This race was back in May, and in the days after the race my life was consumed with the two events I work for, the Mega Volt and the BC Bike Race, so I never got around to talking about it. The race experience was particularly special in that the whole weekend was so filled […]
Category: Memories
Gifts we don’t always recognise
I am a knitter. It is at once a creative outlet, a hobby and a meditation as I sit here quietly in the evenings, with soft music and a full heart. The joy is not in the end result but in the process. Once a project is done, it gets shipped off to the recipient […]
This was my brother
His name was Ismail, and would have turned 60 next month, but he died 40 years ago today in motorbike accident. 40 years? He has been gone twice as long as he was here. He had played well in a rugby match a few days earlier, and limped proudly with some minor injury that he […]
Easter memories
I wrote this a number of years ago, but it is still fitting. The memories still make me smile. Coming home with a bag of hot cross buns from the grocery store. I bit into one, and frowned as the bland, dry mass moved around my mouth. Of course I compared it to the hot cross buns […]
Ma
Last week, my grandmother would have been 111 years old had she still been around. My father called her Ma, so we did too. I think she passed away in 1988 or 1989, so would have been in her late 70’s. I never knew my grandmother except as an old, old woman. Even my earliest […]
It’s not just fruitcake
I’m down to my last stash of Woolworths fruitcake pulled from my freezer this afternoon. There are 3 … no wait, only 2 now … 2 treasured slices left. As far as fruitcake goes it’s pretty decent: moist and just the right amount of fruity sweetness. It’s not special in that its spectacular fruitcake, it’s […]
Childhood memories resurfacing
It’s been four week since I arrived in South Africa for this glorious adventure. Even though I grew up in Johannesburg, I’ve lived in Canada for more of my life than I have in South Africa, so Canada is home. I’ve been back 3 times in the 30 years I’ve been away, the last trip […]
The polisher that didn’t polish
Sifting through my childhood memories, I’m still trying to make sense of things that were just so. I never questioned them .. until now. I grew up in a house with beautiful parquet floors, and every Friday my mother would go down on her hands and knees to scrub the floor. Did they not have […]
New Year’s Eve Memories
I grew up in South Africa – where December is the middle of summer. The school year behind us, my father would be off work for two or three weeks and we’d all be in that blissful state of not knowing what day of the week it was. New Year’s Eve would mean a trip […]