The sun was dropping toward the Swartberg range, bleeding orange into the thorn scrub, when the first of them slid down a sunray like a droplet finding the underside of a leaf.
Oom Koos , seventy-three years old, heart and hands worn from all he has carried , was sitting on his stoep with a glass of witblits when he saw it.
In the far field, a small light, no bigger than a moth, peeling itself off the last gold rays, drifted down over the koppies like golden pollen that has been given a soul. Then another. Then a dozen. They fell soft as ash from a dying fire, and where they landed in the karoo-bossies, in the cracked red earth, in the still water of the dry river bed , they did not vanish. They simply began to work.
He should have gone inside. Instead, he watched.
He had no name for them, these little beings, so in his mind he called them ”die lig-kindertjies”, the light-children moving through the veld, weaving dreams, like they have done a thousand and more sunsets before.
They did not speak. They did not need to. Their work was old and needed no explaining, the way rain doesn’t need to explain itself to the roots of the old gwarrie.
Oom Koos watched one drift to the dry riverbed where his late wife used to walk before the drought took the water and, some said, took her heart along with it.
The little light hovered there a long moment, as if listening to a silence only it could hear, and then dipped low and touched the cracked mud. A single, impossible thread of green new grass, unseasonal and small pushed up through the crust before his eyes.
He did not understand it. He did not try to.
They worked till the moon rose fat and silver over the Swartberg, weaving dreams into the sleeping and the waking, into the seeds resting in the dry earth and the grandchildren resting in town who had never seen the farm but dreamed of it anyway, an inherited longing – spun fine as spider silk.
This Little Karoo, that hard and honest place, had always seemed to Oom Koos, a land God had forgotten to finish. But watching the lig-kindertjies move through it with such tenderness, he wondered if it wasn’t finished at all, only being dreamed, slowly, one golden evening at a time.
By the time the last light slipped beneath the mountains and true dark came down, they were gone. Folded back, perhaps, into whatever sunrise would unspool them again tomorrow.
Oom Koos sat a long while in the dark, his witblits forgotten, warm in his hand
He never told anyone. But some evenings, at the very edge of gold, he swore the world held its breath, waiting, the way it always had, for the smallest things to begin their humble, sacred work.
There is something the Karoo has always known that we, in our grief, forget: nothing here truly ends.
The sun does not die when it drops behind the Swartberg, it simply changes address, pouring itself into small golden bodies that carry its warmth through the dark hours until it is ready to rise again.
Energy does not vanish. It transforms. It waits. It returns wearing a different shape.
That love, once given fully to a place or a person, does not simply stop when the giver does, it settles into the ground, into the grass, into the small green miracle that pushes up through cracked earth for no reason anyone can explain.
Grief in the way of this world, teaches us to measure love in heartbeats and somewhere, somehow many believe that when the heartbeat stops, so must the loving.
Yet, its the lig-kindertjies, sliding down each evening from a sun that will rise again tomorrow, that ask us to embrace something softer: that nothing we have loved is ever fully gone.
It has only changes shape, and joins the quiet, ceaseless work of the lig-kindertjies keeping the world tender in the dark.
A small comforting thought for you my love:
May you find your loved one gone, transformed in energy rather than absent from your life. May you feel them as light that changed shape, rather than a continued loss. May the small unexplainable things, the flitting butterfly, the firefly that lingers, the warmth of a feather that arrives uninvited, remind you that love, once given, becomes part of your heart itself, and remains forever dear , held within.
A treasured love that is always yours to carry.
SharynAnn
The sun was dropping toward the Swartberg range, bleeding orange into the thorn scrub, when the first of them slid down a sunray like a droplet finding the underside of a leaf.
Oom Koos , seventy-three years old, heart and hands worn from all he has carried , was sitting on his stoep with a glass of witblits when he saw it.
In the far field, a small light, no bigger than a moth, peeling itself off the last gold rays, drifted down over the koppies like golden pollen that has been given a soul. Then another. Then a dozen. They fell soft as ash from a dying fire, and where they landed in the karoo-bossies, in the cracked red earth, in the still water of the dry river bed , they did not vanish. They simply began to work.
He should have gone inside. Instead, he watched.
He had no name for them, these little beings, so in his mind he called them ”die lig-kindertjies”, the light-children moving through the veld, weaving dreams, like they have done a thousand and more sunsets before.
They did not speak. They did not need to. Their work was old and needed no explaining, the way rain doesn’t need to explain itself to the roots of the old gwarrie.
Oom Koos watched one drift to the dry riverbed where his late wife used to walk before the drought took the water and, some said, took her heart along with it.
The little light hovered there a long moment, as if listening to a silence only it could hear, and then dipped low and touched the cracked mud. A single, impossible thread of green new grass, unseasonal and small pushed up through the crust before his eyes.
He did not understand it. He did not try to.
They worked till the moon rose fat and silver over the Swartberg, weaving dreams into the sleeping and the waking, into the seeds resting in the dry earth and the grandchildren resting in town who had never seen the farm but dreamed of it anyway, an inherited longing – spun fine as spider silk.
This Little Karoo, that hard and honest place, had always seemed to Oom Koos, a land God had forgotten to finish. But watching the lig-kindertjies move through it with such tenderness, he wondered if it wasn’t finished at all, only being dreamed, slowly, one golden evening at a time.
By the time the last light slipped beneath the mountains and true dark came down, they were gone. Folded back, perhaps, into whatever sunrise would unspool them again tomorrow.
Oom Koos sat a long while in the dark, his witblits forgotten, warm in his hand
He never told anyone. But some evenings, at the very edge of gold, he swore the world held its breath, waiting, the way it always had, for the smallest things to begin their humble, sacred work.
There is something the Karoo has always known that we, in our grief, forget: nothing here truly ends.
The sun does not die when it drops behind the Swartberg, it simply changes address, pouring itself into small golden bodies that carry its warmth through the dark hours until it is ready to rise again.
Energy does not vanish. It transforms. It waits. It returns wearing a different shape.
That love, once given fully to a place or a person, does not simply stop when the giver does, it settles into the ground, into the grass, into the small green miracle that pushes up through cracked earth for no reason anyone can explain.
Grief in the way of this world, teaches us to measure love in heartbeats and somewhere, somehow many believe that when the heartbeat stops, so must the loving.
Yet, its the lig-kindertjies, sliding down each evening from a sun that will rise again tomorrow, that ask us to embrace something softer: that nothing we have loved is ever fully gone.
It has only changes shape, and joins the quiet, ceaseless work of the lig-kindertjies keeping the world tender in the dark.
A small comforting thought for you my love:
May you find your loved one gone, transformed in energy rather than absent from your life. May you feel them as light that changed shape, rather than a continued loss. May the small unexplainable things, the flitting butterfly, the firefly that lingers, the warmth of a feather that arrives uninvited, remind you that love, once given, becomes part of your heart itself, and remains forever dear , held within.
A treasured love that is always yours to carry.
SharynAnn
