Category Archives: seasons

Autumn Sunday Afternoon (slowing down)

Johannesburg, seasons

The sky is the colour of winter. A little bit hazy; a little bit far away. Like high-school rugby matches from crowded concrete stands. Like long Grahamstown walks past frost-whitened fields. Like quiet days studying for mid-year exams.

The air is still warmer, though. Still a sunny Autumn day. Still warm for now. Later there will be a chill in the air. Later the days and the evenings will be colder.

It took me many years but I think I’ve learned to love Autumn, just a bit. The leaves are beginning to change. I noticed it yesterday. The colours make me think of Daegu, now, and the spectacular Korean Fall. This picture was a trip to visit a friend in Seoul.

autumn seoul

Joburg never quite matches that but Zoo Lake and Emmarentia Dam are pretty and the Joburg flowers add their little bit – purples and reds, from bougainvillea to bottlebrush to the sweet scent of the last few yesterday-today-and-tomorrows.

autumn jozi

The mornings have a chilly edge, too, and there is a glare in the air that wasn’t there during the sunny months. The sun slips and slides through the Jacaranda trees as I walk to the station in the morning. Some days I stop for coffee and just enjoy the depth of the sky and brightness.

Today I sit on my pleasantly warm balcony thinking about Autumns past, as a quiet weekend gently drifts away.

Sunday soundtrack: Johnny Cash & Kris Kristofferson – Sunday Morning Coming Down

So Much Water, So Little Sky

Regrets, seasons, South Africa

Four years ago and many, many miles away, I wrote a blog post about missing the sky. Living in a crowded Korean city for a year, I missed the sky often and a lot. Missed open spaces. I talked, in that blogpost, about a quote from Dana Snyman’s book On the Back Roads, 

“Maybe it’s because today most of us are confined to life in the cooped-up spaces of the cities. It’s great to know there’s open space out there where you can just drive, and drive, and drive. Open spaces allow you to dream dreams of freedom.”

Today feels very much like that missing-the-sky time. Before I went overseas, I lived in Johannesburg and Cape Town and the Eastern Cape and travelled to odd corners of South Africa, from Port Shepstone to Vredendal, East London to Tzaneen. Almost every place I went shared one taken-for-granted characteristic: wide open spaces with plenty of sky.

Then I came back to South Africa and instead of finding my way back to my beloved wide open spaces, I moved to a place almost as green and crowded and claustrophobic as Korea. Instead a place to dream dreams of freedom, I discovered a totally different face of South Africa. Every time I’ve tried to explain the difference, people seem confused. After all, it’s still South Africa. It’s part of the same country. Just because it’s green? Just because it gets plenty of rain? It should still feel like home. It doesn’t.

The clouds are lying low again today. Yesterday morning the mist was like soup, think and cold. The mist lifted later, turning the day into a hot, humid weight upon the air. I like hot. I love hot. Tropical rain forests in December. New Year’s humidity in Mozambique. Glorious, terrifying, summer storms in Windhoek. The way the air smells and tastes before a thunderstorm in Grahamstown or Joburg or Queestown. This isn’t like that. It’s warmth without sunshine. For two days now, the clouds have sat, low and brooding, while the humidity and the heat built up and built up and sat. The hot air is heavy with the almost overpowering scents of flowers. It’s spring. Everything is green. Everything is always green. Steep green hills and deep green valleys and grey, green rivers.

I never knew there was a place in South Africa with so much water and so little sky.

Anticipate

Adventures, Ideas, seasons
It’s a cold, miserable, rainy day. Properly cold. Cold like it hasn’t been for months and months and months. It is as easy to forget what cold feels like in a South African summer as it is for hot to become a distant memory in an icy northern winter. I’m not entirely pleased that it has returned.
But still, I thrill with anticipation. Next week I travel to the Western Cape. It sounds so odd to be excited. I have visited Cape Town so often in the last few months it is almost a second home. But this time still excites me. Every time still excites me. But this time is especially good. This time I am not traveling for work. This time is exclusively exploring, being a tourist, seeing friends and a few days in Stellenbosch with some of my favourite people.
I grin every time I think about it. I randomly find myself starting to put aside clothes and consider what shoes to take. I wander the shops and wonder if there is anything I need for my travels. To go, to move, to learn…
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
As tho’ to breathe were life!
Alfred Lord Tennyson, Ulysses

It’s a cold, miserable, rainy day. Properly cold. Cold like it hasn’t been for months. It is as easy to forget the cold feels in a South African summer as it is for hot to become a distant memory in an icy northern winter. I’m not entirely pleased it has returned.

But still, I thrill with anticipation. Next week I travel to the Western Cape. It sounds so odd to be excited; I have visited Cape Town so often in the last few months. But it still excites me. Every time still excites me, but this especially so. I am not traveling for work. This time is exclusively exploring, being a tourist, seeing friends and a few days in Stellenbosch with some of my favourite people.

I grin every time I think about it. I randomly find myself starting to put aside clothes and consider what shoes to take. I wander the shops and wonder if there is anything I need for my travels. I wait in anticipation. To move, to go, to learn…

And drunk delight of battle with my peers,

Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.

I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’

Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades

For ever and for ever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!

As tho’ to breathe were life! Life piled on life

Were all too little, and of one to me

Little remains; but every hour is saved

From that eternal silence, something more,

A bringer of new things; and vile it were

For some three suns to store and hoard myself,

And this gray spirit yearning in desire

To follow knowledge like a sinking star,

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

Alfred Lord Tennyson, Ulysses