All posts by Claire

About Claire

Wandering (and wondering) development professional and aspiring aid worker. Contact me on anticipationofwonder[at]gmail[dot]com

Wedding Day

My friend got married the other day. She looked really beautiful. Her dress was flowing (with train) and soft with a fitted bust-line decorated with the most delicate embroidery and beads, soft straps completing the look. Oh, and the most awesome red shoes. Her groom didn’t look too bad either, with his smart suit and his bright red tie.

Every wedding is unique. Some are sophisticated and formal, some are simple and intimate. This one was full of special, personal touches. The ‘wedding planner’ was a friend and he and his team were helping out of love for the couple and a little bit of the sheer joy of events. Must of the wedding feast (and it was a feast) was given as a gift.

The cake – a main cake to cut plus many, delicious cup-cakes – was made by the bride’s grandmother. Her mother, the bride’s mother, sang a blessing for the couple during the ceremony. The groom’s father shared a moving and meaningful tafelgebed.

Even the memories were trusted to friends. All the guests were asked to take pictures and then pass them on to the couple, and also to leave a note for the couple on their tables. One friend in particular, who is rather handy with a camera, took a whack of stunning pics.

There were special touches for the guests as well. Each table was named with a Latin phrase (ideal for this lawyerly couple) and each phrase was relevant in some way to the guests. The table of debaters was ‘ad hominem’, a long-standing debating in-joke.

Perhaps it was these personal touches, along with a shared fondness for the bride and groom, that blended together a varied, diverse gathering into a relaxed, simple, lovely celebration of the start married life together. They say it takes a village to raise a child. Perhaps a strong marriage equally is sustained by the support and solidarity of a caring community of friends and family, made stronger by the shared memory of a gentle, happy wedding day. Geluk, Janine en Pieter en dankie vir ‘n baie mooi dag.

The last time I saw Autumn…

The seasons are beginning to turn again. Mornings are chilly and the late Summer mists have come to Stutterheim. I watch the swallows patching up their nest and wonder how much longer they’ll be here. Soon it will be Autumn.

Autumn is the last season that got lost along the way in changing back and forth between south to north. The first was Spring. I left the south in crisp mid-Winter and went to late Summer there, and then Autumn and the Winter. No wonder, looking back, the Spring was so, so precious when it finally came. Autumn was lost in my return. I’ve never been a huge fan of Autumn. The end of Summer, the cold’s return. But you get to missing it, when it’s been such a while.

Morning spider-webs outlined in late Summer dew, beads of glistening beauty strung between the branches. Autumn. The last time I saw Autumn, it was pretty spectacular. The colours of Autumn are beautiful in places with summer forests. The leaves all change at the same time. I spent many weekend days visiting parks and places full of autumn colours. The reds and yellows and oranges were so much more spectacular than I had known before. More trees, more trees turning at exactly the same time. It was a sight to see. And colder, more quickly. Colder than some winters here.

The last time I saw Autumn feels like a lifetime ago. Who was it who talked about the idea of the double joy of the travel itself and remembering the travel later? I’m finally far enough away to remember without the bitterness and the homesickness, perhaps with rose-coloured glasses. This new Autumn that is beginning, will never match up to that one, that time, that place.

Summer is so precious here. This past Summer has been one of such joy – the hot, dry summer, the perfect beaches, the summer thunderstorms, the joy of Africa. The Winters I love will always be white-dry grass, frosty mornings and red, red aloes. But Autumn belongs to Korea. To bossum and buying warm coats and hiking boots and tree-covered hills and the slanting light of the setting sun through oranges and reds and yellows at Duryu Park.

Autumn comes slowly, gently to South Africa. Colours change in fits and starts, some trees rushing ahead, others still finding their colour by the time winter is half over. It’s still pretty and its coming brings the circle to a close for me. Autumn is always a time of endings, of contemplation. My Autumns are now a time of memories, of taking out my year abroad and polishing it up and revisiting the pictures and the words and putting it away again, in perspective; an important, if difficult, time, a year of autumn leaves and icy days and snow and new friends, a home I can return to in my mind. A home I carry with me and remember, especially for Autumn.

Words across time

In 1874, Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessey published a collection of poems called Music and Moonlight. Among them was a poem, Ode, that will be familiar to many, although most people know only the first couple of stanzas: We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams, wandering by lone sea breakers and sitting by desolate streams…

It’s a beautiful poem of perpetual change and the role of words and wordsmiths in revolution. This stanza, in particular, seems relevant to this year, these months, these days:

And therefore to-day is thrilling
With a past day’s late fulfilling;
And the multitudes are enlisted
In the faith that their fathers resisted,
And, scorning the dream of to-morrow,
Are bringing to pass, as they may,
In the world, for its joy or its sorrow,
The dream that was scorned yesterday.