ikhaya lam

  The title of the story will be “Ek het niks hier verloor nie”. The title will be ironic.   A Farm with No Name   I will write about how there’s nothing left of the homestead I grew up in, nothing to go back for. How Africa is reclaiming the garden, and how it is fitting that way. Nature takes over from neglect and erases my father’s footsteps from the farm. It demolishes my mother’s vegetable garden and the exotic mulberry tree that fed my silkworms. I listened to Springsteen's Magic while driving the roads of the Eastern Cape earlier this year: "This is what will be, this is what will be".   Entry to the Vegetable Garden. There was an enormous mulberry tree next to the gate. My mother bred Boerboel dogs and Landras pigs, and found time to nurture an alcohol addiction in between. My dad ploughed fields and drank a lot of coffee. There used to be this ad in the Huisgenoot , it showed a big clock with a cup of Ricoffy at every hour. I think my fa...

    No, I'm not LGBTQIA+ . And if you don't know what that means, shame on you click on the letters to find out.      [...waiting for the Flintstones to find their way back from the link...]    Ah, I see you're back.   Sit down.    Let me tell you a story.    At the beginning of this globally conspicuous year a scorpion killed my kitten . I had loved the little critter - the cat, not the scorpion - and I was devastated. Hannes had been given my Dad's name in a hubristic temptation of fate and fate answered. The small, soft, patched body that used to perch on my shoulder and purr into my ear while I sat at my desk lay lifeless under the Oregon pine kitchen cupboard where he'd crawled in to die. I sat outside on the gravel and howled like a mother who'd lost a child, because I had.   His favourite place I thought expressing grief during the loss meant I wouldn't stuggle with depression afterwards. But I stayed listless in ...

dit brand soos ‘n pyl in my. Die mense sien daar niks nie van, en die Here alleen die weet wat ek ly. Die dae kom en die nagte gaan; die skadu’s word lank en weer kort; die drywerstem van my werk weerklink, en ek gaan op my kruisweg vort. https://gedigteboom.co.za/totius/o-die-pyn-gedagte/     I know at least seven women who have lost a child.    I, myself, managed to lose someone else's child.    "How do you do that?" I hear you ask.    You take in a six-year old when his mother's life falls apart and you keep him until he reaches high school, after which the arrangement becomes permanent and one day you realise you've become a single step-parent to a teenager. When you divorce his father many years later, you also lose the only "child" you'd ever known.    That is how you lose someone else's child.   It was not until I found Buurman that the possibility of a human baby crossed my mind. The Bulldog ...