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The Dandelion Diary
Marguerite Black
Human & Rousseau
For my mother
“Slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward. You are afraid you might forget, but you never will. You will forgive and remember … move on. Walk forward into the light.”
Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
“I can understand the nature of the living being outside of myself only through the living being within me …”
Albert Schweitzer
This book is a gift to my loved ones. I want to thank them for keeping me alive:
I climbed a sycamore tree
so I could nest
in the branches
of abundant life
and see the
bluebird
The weaver
I spin stories for you,
in you,
like a cocoon,
a pocket in which you can live,
cushioning you from sharpness,
sudden impact.
I spin stories for you,
unfolding them before you
like a Persian rug
which I weave with thought,
laced with laughter, on which you can tiptoe
through the paths of your life.
Dancing in the garden
The flight of the thistledown
I started to dance a while ago, in my own way. I began to think back, remembering a time when I could move freely, like wind breathing through ferns in a forest. And for quite a while now, as my movements became increasingly difficult, I have been tracing the events, people and thoughts that have shaped me through these desperate and wondrous years.
It was only twenty years ago – a morning filled with noisy, laughing children:
I am eight years old and thrilled to be part of the activity on a sports field in Grahamstown that has been going on since early in the morning. It is the annual sports day of the school and the excitement and anticipation can be felt in the air. Mothers rush around in the biting cold of the dawn putting up tents and stalls to protect their children from the sweltering heat which will surely surface later in the day. The Eastern Cape has been described as “a region of fierce opposites – meadows and plains, dongas and waterfalls, ferns and aloes”. Of Grahamstown it is said that there are four seasons in one day. In an attempt to reconcile these opposites, the children sit on the stands in shorts with warmer tracksuits packed into bags by their sides. Among the children I sit, and jump up impulsively when the under nines’ 100m is announced over the microphone.
The gun goes off and I throw my legs forward with exaggeration and gusto. I can feel my body bursting with vitality as the blood rushes through my limbs. Determination and focus allow me to win the race. After the thrill of the moment, the applause subsides and I casually walk off towards the hotdog stand.
At this moment I am unaware of the fact that in the near future I might not have the freedom to amble nonchalantly towards a hotdog stand, absent-mindedly glancing towards the sky and constructing patterns in the clouds. I do not foresee the way in which I will soon have to use my determination and focus. And it will not be for furthering my athletic abilities. It will be for something of a devastatingly different kind – in fact, a fierce opposite.
I was soon to embark on a journey where every step in itself would be a race, and where, whenever in motion, it would be dangerous to be absent-minded for one second. Because that would mean that I could fall and hurt myself.
The regimented order of a day on the sports field wasn’t a patch on a day spent in our garden, which was like a jungle to me. Here, my feet could take me wherever I wished to go. It was 1985, languid days of roaming around and discovering a small green worm, dragging itself along in the dust, or a light blue snake-egg, strange and brittle. I often think back to and long for those days, when I could run freely and when my legs would listen to me and carry me even to the impossible places that my little-girl imagination demanded of me: up a steep tree to scrutinise a leaf or down a flight of steps in a flurry. I was blissfully unaware of what the future held. Now I know the future’s unpredictability is a privilege. When I was a child the mountain could always come to me, I could sing with the cicadas and fly up high with the swallows.
The garden
Loquats
half-maimed,
eaten by mousebirds,
the jungle of a child,
mtwana of the veld.
Here bird funerals
were held
and feasts of prickly pears.
Abakweta-shongololos
were the scarecrows of the plains.
Here warm berg winds
rustled through summer grass.
Goats on the hill
grazed amongst kikuyu.
Here geckos were our snakes
and Datsuns racing cars.
Garden of trampled dandelions,
the jungle of a child.
My brother, Malcolm, and I spent every possible moment after school in gangs made up of the children from the neighbourhood. Down by the dam and up by the railway line on the hill, we conducted funerals for birds with a designated priest and casket carriers, or relentlessly dug unsuccessful swimming pools in the earth during the ruthless heat of summer. Every morning the hill, a mass of rampant natural growth that could not easily be tamed by humans, would slowly come alive with cattle herders, now whistling, now talking in low monotones.
Playing in the garden
On such a day I went to one of my friends’ birthday parties a few blocks away. I ran through the long grass in the field behind our house, the heady fragrance of kukumakranka fruits in the air. From somewhere close by, I could hear the hissing and rapid honking of
