Jaunting Along

We came back to South Africa to find a winter tracery of branches wearing their dust overalls, all a-popping with spring underneath, the buds on some trees set to jostle the little beans, hanging like sentinels, off from their perches. There were sunsets the orange of gold so hot you could pour it, the incandescence shot through with hot pink, such that the sky was filled with all the colours of a glowing peach. Throughout the managed veld, green shoots ran through and under the black soot of spring burning, the bare ground visible beneath. Arrays of African grass ranged along the roadside edges, gang-pressed regiments straggly and most disorderly in their ranks. We are back, home in South Africa after a year overseas in Arabia and just in time for our first wedding anniversary. We do indeed have something to celebrate at that, it's been a difficult first year of marriage and both we, and the marriage, have survived. There was the relocation, my dad’s death, our experience of a...