As the waters recede, we gather the flotsam and jetsam of what we took for granted before the rains came. And amid chaos, locals unite to rebuild essential bridges, showcasing solidarity and determination to restore normalcy. For those of us who have lived through the floods in greater Kruger Park, it wasn’t the water that hurt us.
It wasn’t the white noise pelting down on our roofs and lives, unceasingly. But when it did cease, and there was momentary silence, the pitter-patter of droplets on red earth would reappear. It was the sound of more sheets of water that would now spill and spread on deeply saturated soil all over again.
But it wasn’t the sound of the returning storm that broke our hearts. The reckoning emerged in the realisation of what the waters took from us. “How I linger to admire, admire, admire the things of this world that are kind, and maybe also troubled — roses in the wind, the sea geese on the steep waves, a love to which there is no reply?” the poet Mary Oliver writes inHeavy, her poem on grief.
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Some Lowvelders are still cut off by the ferocious flood waters that blew in from Mozambique last week. Settlements have been destroyed, lodges submerged and about 40 people lost their lives. At least 400mm of rain claimed R4-billion in infrastructure damage.
These are the things that are devastating beyond comparison. But also in the wake of natural disaster, emerges the absence of lives we took for granted — and even the missing daily irritants we then understand as loss. Two guinea fowl frequent the long grass in front of my Lowveld veranda.
Joined at the hip, they are never apart, always foraging together, by habit tapping at their reflection in the veranda doors. Not infrequently, they do so at presumptuous hours before the sun itself has even knocked on the door. I call them Brolloks and Bittergal, not because they are the grotesque characters of CJ Langenhoven’s Afrikaans children’s classics, but because they are two loveable misfits in awkward feathers who seemingly must always be with each other to remain Brolloks and Bittergal.
Two days ago, a bedraggled, big-eyed Brolloks tottered out of the soaked grass. Bittergal was gone. I said a little prayer for Brolloks, hoping he would not feel too lost without his shadow.
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