“Looking forward you constantly acquire moments of arrival, moments of realization, moments of discovery. The wind blows your hair back and you are greeted by what you have never seen before. The material falls away in onrushing experience. It peels off like skin from a molting snake. Of course to forget the past is to lose the sense of loss that is also memory of an absent richness and a set of clues to navigate the present by; the art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.”
– Rebecca Solnit from A Field Guide to Getting Lost

The friction between the forward motion of cycling through chores and projects here on the quinta, and visits to South Africa is in essence what creates my reality as it shapes the person I am and become through the passage of time. A brief two-week visit to South Africa reminded me again of why I put up with the bureaucratic challenges of legally living in Portugal, and although there are always lovely interactions with various strangers, reminding me of how friendly South Africans are, I also know that I would do everything I can to avoid living there permanently again. It is the constant pull and push between feelings of belonging and not belonging that in a strange way also add to the richness of my memories and experiences of a country that has shaped the way I looked at life, and reinforces the feeling of being a stranger on a continent that my forefathers left centuries ago in search of a better life.

On my father’s side, the progenitor of all the van Niekerks in South Africa today, Dirk van Nieuwekerken (later changed to van Niekerk) arrived in the Cape of Good Hope in 1671, while my mother’s side, the Taljaard family, who were French Huguenots, arrived a century later via Holland. The irony is not lost on me that I find myself back in Europe in search of a better, safer life.

Notes:
# The month started with frantic preparations for welcoming the quinta sitter on the 3^rd, and leaving for Lisbon. Of course, something had to go wrong. As I was doing loads and loads of laundry the water suddenly, instead of draining away into the septic tank, started bubbling up into the shower tray. Luckily Michael installed a grease trap (not standard in Portugal) in the water heater room to make cleaning the drainage system easier for us – a job, although not the most pleasant, is simply part of our yearly summer chores. Luckily, all I had to do was clean out the grease trap (yuk) and let the hot water tap run for a while, before things were back to normal.

# With no time to spare to catch my bus on the 3^rd, we had to take a 15-minute detour, because an accident caused a road closure. Lawrence seemed to enjoy the challenge and excuse to speed, and got me to the bus station with 5 minutes to spare.

# Two nights in Lisbon before my flight to South Africa with Turkish Airlines, meant I could destress and enjoy the gorgeous spring weather in one of my favourite parts of Lisbon – Parque das Nações. It is a modern neighbourhood with spacious walkways along the Tagus River, and tree-lined streets, where green areas and public art are never far away. It is also where one finds a major bus and train station, while the airport is a quick three metro stops away. Developed for the 1998 World Expo, the degraded industrial area that occupied the space were transformed into what is perhaps Lisbon’s most modern neighbourhood.

# I returned to balmy days with the smell of jasmine and orange blossoms perfuming the air, but in true spring fashion we’ve had an impressive thunderstorm two nights ago, and a subsequent extra 24.5 mm of rain to make it a total of 53.5 mm for the month, which introduced cooler weather again. To be honest, I’m not too unhappy about that, as there is a lot of strimming waiting for me that I need to catch up on, and cooler weather makes working outside much more pleasant.  

A Moment of Joy:
It was wonderful to be able to spend time with various family members and friends, cramming a year’s worth of conversation into a couple of hours or days, but for someone who is used to the quiet life with only Midnight and Lily for company, it can become a tad tiring, which is why two moments stand out for me during my visit that brought pure joy. The one was taking a walk along the beach, lingering a while with my feet in the warm water of the Indian Ocean, while the other was taking a long morning walk on the farm at sunrise flanked by maize taller than my head.

Portuguese Traditions:
Freedom Day, or Dia da Liberdade, celebrated on the 25^th of April each year, commemorates and celebrates the Carnation Revolution (Revolução dos Cravos), a peaceful military coup that took place on that day in 1974, ending what was the longest running fascist regime in Europe.

Click on the following links, if you are interested in exploring the subject: an interesting article, a personal memory, and a short video.

Written by: Jolandi