Outside. Alongside. Outside the shopping centre, alongside the black see-through fence. The parking area at my back, my feet perched on the low cross-bar of the tall wooden chair, my knees almost touching the shopping centre’s exterior wall below the ten tiles arranged into a narrow strip and affixed to the wall, serving as a table upon which my notebook gratefully opened itself to the morning sun. It, like me, in search of warmth on this chilly mid-winter’s day. And only now content, having found this unexpectedly glorious postage stamp of sunlight. Strange it seemed that this small patch outside would be warmer than inside the restaurant – the restaurant that I thought I would spend some writing time at before my working day began, a restaurant which I assumed would not only offer warmth, but an expansive sea view to accompany the espresso and my expressions. The restaurant however, was cold and cavernous, and the waters of False Bay just a modest channel between grey concrete pillars. So it was upward and onward, and ultimately outward to my discovery of the sun-kissed corner of the tiled table, and into the gentle threads that wove me to another space and time.
Sitting on this edge, the one leg of my chair propped up by a small stone, to give some stability to my seating, my sense was of being in a different place, and in a different way. For one, at a time when I was walking almost daily in preparation for my upcoming Camino, I had not walked here. Then, at the other end of the spectrum, in the many months of writing drought, here I sat with my hand closed around my pen, and my head and heart open to where my words might wander. But maybe more significant was the setting itself, and what lay beyond the black see-through fence that bordered Habour Bay Shopping Centre; by what had drawn me with quiet unconsciousness to this very spot. A connection I did not immediately make in language, in words spoken or written, but in a connection felt in another place. A meeting of the outside of the place, with the inside of me. Because it was not just me being held in the morning sun’s unassuming embrace, but on the other side of the fence and entrance road, lines of long dark stone rectangles that lay half buried among the lush winter grass, and the squares, oblongs, and other assorted shapes that stood upright in neat rows on the green grassy hill, just this side of the twinkling blue waters. The shapes – graves and headstones of the Glencairn Cemetery.
So, while this morning sun warmed me, perhaps equally it was warming the souls of the dead, for whom the cemetery literally and figuratively holds space. A cemetery that looked small from my coffee cup vantage point, but that I knew to be large from my many walks and runs past it, as well as my wanderings within it. Brown rather than green, because of the grass’s struggle to find fuller colour and form against the thirst-inducing south-easter. A wind that in the summer months can be a constant companion, but one not necessarily welcomed owing to its: “I’m going to blow just as much as I like” attitude. The wind that in my first summer months here back in the Deep South I’ve worked hard to build a better relationship with than I had previously, one grounded in acceptance rather than a relationship founded on prickling, poking resentment – of “why won’t this bloody wind just let up?
The wind that I might have experienced with less acceptance in the first nearly two decades of my life living in Fish Hoek. With less acceptance during the morning that my beloved Gran and I trod our way around the rectangles, squares, and stumpy stone crosses, through the sandy patches where the soil’s thirst could just not be quenched, leaving the grass unable to knit itself into the emerald green winter rows of plain or pearl. That morning, my Gran’s sensible beige Hush Puppies, sometimes stepping, almost scrambling, sometimes stationary, as we sought out Uncle George, Uncle Fred, Aunty Mavis, and Aunty Edna. “I know they’re here somewhere, just a matter of finding them, my dear.”
My Gran’s Hush Puppies in motion, then a pause. Once located, quiet moments to honour the relevant Wakeford, and then a short story – my Gran sharing a snippet, some sentences from the book of one of my great aunts or uncles buried here on this windswept hillside. A slow ramble among the headstones and stories, a subtle savoured connection. My Gran and I adding further rows to the stories and silences knitted between us. One pearl, one plain. She ‘the pearl’, Pearl Wakeford, the gentle jewel of our family, the decades long storyteller. Me, ‘the plain’, at that stage, a less storied version of my current self.
So, while the setting might have seemed unusual, perhaps it wasn’t surprising, that on this early July morning, with pen at the ready, and wanting to pause, that it should be this corner, this ‘outside and alongside’, that whispered to me, to pause ‘with pen and Pearl’. A whisper, because Pearl never spoke in a loud voice, but invited you into her world, quietly and gently, with warmth and love, and holding an acceptance for the world and the people around her. An acceptance and way of being in the world, that imbued her with a serenity and kindness, and a capacity to be fully present. That it would be alongside this place and alongside her and other departed family members, that I should find a warm sun and an even warmer remembering, into which to settle myself for those morning minutes, but also as part of the bigger settling back into this part of the world, and into the older and deeper family stories held in this southern soil and sea.
