There are five avocado trees growing on my kitchen windowsill.
A sixth has fallen off its toothpicks a bit, but I’m holding out hope it does its bit and pushes through its difficult circumstances.
Outside, the normally busy road I live on is largely silent, although the five dogs who allow me to share their home with them still find something to bark at, en masse. I think it’s the canine couple across the street. Or just sommer, because even they sense something odd in the world.
They’re also hugely entertained when the neighbour’s kids’ ball comes bouncing over the wall. It’s been returned about six times and I’m amazed it has survived the dogs’ gnawing. It’s a terrific game when I try to extricate it from them, to swop the extremely hardy Kong device for the far more vulnerable tennis ball.
The occasional taxi still goes by, and the city rubbish collectors have popped in too.
Tragic news on the hadeda
front. On an exercise expedition around the house, I found a barely-feathered corpse under the tree the family has made its home. They’re right outside and sort of level with the lounge windows, so I’ve been able to watch their goings-on. With Swiss-watch precision, they have a loud discussion every day, so loud I have to turn up the TV volume if I want to hear it. They settle after that into being good neighbours.
I’m very sad about the poor dead baby, and don’t know if it was wind or if hadedas also have a sibling survival-of-the-fittest routine where a stronger baby kicks a weaker one out of the nest. Having given it some thought, I’d never seen a baby hadeda, or a dead hadeda, before. Do they have a special place to go to die, like elephants supposedly
do?
One of the paw-paw trees is groaning with new fruit, all of it intact, but I’d wager a lot that the monkeys, who still use my garden as a thoroughfare, dancing tree-top-to-tree-top while the dogs go mental underneath them, have their eye on these.
The primates and birds have had a lot to do with my jungle garden: chillies, paw paws, some un-nameable tree and a couple of pretty shrubs have all sprouted because of poop and pips.
Butterflies abound and provide plenty of entertainment when you have time to just watch: have you ever seen a young dog trying to catch a butterfly? Perhaps you have to have been there.
The other neighbour warned me about “a big green snake” he saw in my Natal mahogany that stretches its beautiful limbs right up to my windows (I never saw the snake,
but who knows what’s under the couch?)
There are bats in the Strelitzia nicolai, and a loerie sings in the surrounds more frequently than I realised before.
So I’m working in the place I have worked my adult life to pay for, surrounded by the dogs I adore (if we ever get back to “normal” office work, I can’t wait to go to the bathroom on my own) and discovering my office chair is way more comfortable than my current make-do arrangement.
The bread is stale, and the toaster broke this week, but apart from that, you know what?
The lockdown may have given those with blessings the time and space to count them, and remember that, for most, life will go on.
- Slogrove is the news editor