Neulich am Fluss

Weekend

Wir haben ein wunderbares Wochenende mit Freunden im Cape Aghullas Nature Reserve verbracht. Der wirklich südlichste Punkt Afrikas.

We had a great weekend away at the Cape Aghullas Nature Reserve. The most southern point a Africa.

Tamaras Füsse. Sie hasst Schuhe und trägt nur selten Socken

Tamara’s feet. She hates shoes and seldomly wears socks.

Tamara with her favorite fairies. They can even blow bubbles.

Tamara mit ihren Elfen. Die können sogar Seifenblasen machen.

Luzie created this beautiful animal out of play dough. We used to call it Plastilin.

Luzie hat dieses wunderbare Tier aus Knete geformt. Bei uns hieß das Plastilin.

Eine Kindheitserinnerung

Der Strand in Struisbaai. Menschen, Boote und Möwen.

The beach in Struisbaai. People, boats and seaguls.

Luzie am pool

Das war ein wunderschönes verlassenes Farmestate, an dem wir einen langen heißen Tag verbrachten. Sogar mit pool!

This was at a beautiful old farm which is standing empty for quite a while.  There even was a pool.

Today: Sick at Home

Krank, aber fröhlich
(sick but beautiful)

Good Bye

Happy new year to everyone!

Now slowly getting back into routine. I am almost a bit depressed today about that. So many things happened. So many plans had been made. And now as if nothing had happened we are going back to normal.
I like to get into this state of desiring something with all my heart and at the same time being completely happy with what we have and content to settle with it.
It is a good exercise.

We had a great holiday. Worked a bit, discovered the most beautiful wild beach behind our house. You only need a 4×4 to get there and we got stuck in the sand twice but only the last 50 meter. It is like in the first part of the surfer movie Endless Summer, when they walk over the dunes in Jeffrey’s Bay and there ist this empty, endless beach with this amazing blue sea.

We had a lot of happy time with friends and family. Food and fun.
We love this place. Even though we neglected our garden and never managed to plant a vegetables or flowers. Now poplars are growing everywhere. We both thought that for this year we want to settle down. Have a place as a home base from which we move. For years now every place has always been temporary and I am longing for a place that is home. A place that won’t change and where we always come back to.

Now, after nothing has changed I am thinking about cutting my hair short. I only let it grow to tie it up. Who needs that lot of hair.

And I am going to leave this place. It felt so lonely. I less and less wanted to go there, rather stay in real life. I realized I stopped emailing my friends and lost contact with them, and that was the opposite of what I intended. Good bye and thank you for your love and attention and beautiful and suporting comments.

Bye bye

Christmas

Life out here in the village feels less christmassy than ever. Only the beautiful lights at night remind us that we still have to buy some presents. Or maybe not. We could dig in the garage for some long forgotten toys, wrap them in nice paper and give them to the kids.

Desert

We are back from the desert. We went to the Karoo. Up a dirtroad, 100 kms north of Ceres. We took the dogs and two boys to visit Luzie and her friends on a farm.

It was different from anything else I have been. You travel this dusty yellow road and there are no cars, no trees, no houses, just bushes and dry land. There is nothing. The wind that blows into the windows is hot like a hairdryer. Nothing changes just dry flat land. And suddenly at the horizon you see something blue and it is glimmering because of the heat. It looks like water. Blue blue water and you think this must be a mirage and as you come closer you see, it is actually water. Masses of blue blue water in the middle of this dry yellow land. You have no idea where it comes from. And it is cold. It is a miracle.

We turned left at the green watertank and the sign grote dam, drove through a gate and the road became worse and worse untill we finally arrived in the middle of nowhere. Three empty cottages, no shade. The fridge didn’t work. The butter melted away. We ate all the meat the first night and drank warm beer. The water which came out of the shower was too hot to use. We went to swim at the dam. There was a huge dam In the middle of this dry land with cold water. A bird sanctuary because there is nobody. Just us and the birds. The children played in the pool, a natural hot pool where the water flows from the mountain into the pool and it just overflows because you can’t stop the water.

Every morning we got up at six o’clock after the sunrise and walked into the dessert. It was beautiful. You can walk forever in any direction. We saw a rooi cat, we collected stones and rocks. We walked along an almost dry river bed with puddles of water.

At night we listened to the birds and sat in the coole breeze. The stars were amazing. It was just us and the sky. I could lwatch the stars from my bed. I saw the moon rise bright orange and fell back asleep until a layer oft bright orange light on the dark blue sky announced the sunrise.

It had 46 or more degrees. We swam and ate and slept. It was snake season. We saw a dead Cape Cobra next to the road and told the kids to watch every step because it was an hour drive to the next doctor. Luzies friends family spent their days shooting mice and feeding them to the cats. The mice eat the vegetable they grow in a little garden and attract the snakes. The girls run around in bikinis and rubber boots.

On the way back in an insane heat, we stop for a car on the side of the dusty road. They had a puncture and their jack was broken. They said, you can not believe how glad we are to see you. We were the second car they met on the road since they had left two hours ago and had waited for 30 minutes in the burning sun until we arrived. Sven changed their tyre and than we travelled together to the next gas station more than 60 kms away. We both needed diesel and drove on empty. We knew we wouldn’t make it that far. Sven stopped at a game resort and asked if they could sell us some diesel and they did.

As soon as we left the dirt road it cooled down. We were back in the world. For the first time in my life I loved the heat. I have never experienced the dry desert heat. It is completely different from the tropical humid heat. It is so dry, I didn’t even sweat. It is like the exact opposite of a very cold clear winterday.

My Boy

Anton age 8

Anton age 10

Anton age 12

Anton two months ago

It was Antons 14th birthday on Friday. Like every birthday I couldn’t believe that is has been 14 years ago when i pushed him into the world. I still remember his birth as it was yesterday. The night in our apartment in Berlin Charlottenburg. My friend U. was with me because Sven was working as a projectionist at a movie theater that night. U. and I watched a movie on my small black and white tv. I was already a week past my due date and again nothing seemed to happen. U. had just decided to sleep over when Sven came home at midnight and the moment he opened the door I had my first contraction. I got up and fired the oven in the bathroom to take a bath. We had only cold water and Kachelöfen in that apartment. I am too scared of hospitals thats why I had my children at home.
My midwife was on holiday and her replacement didn’t hear the beeper. So nobody came until 3 o clock in the morning. I was in the bath for hours. I had never met the midwife before and when she came she said that was her first birth since 10 years. But she was great. Somehow she got me out of the tub and onto the bed. I left marks on Svens and my friends hands and arms when I finally pushed him out. It was 7 o clock in the morning and Sven went out to buy champaign and breakfast to celebrate. Anton was the most beautiful baby. He looked so familiar to me. He had the most perfect nose and ears. He still has.

He went on a big hike with two friends and two girls and Sven the next day. They walked three and a half hours to the rock pools and waterfall. Sven showed me on his camera Anton’s 5 meter jump from the rocks into the water. He never did that before. He seemed changed. He is becoming a man now. This morning I found a paper envelope in my laptop. “From a secret helper” was written in front of it in small skew letters. Inside were 250 Rand. Anton had given me his birthday money because “we need it more than him”. When I gave it back to him with tears in my eyes, he grinned and said, I knew you would give it it back to me anyway.

Open Garden

I wrote this two weeks ago. Because my Internet is so slow, I only look at the preview and almost never visit the site. That is why I didn’t realize that my last two postst haven’t been published.
Here they are in wrong order.

Saturday, November 8th:
Today was the most beautiful day. We went to the open gardens in Elgin. Once a year people open their gardens to the public. Once again I realized I need beauty around me. My first priority.
I feel very blessed living in such a beautiful country!

Good Bye Zoé (former Ashley)

Zoé

Managed to eat nothing more yesterday. Except a small bag of jelly babies, which I downed all on my own on the streets, while walking the dogs.

A tragedy occurred yesterday. I heard Luzies silent scream and was very alarmed. Silent screams are always a sign that something really serious has happened.

I ran to her room, there she stood in the doorways, head bowed, crying. I thought she had hurt herself and wondered why she was on her own, while Sven and Anton were sitting in her room, next to the hamster cage.

The hamster had been murdered! Luzie found him in the cage, slit open, intestines hanging out and ants crawling over him. The cage door was closed. A mystery that nobody could explain.

Luzie was crying hysterically. She was under shock. She went into my room and lied on my bed. I lied next to her, taking her in my arms. After a while, she asked me under her sobs: Can you please get me my DS? I got up and brought her the requested.
Sven buried the hamster and two minutes later, Luzie was playing as if nothing has happened.

Earlier that day she told me about school. All the prefects had been on a camp on Monday.Today they handed out all the things the little ones had forgotten. She told me amused about one girl that had forgotten two T-shirts, a towel, her bathing-suit and a boy who had forgotten his trousers and his shoes. (How can he forget his pants?)

Luzie didn’t forget anything. She is past that age. I remember when she was in grade 1 and 2, how she and her friends always forgot everything. It was a drama when we couldn’t find her blouse or skirt or shoes of her school-uniform the next morning after she had spent the afternoon at her friend. I almost forgot.
Every mother was upset about it. When I picked her up I went trough the whole house of her friend to collect her stuff. The other mothers did the same. We thought they would never learn to keep their things together and they did. Just so.

Same with Anton. First thing he does when he comes home from school is to take a shower. He says he can’t understand how one could live without showering every day.
I remember he lived very well without showering for weeks until recently. Kids just change. They grow out of things. You are always concerned about how they would ever learn not to forget things, brush their teeth, wash their hair, shower .. until you give up and than they just do it by themselves.

Dieses Buch wird Ihr Leben Verändern!

Für alle, die es noch nicht haben oder nicht wissen: Unser Buch “Was wir von der Liebe verstehen” kann man jetzt kaufen, leider bisher nur in deutscher Sprache, aber das wird sich bald ändern.

Es ist in der Tat lebensverändernd, man kann es immer wieder lesen, viel lachen, manchmal auch weinen, es ist offen und ehrlich (vielleicht zu ehrlich), was man heutzutage so selten findet wie eine unverbaute Aussicht.
Deshalb kauft es, lest es, vorallem verschenkt es an alle Paare die ihr kennt und solche, die es werden wollen. Und vorallem an die, die ihre Hoffnung an die Liebe glauben verloren zu haben.

Wir haben auch noch einen Blog dazu eingerichtet, in dem wir abwechselnd über die Freuden und Leiden der Liebe schreiben. Sven hat ihn mit einer Geschichte über Vertrauen eröffnet und ich werde bald darauf antworten. Außerdem gibt es Textauszüge und ein Interview zu lesen und kleines Video zu sehen.

Unser Wunsch ist es, noch mehr Autoren zu diesen Themen zu gewinnen so daß ein möglichst vielfältiger und anregender Austausch stattfindet, zu dem wir auch die Leser einladen wollen.

Außerdem schreibt Sven auch noch einen Blog!
Sven also started a blog. Don’t miss it. Yes, we are living in blogworld now!