|
June 6
It is finally clear.
These entries will form a "mionthary",
not a diary. The fact is that, if I am not very careful, I shall
fall into retirement - or have done, because I am experiencing what
all retirees tell me about their lives:
"I'm
so busy, I can't find
enough time in the day,"
they say with self-satisfaction.
"What do you do?"
I ask, mystified.
"Well, it's
very hard to say. Nothing specific. Nothing you can describe. But I
am busy. Mowing the lawn. Thinking. Doing, ...er things,"
they all say, with equal astonishment.. . . "But
what are you doing, if you're
not retired?"
Six months ago I was
working from 7.30am to about 7pm daily. Mostly writing and editing
and publishing those damn Wings and Feathers books.
But also doing consultation, researching and reporting for the oil
companies and the Dome Inc. goldmining group. And a bit of Editors
Inc, and before that a little for the literacy movement READ, and a
little less for the anti-guns movement, and for the saving central
Johannesburg movement after consulting for an insurance group in the
city.
A month ago I was busy
researching a proposed novel, and writing the SA Petroleum Industry's
Association's annual
report (which I still am!). But work has become almost impossible to
do in these difficult circumstances. My desk is impeccably clean. My
upstairs workroom is lined with bookshelves and tidy furniture. The
sun streams in from the east, touching the couch to the right of my
L-shaped desk area. I start to write, but a splash beyond the
balcony catches my eye. Is it a whale? A dolphin? A seal?
Investigation proves it is a diving bird. There are lots of them out
there today, wheeling a diving; which brings the fishing boats.
Now it's
all quiet. From my desk I can see only one hovering seabird and one
white motor launch. It is a sunny winter's
day, the sea sparkling blue with dazzling white foam stretching back
into deep whale-water in thin streaks and fat, puffy patches.
Despite the sparkling seascape and bright sunlight I cannot see the
lighhouse or any sign of Danger Point. They have disappeared into
an indistinguishable mist on the horizon.
. . . I should be trying
to write a novel synopsis now. . . but every time I sit down to type
these days, my eye is caught by a heavy movement in the sea beyond
the white balustrades. It is another wave, coming to pound the rocks.
The winter waves are not as high as some of those that came after
llast summers storms -
but they come in heavier ranks, wide and powerful, surging over the
wave-ledges with a strength never seen in April.
The cliff walk has
changed again, of course. Mrs Benningfield, the constant early
morning -. walker who does not bother to greet when we meet,
just: "Have you noticed
the April Fool blossoms down there?"
or "Doesn't
the Felecia look magnificent this year?"
- said last week: "Are
you not walking every day?"
I confessed I was "too
busy" to be regular now. "You may miss the
orange Cliff Lily,"
she warned. "If you walk
only a kilometre that way, past Kraal Rock, you may see the last of
them. They're quite
rare. I had to go to
Cape Town for a few days. When I got back, the Cliff Lilies were
gone.
Our Arum Lilies, which
sprung up just outside our gate after the rains, were destroyed some
time ago. Just as the gardener next door prophesied, the procupines
came in the night and dug them all up, making off with the bulbs and
scattering the poor dead lilies among my newly planted fynbos.
Fortunately, within the gate - bricked to keep crafty porc. at bay -
not only lilies are flourishing, but bunches of other bulbs,
including local wild watsonias, have burst forth, half a metre high,
and should display their flowers soon.
The cliff continues to
bear big patches of blue Felicias - in two different forms Arlene
discolvered when examining the leaves - but the blossoms are
shrivelling, the colours fading. East of us, about 200 paces along
the path from our gate, there are now dramatic patches of red and
yellow. The blossoms do not line the path, but stand dramatically at
eye level and above. You stare up at a dozen candelabra of redhot
poker cacti thrusting above the fynbos. The redhot pokers stand
against walls of new yellow blossoms on the rhus bushes which are
also above eye-level.
Strange how different
forms of fynbos thrust their presence before you with their blooms.
There is another bush, a kind of bloukappie with olive-green
leaves, which lines both sides of the path about three bays to the
east, which I have been walking past, unseeing, for months. Suddenly
they are in flower, forcing you to stop and stare.
I must get one for my 'already complete'
wild garden outside the gate.
|
