Spring has sprung in Oribi Gorge but winter always has its last hurrah just when you think the cold is over. I’m learning that gardening takes a tremendous amount of patience while things look shabby or bedraggled until the sun, rain, and Father Time work their magic.
Working on botanical exploits also requires risk, throwing caution to the wind while seeds scatter over flower beds or you stick in a cutting with high hopes that it will develop roots and survive to be beautiful.
The swallows arrived back in the last week of August 2021 to mark the end of the coastal winter; the day before, the yellow-billed kites came swooping over my home looking for unsuspecting morsels. That same week my other grandmother died without meeting her great-grandson, my born-during-a-pandemic child.
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I can’t stop thinking about her love for the bright and cheery colours of spring, and her commitment to the iconic Beach Shop in Shelly Beach (her all-time favourite holiday shop each year).
She always used to tell me that fashion comes around every 20 years. I’d laugh and roll my eyes. Twenty years is such a long time. Yet, here I am celebrating the spring by putting away my warmer clothes and seeing my kick-flare jeans tucked right into the back of the cupboard. Oh yes, the wonders of acquiring clothes in the late 1990s when I had already reached my adult size by Grade 7.
Didn’t jeans look so much better when you could put them over your shoes and just see those cute little toes sticking out in front of the flare. Calves fitted better (skinny jeans are for skinny calves!), and rainy day mud on the back wasn’t so bad when everyone’s pants were getting stuck under their heels at the same time.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, move on teenager. Oh, wait. Flare seems to be back in fashion – I saw some very flare-like jeans on my online shopping page for the coming season. Maybe Granny’s theory about 20-year fashion cycles was spot on then. Everything has a season, and we like it that way. It keeps life interesting with changes and advancements, but predictability also lends some comfort. We know spring will come, every year. God has made us that way, to appreciate the certainty of His provision. It’s an Ecclesiastes 3 revelation – there is a time for everything under the sun.
When my pineapple off-cuts finally start making baby pineapples this season or next, I might even be able to take out those 20-year-old flare jeans and rock them on my 20-years-older frame without an ounce of embarrassment. I wish I could share the fruits of my patience with my Granny once the pandemic has made its way out of its final cycle, but I know she’ll be looking down on me and giggling about the way the mud is sticking to the bottom of my jeans as I trudge through my garden in full bloom and welcome the new season.
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