ikhaya lam

    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 ...

The Road to Our House For the two of us here in the mountains, there's not much difference between "self-isolation" and what we usually do. We prefer to live with our furry friends, both tame and wild. We know the leopard tortoises by name. To come across one, or sometimes all of them, at the end of a day is like meeting a friend on the road. The black eagle pair still soars above our house. The other day we surprised a brown buzzard on a Cape spurfowl carcass. The kill wasn't fresh - he'd been feasting on it for at least a day. There's a new-ish, very wild Cape Grysbok in the reserve. Even the baboons visited the other day after a long absence. Okay, some housemates are more welcome than others... So we carry on doing our thing, keeping trips to town to the bare minimum and carrying F10 veterinary disinfectant wipes in the bakkie. Yes, people, vet shops still have "hand sanitiser". When you ...