cinnamon rooms

My tiny house on the farm is finally starting to look like a home.

Space scented with huge cinnamon sticks found in a Joburg industrial catering shop where the flour comes in 50kg bags and everything is done on a grand scale. The walls are rough textured - an accident of my budget constraints that just works beautifully (tough exterior Cemwash paint aptly named ‘Clarens’). The uplighters are chicken nesting baskets based on an old French design from a garden shop (on sale of course). The kitchen dresser was a hideous monster inherited in the original building. Everyone shrieked 'burn it!'. But something told me transformation was hidden under five layers of variously coloured, gluey, oil paint (I counted because I did a lot of paint removal with my own fair hands). And there was.

I have yet to spend a night in the cottage (waiting for the rings so I can hang the curtains), but very soon I will be installed with dear books, sounds, fire and grace in a place that is entirely me and entirely mine and created from my own vision, energy and labour.

That’s freedom, right there.

swimming

Heat heavy as a rockfall promises to frazzle my whitey skin like a roasting chicken.

The nearest pool is the Sterkfontein Dam, which I can see from the farm.

No other swimming compares. This is not like other dams. At high altitude it’s more an alpine lake than your murky, reed-choked grasp of dams. The water is cold and clear thanks to the sandstone valley that forms the dam basin. Distance turns it Aegean blue; close up it's transparent seagreen.

But it’s the views and the space. Vast. Empty. Mostly sky. On the horizon the Drakensberg and the Malutis merge.

It never gets tired, this looking.

A swallow’s nest dandles right over the water, tucked into the frailest crack in the overhang of the small cliff. The bird harries me, anxious when I swim by.

I like having this 20 km stretch of open water to myself, shared with birds – vultures and swallows, bald headed ibis, hawks, kites and familiar others whose names I’d know but for the fact that the plates in Roberts are frustratingly incomprehensible - a truth SA’s bird lovers can never whisper for fear of being dragged from their beds and shot by Twitchers at Dawn.

Swimming in this wild place stirs memories of my twelve-year-old self who was free and brave.

In summer, huge electric storms roll over the escarpment in bruised cloud masses, writhing with the most ferocious and terrifying lightning I’ve experienced.

Somewhere, Discovery probably, I learned lightning can strike from 30 km away. A few years ago, when he least could afford it, a single strike killed ten of my father’s cattle in one fell swoop as they sheltered under a gum tree.The other day he told me how when he was a boy he found all the farm carthorses killed like that. They lay together in a field like warriors, their beautiful great bodies still steaming. It was so fresh that as he climbed through the fence into the paddock the residue of the charge knocked him flat.

Wind driving a storm shamboks the water. Coldbumps fleece my limbs. Time to scramble barefoot up the rock face to where I parked and drive away down the hill, past fields of haymaking. Home through the shimmering day, skin quietly singing of tomorrow’s sunburn.