Autumn affirmations
Happy anniversary, my Sam-I-Am
Lovers, Jules – my daughter, and the person to whom these letters were originally addressed before they became Love Letter – will be recording every Love Letter from now on. Each reading is about five minutes long so functions as a quick sound filler allowing you to make a sandwich or iron your panties while you listen. Mostly though, the recording is an attempt to make the small weekly pleasure of the Love Letter available to wider audiences. In this recording, you might hear the storm raging in the background. The poem is read by me as the first voice, and by Jules as the second voice. Let us know if you have suggestions for improvements.
Today Sam and I have been married a week.
Happy anniversary, my Sam-I-Am.
I cannot say more without oozing into sentimentality. The emotion of the ceremony is too recent. It’s hard to communicate the feeling of gazing out from our spot on the lawn by the old ivy-covered braai, with our very good friend Greg marrying us, looking at the tiny gathering of family, all gazing back at us, many with watery eyes, with so much warmth and happiness.
Marrying someone you have known for so long is a bit odd.
For instance: you’re not hopeful and starry eyed – you’re serene.
We didn’t want to make one another promises because we never have before and don’t mean to begin. We both have broken promises in our pasts and have had to deal with the damage they dragged in their wake.
Our promises are already built into our daily behaviour towards one another in the plus-minus 5 500 days we’ve known one another.
Based on what we know – our ease, comfort, joy, conversation, mutual problem solving, physical delight, practical support, tenderness, kindness, and fifteen years of still being glad to see one another when we wake up in the mornings – we made a calculation to start a new part of our lives with a small celebration.
And then we came home and carried on just being who we’ve always been.
We were such young little people when Sam and I met. Though, man, I felt old. Things were really hard for both of us back then.
It was poetry that brought us together. He read a poem at Off The Wall – a weekly poetry event where I was the MC for a few years – that took my breath away. I asked him if he could mail me a copy of the poem. We started chatting via email. And that's how it went. Slowly. Word-by-word. Over months and years. We might have been the inventors of the slow-to-commit subsection of the Slow Movement.
This photograph was taken a few years after we met there, doing a reading together.
Don't ever say ‘What's poetry good for?’ to me.
My answer will be smug.
Read here the two of us reading two poems we wrote one another: one fifteen years ago, the other more recently.
The way to a family’s heart
On Tuesday evening, I made supper for Sam and Jules. Jules interrupted the story she was telling us to exclaim, ‘Can I just say that this food is phenom!’
Sam said, ‘Yes. I wasn’t expecting such great food so soon after getting married.’
I said, ‘Why not? Did you think I was going to stop trying to impress you?’
Jules said, ‘Stop being silly and get him his beer, Mrs.’
We find ourselves amusing.
This ‘phenom’ supper was – get your notebooks ready – frozen fish baked in the oven, leftover mange tout from before the wedding, slightly yellow and somewhat limp but freshened after a quick steam with a splash of olive oil, and mushrooms fried in butter and thyme.
What can I say? Kitchen genius got me where I am today.
Battening down the hatches
This morning, the roof man came in to secure the sheets on the porch roof.
A storm is coming.
Warnings. Level 6. Orange. Then Level 9. High winds. So much rain. Preparation suggestions: ‘clear drains’, they say. Make sure your gutters aren’t clogged, they say.
The pot plants on the stoep have been brought in. The boxes from our year away – yes, shockingly, we still aren’t entirely moved back in, what with family health crises upcountry and wedding planning – dragged back inside. The gym weights are in the buckets so they don’t end up on Robben Island.
Our ship’s tarpaulins have been secured.
The place I moved into after I got divorced had a tree I parked under and in the cleft of the tree was a package that had grown into the tree. One day, there was a huge storm that stripped the package of it’s thick paper wrapping and I found what was inside.
Here’s a poem I wrote about it. The poem was published in Botsotso Volume 21
A week ago, dressed in our happiest, the weather was mild and autumn-y and there wasn’t a hint of a wind despite the family’s warnings. Everything shimmered and gleamed in the season’s best and most benign light in Sam’s parents’ garden where our families’ faces glowed.
Happy anniversary, my Sam-I-am.
Love,
K.
Congratulations and happiness upon you - the leaf confetti is phenom!
The confetti is so smart. They use confetti (called coriandoli- confetti instead are the white almond candies given as gifts at events like weddings or baptisms) here in Italy during carnival. You can buy bags of stamped out little papers to throw on people. Kids walk around with it. The result is that for weeks you have the colourful little papers lying everywhere,in parks, piazza, the steets and my classroom.