It’s been a while. One of those periods were life just happens and before you know it days have gone by and to-do lists keep on growing and the hours are filled non-stop but, retrospectively, one doesn’t even know with what. It’s been a busy time, a relatively confusing time, and not much has happened at all. But I’m glad to say that I wasn’t alone as my dearest Mother City played along and the Cape Town weather echoed my confused state of mind every day.
Today, for instance, the city seems to be operated by a giant switch, flipping from ‘cloudy and rainy’ to ‘sunny’ ever so often. Never boring. A few days ago it was a glorious beach day – over 20 Degrees Celsius, me walking around in shorts and a shirt – a day belonging in April and not at all in June (June and July are supposed to be Cape Town’s coldest winter months). But Sunday two weeks ago Cape Town experienced the coldest recorded temperatures and was hit by an incredible hail storm. We do have hail, sometimes, but this was beyond belief – the streets were so littered with the white stuff that it looked like snow! And, as one would have it, everyone went crazy.
Snow, hail, all those things belonging to the Northern Hemisphere, excite us. We tweet, we facebook, we snap away, and everyone is joyous and united in the unusual experience. And though I have travelled tons and ‘those’ forms of precipitation are not unfamiliar to me, I still join the masses and the fun. Some complain about everyone commenting on the same thing – but isn’t that the point? Isn’t it the miraculous ability of heightened times – weird weather events, soccer matches, concerts, etc. – to bring everyone together and eliminate differences that makes these times so exciting?
And it’s not even limited to humans – these are the times when extra attention is given to animals and the environment and everything in it. I think that’s pretty exciting. When the hail storm hit I was alone at home trying to take care of a flustered pigeon. It flew against my balcony door in the weather confusion, literally looking like it had just been sloshed around in a washing machine. I fed it and watched it warm up and, when the storm stopped, it flew off again to continue its pigeon life.
So maybe nothing spectacular happened to me personally in the last while. I didn’t save the world or stop poverty or create magic in an artistic endeavour, but maybe, just maybe, I made a stray pigeon happy. And that’s gotta count for something, right?
