T he last colour had long since drained from the sky, and the Swartberg stood black and silent against a deepening indigo, when Oom Koos, seventy four now and a little more bent than the year before, carried his chair out onto the stoep to watch for them. He had learned, since that evening with [...]
T he 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 [...]
E very morning they gather along the fence line near the succulents, nine donkeys, each one different, each one somehow already telling its own story before a single word gets written. The tall one at the front always stands closest, watching everything with those long, patient ears turned toward whatever sound arrives first. Behind her, [...]
S omething happened on a boulder in the Little Karoo earlier this year. I have been finding the language for it ever since. This is as close as I have come. It was an ordinary afternoon. The kind the Karoo makes look extraordinary without any effort at all. I had gone for a walk, the [...]
I have loved words since before I understood why. As a child, I collected them the way some children collect stones, turning them over, feeling their weight, noticing how the same word could mean something different depending on the light it was held in. "Some callings arrive loudly. Mine arrived as a whisper, [...]
T here is something we have being doing that may become a ritual. The thing that Lance and I do on Friday nights. When the sky is clear and the stars are calling, it goes like this: We load mattresses into the back of the truck, blankets piled thick against the winter cold, a flask [...]
T here was a moment, a few weeks back now, when the sky over the Swartberg turned the colour of an old bruise, and something in the air told every creature on this ranch to take shelter. And then it came, tap dancing ever so loudly on the tin roof of my home. It wasn't [...]
T here is a moment, pegging washing to the line, when the wind arrives before you are finished. It came this morning, moving down off the Swartberg the way it does, and the sheets filled like sails before the last peg was on. And I stood there in the middle of all that white billowing, [...]
J une 1st marks six months, and I want to tell you how it began. We arrived December first, last year. In Summer in the Little Karoo which is not the polite, golden summer of postcards. It is the full, uncompromising, heat-pressing-down-on-everything summer of a land that does not soften itself for newcomers. We had [...]
from the heart of the Little Karoo
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