The lekkerste lekker

During those long summers when life seemed endless and the magic was always happening around us, I was, as I am now, always trying not to forget the stories, Nowadays a sound, a smell, a comment, or even a thought can take me back to those few years on the edge of the forest.
It was as if there was only us, me and the kids, and there was a whole world to discover and create.  Behind our house was another bywoner family consisting of a mother and father, a sixteen-year-old daughter, a younger twelve-year-old daughter, and two even younger ones of six years and eight, one of whom was born blind.  Because they came from the Freestate, their Ouma used to visit a lot.  She liked her port wine and long conversations under the African sky.  She helped to look after the children who were not allowed outside the gate.  They had a beautiful Dalmatian called Spot.
In those days it was always recommended to be neighbourly.  They were friendly Afrikaans people who were really struggling financially, especially to keep their son in the blind school.  Occasionally I walked down the road to have a cup of coffee with the artist mother and Ouma, of course.  Mary Jayne and Andrew used to come with me and play on their swing.  They had a swing which was really just a big rope with a knot tied in the end of it.  They also had a small stream in front of their house, which supplied them with a never-ending number of frogs. The little blind boy, Johannes, was the most adventurous of them all.  He was always getting little scrapes and cuts by falling on his hands and knees.  It never seem to stop him though; he was fearless.  He used the Dalmatian as a guide when he walked.  He was always full of life and chatted away to anybody within distance.  Occasionally I would see Bully guide him as well.  It was ironic that the most adventurous child was the one who couldn’t see.
Johannes was sitting on the wall one day, his dog at his feet.  His mom had just dashed inside to get the coffee.  Feeling a little awkward, I asked him about his experiences at school.  He laughed and said to me, ‘Tannie, you don’t want to ask me that.  You want to ask me about my pockets filled with dreams’
He had caught my attention.  He knew it too.  ‘Okay, tell me about them’, I said rising to the challenge.
‘I dream in colour’ said the little boy who had been blind since birth.  ‘I dream about the paintings my mother paints. I can see the trees and the birds my mother painted against the wall.   I can even see the little fairies she put on the toilet rim. I feel her energy and smell her paint.  I can smell different colours and I can see her as she hums to piano tunes.  I dream about ‘groot dinge’, Tannie, like playing the piano and becoming famous. The music puts colour into my head.  It feels baie lekker, die lekkerste lekker’

Tea with Mrs Lee

The ‘main house’ on the farm was situated closer to the mountain. It belonged to the owner of the farm.  It was a huge house with a shiny red stoep that went all the way round. There were very comfortable chairs with soft pillows that one could sit on, whilst sipping lemonade or tea and enjoying the afternoon or the morning sun. One could even watch the sun go down on the west side of the house. The bright purple bougainvilla snaked around the house providing splashes of unforgettable color.
The garden was an expansive affair of rose and jasmine.  There were always two gardeners mowing the grass, picking the mushrooms after the rain, clipping hedges and growing new plants every year.  There was a swimming pool and even a small diving board , but we, as bywooners, were never allowed to swim in it.  Mrs Lee would not even allow Bully to swim in the pool, so we were never envious and besides, the river and the dam were much more fun.  I will never forget the feeling of a water snake swimming past my tummy as I hung on to an old tyre tube in the dam,  or the day Bully pulled Andrew out of the water when he almost drowned.  No, I feel we were lucky.
Once a month, every month on the 26th,  I would have to go pay the rent at the big house on the farm. A quick phone call to Mrs Lee to make sure that she was ready to receive me and we were off.  The main house was a good fifteen-minutes walk away.  My children, Bully and some of the local children would always come along for the walk and the visit.
When we arrived there, poor Bully had to wait at the gate whilst the children would be herded into the kitchen and given some homemade lemonade in huge, shiny glasses, topped with clinking ice cubes.  A real treat.  Mrs Lee would always have some iced-cupcakes with little silver balls for the children too.  They would drink their cool drinks, grab a cupcake and then go sit in the garden. Bully would complain loudly at the gate, howling like a big baby. Inevitably a cupcake would be dropped by one of the children. They would race over to and give it to the dog, even if only to keep him quiet.  I’m not sure how many cupcakes the dog ate in the end, but it would be a lot.  I would be shown to one of those beautiful couches and tea would be brought.  Mrs Lee loved her silver tray and lacy doilies.  Everything about this visit always seemed to represent finery and sophistication.
It seemed very out of character then, one day as the visit was just about finished, the rent paid, the children collected, and every tasty morsel of cupcake devoured, that a cockroach happened to be crossing the shiny red stoep.  I was shocked, frozen on the spot, unsure of what to do – it was so 'out of place'.  Mrs Lee spotted it too and, while still talking to me, slowly and firmly crushed it with her heel!  It was HORRIBLE.  I heard the squelch and saw the ugly goo, its black wings crushed.  Mrs Lee, in all her finery, wiped off her foot on the edge of the stoep.  ‘Well that’s that then’, she said closing the subject.
All the way back to the house the children, who never missed a thing at Mrs Lea’s were talking about it very loudly amongst themselves.  I wondered whether I had imagined it.  Nothing like it ever happened again. Tea with Mrs Lee remained an experience that neither I nor my children would ever forget.

Bully Beef

Living at the end of the forest seemed to give my little family and I a different perspective on life.  As a single mother with two young children, I found that life sometimes threw a curved ball in my direction.  When I stood back and regarded life from this new perspective, it looked different, felt different and smelt different.  It was always a blessing, although sometimes I could not see that right away.
We had just moved to the farm.  We were all trying to adjust to the new way of life.  All creatures, both great and small would invade our space, crawling under doors, through the window netting and even through the peep holes.  It was best to keep the keys in the doors at night otherwise the little creatures crept through the holes in the locks.  Mary Jayne and I were not naturally fond of little snakes and bugs.  Not even the little brown mice were cute.  Andrew, of course,  loved all little creatures.  Looking back, I’m not sure if it was the thrill of finding a new creature, or just the creatures themselves that captured Andrew’s imagination so much.  He played endlessly with them.
One day I bought some ducks from the farm down the road in an attempt to keep the crickets at bay. The horrible little crickets seemed to be everywhere, under our pile of laundry clothes, in the toilet, under the couch. Ducks and crickets are natural enemies.  I named them Binger, the thin one, Bonger, the fat one, and Fluff.  Fluff was probably younger than the others because she was a whole lot smaller and far more fluffy.  They quacked around our garden, chasing the cars and the tractors.  I dug them a pond and built them a little house so that they could have somewhere to sleep at night. They would leave their feathers all over the yard.   Sometimes Fluff would bite one of the children’s bums, but that was not very often.  Andrew and Mary Jayne would chase them all the way to the stream in the Fairy Forest where they would float unconcerned in the water.  At night as I lay in my bed, I could hear the ducks chase the crickets, quacking loudly as they had a conversation about them.
About a month later, one lazy Sunday afternoon as I came home from church, I smelt the distinct smell of roast duck being cooked over an open fire as I was driving up the path.  Oh dear!  The children cried, I cried.  We were all devastated.   I didn't know what to do. I really had a problem.
The following week I went to visit Yvonne and told her of my predicament. Yvonne was an Afrikaans lady who had a huge house in the centre of town.  It was painted orange and had a huge lawn that she constantly seemed to be mowing.  Her property was surrounded by a very high black fence.  If one wanted to get inside, you first had to wait until she put her huge black dogs away in the little room at the back of her house.  She had no chance to plant anything pretty or even sit in the garden herself, because the dogs would just stand there with their huge paws, chewing away at everything as they destroyed it all.  They looked a bit like wrestlers, very mean and angry.
That afternoon though, she had had enough!  Her neighbour had given her a new puppy, which was softer by nature.  He seemed to me to be tall, thin and elegant compared to the other brutish black dogs.  He was lovely and brown.  When he shook his head the spit dripped out of his mouth and flew everywhere.  Because of his softer nature, Yvonne had let him inside the house, but when she opened the door to let me in, the young dog streaked past and into the front garden.  Here he saw Mary Jayne and Andrew.  They had left the hatch at the back of the bakkie open as they climbed out.  The dog climbed in and curled himself into what seemed to be a little ball.  Well, it was quite a big ball actually. What were we going to do now?
No amount of bribing could get him out.  As we dangled some biltong  under his nose, he just farted loudly.   We offered him some raw meat to get him out of the back of the bakkie but much to the delight  of the other dogs he didn't take it  so we flung it over to the dogs on the other side of the fence where it was hastily gulped up.   He had made his decision.  He was not going to move.  Thinking he would get bored and get out  if we ignored him did not help either, because after more than an hour of chatting to Yvonne he was still there, happily snoring away.
‘You had better take him home with you’, Yvonne said.  ‘Bring him back if he gets too much. He needs a new home!’
Mary Jayne and Andrew yelped with delight.  I sighed, knowing that he was going to become another addition to our little family.  That night we named our new boerboel Bully Beef, or Bully for short, after his first meal in our house.  He cocked his head to the side and raised his eyebrows. Within a few hours he was firmly part of our little family.  When I fixed him a bed outside, he objected strongly, raising his eyebrows to the roof, rolling his big brown eyes and plonking his huge body in the kitchen, near the food and the stove where it was warm and where he wanted to be. When the bugs came in, he caught them and ate them.  He was very happy to be with us.  The kids and I were very happy that he was there too. Within a couple of days, it was as if he had always been there.  I can’t actually remember a time on the farm when he wasn't there.  I bought some new ducks, Hatty, Matty and Sam.  They lived for a very long time behind the house, down by the stream. Nobody ever dared to touch them now that there was a big dog to protect them.

Flying

My small family of two children and I lived in a forest area in the middle of a valley called ‘Slanghoek’ or ‘Snakecorner’. It was wine-growing region, so the forest, which consisted of big oak trees was not 'very big'. We lived in a huge house with many bedrooms and lived alongside many creatures; the bees in the roof, the frogs during the rainy season, the crickets, the spiders and of course small harmless snakes.  Even an occasional duck would find his way in through our wide-open back door.  Our big dog Bully would eat as many of these creatures as he could, chasing after them with glee. He would try hold them between his paws and then nibble at them, breaking them off limb by limb, torturing them as he went along.   The smaller creatures frustrated him because just couldn’t get a good grip on them.
At this time, my eldest Mary Jayne was seven-years-of-age.  She had long blond hair that always shined in the sunlight, creating a halo around her. She loved to dream and would often play ‘pretend’.  She pretended she was a princess and that her knight-in-shining-armor would rescue her; especially from her pesky five-year-old brother Andrew.  Because she hated the creatures and found them all ‘SO DISGUSTING’, Andrew would chase her around all day, small creature in hand. Daily life often consisted of Mary Jayne running for her life in front, Andrew close on her heels behind her dangling some poor creature, and Bully running behind them, licking his lips at the treat.
The fairy forest behind our house had many treasures and lots of unexpected events happened there.  Like I said before, it was not a very big forest, but it had a river running through it and an old rusted car just sitting there waiting to be played in.  It was said that that car magically appeared around the time we came to stay in that house, but of course we could never prove it, since it was there when we arrived.  The farm children however, all agreed that it was magical and would speak about it in awe and with amazement. They would sit in the car and play ‘feel the magic’.  This game entailed driving the car, pretending they were going down the ‘big road’ so fast they took off into the sky magically flying into the distance.  They could see all the world below them and the mountains.  It was a wonderful game and it lasted for many hours.
One day Mary Jayne,  Andrew and Bully were sitting in the car.  The big green school bus had not brought the farm children home yet and for once they were playing amicably with each other.  Andrew took the steering wheel while Mary Jayne pumped the accelerator harder and harder, faster and faster.  The trees passed by faster and faster.   Their little hearts were beating faster and faster.  The car started shaking. They both shrieked with delight and with a bit of fear.  Up and away they went.  Bully was howling with delight.  His ears pinned back from the wind.
They were flying!  It was so grand up there.  They could see their school, their granddad’s workshop, the vineyards and a huge storm brewing.  They decided to turn back and were just about to land again when they opened their eyes.  You see, the game only worked when you closed your eyes. Mary Jayne and Andrew had opened their eyes a fraction too soon.  The little rusted car came down with a huge bump.  The left hand wheel fell off and went rolling off into the bush.  Suddenly they realized, they had flown!  The parts of the car really had fallen off during the landing.
Of course, when they told me about it I just nodded.  I knew of the magic in the forest. I knew also that my two little children’s imagination could run away from them but it was when the dog started talking about it later, I got worried.  But that is for another chapter.

The girl who thought too much

Once upon a time, there was a little five year old  girl with blond hair and blue eyes.  She wore a dirty, tattered, yellow dress and no shoes.  This little girl was the most miserable girl ever. In fact, she never had any hope for her future because nothing in her life ever seemed to go right.
Her mother gave her endless trouble.  Her mother was a very selfish woman who was too involved in her own life. Her Dad would shout at her for no reason at all.  In fact he was not very nice to her most of the time.  That was when he noticed her because he didn’t come home much.  He preferred to be out with his friends, drinking at the bar, measuring his manliness in a game of poker or darts.
Her clothes were always tattered and torn.  She had no money to buy new ones.  She envied her friends who got new clothes almost every month.  In winter she was freezing all the time and in summer the heat seemed to stifle her.  It all seemed so hopeless.  In fact, she could not find one blessing, to be grateful for.  She felt like life had dealt her a very cruel hand. She thought about her bad luck constantly.
She felt she had no talents.  That was until one day she fell into the deep end of the town swimming pool.  She did not know how to swim. But as she flayed her arms and legs around, trying to breathe and push herself up, she thought of her friends and how they managed to swim.  She wondered whether her parents would miss her if she drowned or indeed, if they would even care.  She decided that day in the water, to take responsibility for her own life because she realized that nobody else would.  She was in control of her own life.
She held her breath and gave herself one mighty heave.  She lifted her arms out of the water and her head seemed to follow.  Suddenly she realized that she had the control.  She was not going to drown. Feeling encouraged for the first time in her life she kicked her legs and felt herself moving forward.  So this was what it was like!  She pulled herself over to the side.   She was determined.  Yes, she could swim.
She practiced every day for a long time until she became the school champion, the provincial champion.  Soon she was swimming for her country!
Because she gained confidence and control, she used this in other areas of her life.  She delivered newspapers and taught other children how to swim.  Soon she was able to afford new clothes and shoes. She was finally gaining control of her life. She became the shining star of her town.  She refused to see herself as having bad luck. She had discovered that she was special to herself, for herself, by herself.  Her parents never realized how close to death their little girl came,  because they are still stuck in their own thoughts, to this very day.  But those, she realized, were their thoughts, not hers.

Visions from the Past

Writing takes skill and tremendous effort.  I feel glazed and motionless.  The spelling mistakes are slowing me down.  Perhaps the angels will help me see the vision stronger.  Perhaps that transcription job I had a few years ago will help me type faster and more accurately.  Yes,  I feel it does.  Yes, I could tell you that this is what I am supposed to do.  I feel connected.  I feel like I need a hundred prayers.  I feel the information coming from deep inside me, spilling out like when Abraham tapped on the rock.  It’s like that, flowing from inside me.  Are there spirit guides to help me?  I am not sure.  I need to feel some more.
So here I am, a writer with nothing to write except what comes out of me. This is what God had intended when he sent me here.  I am to be a messenger, a harvester, a fisher of all men.  That message was given to me two years ago in an office of a minister.  It was then that I knew I was to become a Messenger.  It was as if He spoke to me in the quietest, loudest voice.  I have heard that voice before, saving my life a few times, but I won't bore you with those boring details of an ordinary life.
I feel like I am the person that is easiest to forget.  The one who slips from your consciousness when I leave the room.  Only, people tell me about what I told them years ago, and how my words changed their lives.   I feel small, yet I am the bearer of truths and consequences. Is this a problem of confidence I ask myself? Have I been undermining my influence over other people for many years?  I think so.  I need to change this.  This blog is one small step in that direction. Every great journey starts off with a small step.  This is my Leap of Faith.
I see the miracles occur in my own life.  Two days ago my Love told me that he sees money like water flowing.  I have been praying for this for a long time.  I try not to preach to him.  He has his own journey and I must respect that.  I live BY EXAMPLE.   Two  miracles occurred this week.  One is that my house is filled with children for my two boys to play with, the other is that my husband saw money as flowing.  That is something I firmly believe.  Do what you are supposed to be doing and money will follow.   Another miracle is that my children asked me to pray with them last night.  I watched my beautiful son pray hard and earnestly, firmly believing in God.  My Love said it was beautiful to hear.  Before he would have belittled me; now he thinks its beautiful.  Miracles happen in the small things.  One has to stop and listen to realize it.
When we lived in the UK I met a a stranger in a park.  We started talking and immediately connected.  The one thing she said to me, that I can remember this morning,  was that one of the reasons she wanted to become a minister was because it was a way to talk about God.  She felt she could not share her feelings with anyone except her immediate family.  I can relate to that.  I have felt VOICELESS for a long time and more than just with my immediate family.
Voicelessness occurs when your husband is rude to you in front of your friends and you dont know what to say, or when your rib is cracked but you are too embarrassed to tell the doctor how it happened, or when you try tell someone what is wrong, but you can’t get the words out even though she can clearly see something is wrong.  Voicelessness occurs when your father denies you your point of view or belittles your talents,  telling you that you should be married instead.  Voicelessness occurs when the pain in your chest grips your heart  so hard it swallows your words.  Voicelessness occurs to young children when they are abused, raped and left for dead.  Children crying softly into their pillows, trying not to wake the evil monsters up. Voicelessness occurs when the HORROR gets too big to imagine.
And so, dear readers I wanted to ask you, what were those horrors for you?  What do you do about it?  Like it or lump it, it becomes part of you.  It forms your character and stays within those damned memory channels for a long time.  Sometimes it finally decays but most of the time it doesn’t. It becomes who you are, it makes you feel small, insignificant and  used.  Your life never seems to run smoothly after that.   What you didn’t realize is that Jesus was carrying you, helping you.  He was there when you thought he wasn’t.  He was waiting, giving you imperceptible signs. If you lean on him, he will help you, but you have to believe. That is the one prerequisite.  Believe.
Believing is like a single blade of grass, shooting up.  Soon, it spreads and you have a whole lawn.  All you have to do is nurture it, water it every so often with Bible readings, music and talking.  Getting your own voice; Expressing your belief is confirming. Don’t be voiceless, God is there, he wants to listen. You just need to hear.