Opposites

Terri comments of how reading here makes her aware of the oppositeness of our seasons - hers and mine. I am in winter looking forward to summer and she enjoying summer bounty and preparing for winter. She is not alone. Since beginning this blog I have been made aware that my seasons in the southern hemisphere are not those presently being experienced in the North.

Some things happen at the same time.... it dawned on me that our cherry trees blossom at the same time as those in the North, and that was a wondrous thought to behold.

But mostly I like the yin and yang effect that this oppositeness of seasons has.

I loath being cold and here in this part of Africa when the "real" cold (no snow of course!) lasts a mere six to eight weeks and the heat for months our houses are built airy and open and  not ideal for keeping winter chill out. Yet reading of summer in the North I am reminded that the cold does not last forever and that the world turns, and in time summer and warmth and heat will be present again.

Spring? I don't think so! A taster perhaps.

I have had pneumonia and bronchitis. Been bored to death in bed.

Yesterday I heard the large warty toad who lives under the large pot that serves as my courtyard fishpond give an experimental croak or two.

I knew what stirred him from his winter slumber - slightly warmer weather and an rapid increase in humidity. Sure enough the humidity level stood at 58% when only days ago it was 23%. His skin and whole body was giving him the message that it is spring. Nice as that thought is, I don't think so. It will get cold again before true spring arrives. All two days of it. Then it will be summer. Yay.

I thought about how easily I fall into despair if  I think something is over or healed only to have it come back again. Grief. Sadness. Anger. And the like. Yet sometimes perhaps what I felt was only a taster. A snifter of spring. A promise of what will come. With promises of summer beyond that. Perhaps now I am just experienced enough to be able to enjoy the 'warmer" weather, without dreading winter's inevitable last fling.

Now there's a thought to make me smile.

Frost

We have frost this morning and the wind is very fresh and very cold and out of the south.

When I was a child I loved the smells that the wind carried. I loved the smell of rain and that warm heady mixture of cattle dung and dust that is so Africa before the rains come, and the concretey asphalt smell of a city and waxy smell of acacia  thorn bush in the lowveld and the papery smell of mopane scrub and the vivid tang of elephant or water hanging in the air.

The southerly wind carries for me the ice cold sharpness of the Antarctic snows.

Much as I love still the smells borne on the wild wind, the smell of the Antarctic is one that usually only makes me hunker down and grit my teeth and hold on to the hope of summer heat. This morning as the wind has finally swung around to the South, bearing winter with it I consider opening myself to a different perspective. I can't quite bring myself to enjoy winter but I consider what joy I may find. Warm fires, snuggly warm bed clothes, hot porridge, hot chocolate drinks, three cat bodies cuddled in close. And other than the theme of being warm I see that winter in Zimbabwe is about being close, cuddling and snuggling.

And I think, maybe winter isn't all bad.

Spring and winter

Last week when I got home from Johannesburg I got home to the early days of winter. I had left five days before in late summer, and now I had missed the two days of autumn to find myself in winter. Winter as in the tropics ... colder, dry. No snow. Winter endured for a few months in houses and clothing designed for the hot weather ......

And suddenly the odd dislocation I feel at Easter makes sense. Much of the imagery, much of the symbolism that I read and is part of the liturgy is geared to new life, to spring. Spring that is happening to the north of me, where Life burgeons anew after the layering stillness of snow and cold and long, cold winters. A physical affirmation of the Resurrection. Yet my physical world is drifting down to dormancy, leaves yellow and fall, grasses brown and die, days shorten and the light itself changes. The world around me dies ...... withdraws, bides it's time until the coming of the rains. In the deserts to the south and west of us seeds fall to lie dormant in the sand not for a season but for many seasons. Until the rain, that comes once in ten years, falls. And then in days plants spring up and flower and are fruitful ....

Here and to me just now, the Cross, Good Friday makes sense, but not always the Resurrection.