Two Bits – 2 October 2015

My niece died this weekend, a few days short of her 40th birthday. Of lung cancer, though she had never smoked.

She was my sister-in-law’s child, so I had known her pretty much her whole life. She was a truly beautiful little girl with short blonde hair and big blue eyes, just like a little china doll.

When I picture her, I see this little waif of a thing, not the handsome woman and mother she turned out to be. I can see her peeking out from behind her mother’s skirts, or playing with her little collection of dolls.

But grow up she did, married and moved far away to Sweden, but we saw her every couple of years and of course fairly often through Skype.

There was something that always bothered me about Shila. She was different from other people in a way that I could never pin down. She was artistic and a dreamer, like her mother, and that’s no sin, but clever enough to sail through a fine arts degree. She looked at life through a different lens, like the flower children I knew in my youth would have wanted to, yet with none of their artifice.

She reminded me of none so much as the Little Prince in Antoine de Saint Exupery’s story of a little boy who comes to earth from a faraway planet, and his wonder at the ways of adults. One sentence I remember well is: “Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.”

In the story the little prince is befriended by a fox and when they part the fox says to him: “And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

Remembering that made me realise what it was about Shila that was different from so many others and made her special: she was completely without guile. She saw with her heart. She never, ever made unkind comments about others. She would rather run away than be deceitful. She never laughed at anybody. Laughed with them, oh yes, ‘til she cried, but never at them. Everything she did was from the heart and it was filled with love. That’s pretty special, don’t you agree?

My wife Rose was in the ‘Berg this weekend, and Saturday morning she had an unusual experience.

The Serval is a very beautiful African wild cat found in long grass environments, and is extremely shy. It is almost exclusively nocturnal and stays well away from humans. I have never seen one in the flesh.

Shortly after dawn, Rose saw this Serval walking calmly up the road to our house. It stopped right outside the front of the property and cleaned itself, licking and scratching for five minutes or more. Then it walked alongside the house and only paused momentarily as she took a picture with her cellphone. The cat looked at her for a few seconds, then walked into the long grass and was gone.

Rose told me: “At that moment I knew Shila was saying goodbye. It was a truly wonderful experience.”

And need I say that Shila would have been thrilled by this story, because both girls are romantics through and through!

The point of my story is this: appreciate the special people in your life and tell them so, often. They are here now and we forget, then they are in the wind and it’s too late!

Early Sunday morning, I know that another star was born.

* * *

Ballito was full to overflowing with visitors last weekend, and all local events had a great turnout.

The first Strawberry Festival was swamped, with more than double the turnout they expected. Almost too successful for a first time, you could say, with a vertical learning curve.

We have a raft of photos of each event: the Strawberry Festival, I Heart Market at King Shaka airport, Umhlali street market, Shaka Day celebration in KwaDukuza and of course our own Bass Competition in aid of the Orphan Fund.

There are too many to fit in the paper, so look for your picture in the gallery on our website.

The weather was perfect and the water shortage, though still very much there, did not make life uncomfiortable for our visitors. I just hope the same will happen at Christmas!

What the weekend proved is that there is plenty of scope for a Dolphin Coast heritage weekend festival to be grown into an annual attraction.