucket to the well.
A house with no plug points, no electrical hum.

When last did you walk on a beach for a day, without seeing another soul?

We walked the marshes and he found this clue:

Around the bend, there they were, those flamingos.

By the end of the day I had handfuls of feathers.

There is samphire, I think. And the husks of hundreds of small, bone-coloured crabs.

A house settles gently into decay. The cement contains not just sand, but shells and pieces of purple coral.

In the mornings, you open the kitchen door, and they are there, waiting for breakfast.

A place that can wipe away fear.

The city has made me so cautious.

Triage.

On our breaks, at the breakfast table, we talk about leaving the film industry, of what we'd do. Many of us dream of other things. But there are moments and there are people... they happen when you least expect it and make it all worthwhile.

The other morning just before daybreak, I got a lift with the props people on the back of a Land Cruiser. Sitting there in the crisp, cold air between the muskets and the hides and the arrows and the quivers. Up the winding mountain road, horses galloping ahead of us and horses behind. There's a row of pine trees where the lane is very narrow, so you brush against them and the smell stays with you. It brings back memories of good things.

Or waiting for the rain to let up and someone plays a song. We're stamping our feet anyway, because it's cold, so we end up dancing and laughing for a while, in a small tipi, on a mountain, at seven in the morning.  Thando...

At night I dream I'm being followed.

But, four more sets to go and then some time off.

A road trip. Open spaces, clouds and sheep.

Karoo my love.

Going Cuckoo.

Those flamingos, those mud-stirrers, those jokers. I expected to go there and find them gone, all of them, overnight. But they have left in dribs and drabs, the final few lingering like party guests who just won't go home. Bittereinders we say in Afrikaans.

Now we drive along a different road.
A mountainside on a farm. The gravel road meanders past ancient manor houses, horses, sawmills, trees all red and copper. The tractor drivers wave hello.
Robert Plant and Alison Krauss croon please read the letter that I wrote.
I wrote it in my sleep.
And these words from Edith Templeton I can't forget: He will awake, will read, will write lengthy letters, and will pace the avenues amidst the drifting leaves.
There's no time for that and I miss it. Fourteen hour work days, small snatches of sleep inky with Indian life. The neighbor's blasted cuckoo clock follows me even while I'm awake.

Our Cherokee adviser could have stepped from an old Edward Curtis photograph.

Except he wears jeans, a black jacket with a scarlet lining and blue tinted spectacles.
He stares at the horizon a lot and tells us stories about warriors weaving hummingbird feathers into the manes of their mustangs.
Hummingbird has speed.
He says: Even your money comes from trees.
He says: I heard it on the moccasin express.
He looks around and asks if we have questions. He turns to me with eyes wide and says: Cuckoo!

Glamorous it ain't.  At the front door of my friend last night, she says only half in jest: I'd invite you in... but you're too dirty!

There's a storm a-brewing with gale force winds and lashing rain.
 The extras are in purgatory...

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.