Tag Archives: colours

Oribi Mom

Oribi Mom: An Ancient Artist’s Palette in an Unlikely Place

There is beauty all around.

 PHOTO BY PIXABAYMarch 4, 2025

There’s a tree I love on the highway between Harrismith and Ladysmith. I have seen it since I was a little girl, travelling home. I lived in Northern Natal for a little while and played sports sometimes in Harrismith. Even after that, we’ve made trips up to Joburg to see family, embark on planes, or visit game reserves.

Every time we come back from the highveld to the lowveld, there’s a spark. I see that big flat mountain in Harrismith and feel a tingle. Then, I see the ‘Racing Car’ mountain, which my children insist on calling ‘Hippo Mountain’, where I look for bald ibises. The little spark of joy grows because I know the descent is coming.

You have to go super slow down Van Reenen’s. Driving at 60km/h feels like trudging through clay after a few hours at 120km/h. The police assure us it’s not meant as a lesson in patience; they want us to arrive alive. Before you get to Smelly-Truck-Brake Pass, though, there’s this beautiful tree. It’s huge compared to everything else in that location, so it stands out. It’s also right next to the road.

Look Closer at the Tree As You Come To This Ancient Place

I have no idea how this tree is still standing. For 30-plus years, I’ve taped it as absolutely ancient. It hasn’t changed. The tree of my childhood memories looks just the same. It’s a gum tree, but let’s skip over the part about it being invasive and water-guzzling. It’s dazzling. It stands straight up, towering above you as you come up the hill. You can see it from quite a long way off, and as you get closer, it touches the sky.

You can’t help but notice the phenomenal composition its stripped bark reveals layer upon layer. It’s like a bored artist has taken their palette and tried to get every colour there is onto one tree trunk – pinks, greens, yellow, blues, greys, oranges, and all the fancy colour names in between that I don’t know. ‘Rainbow’ would not even come close to it.

The ibises, cranes, and ducks get to enjoy it every day. I just catch a glimpse of it when I’m coming home. Is that why it’s so captivating? I hope to ask my grandchildren one day. Will they be coming home to beautiful KZN, too? To me, home is colours on a tree and the promise of the ocean.

What’s it to you?

Published here.

Oribi Mom

Oribi Mom: Yellowed Collars, Old Photos and Time Passing

“Ordering school photos might not be a thing in a few more years. I think I’ll miss it.”

PHOTO BY PIXABAY

May 16, 2024

How do you get sun-cream stains out of white school shirt collars? Tell me you’re a mother without telling me you’re one.

Apparently, a combo of baking soda, vinegar and fairy dust works. Other suggestions that have come up on searches included toothpaste, lemon juice, sunshine and a paste of Vanish. The collars are still yellow.

Maybe it’s the hard water on the farm here. Maybe it’s my woefully lacking knowledge of the types of material and what each needs to stay sparkling white.

Don’t bleach it, say the eco-conscious and the health nuts. (Also, this fades out the school badge!)

So, on photo day, it’s the least yellow collar that went on, alongside a hope and a prayer that Photoshop includes whitening collars in annual photo shoots. Say cheese, but don’t spill any of the yellow onto the collar, please.

These school photos really are something. It’s one day a year, but from my own school career, it was often the only photo.

I came from the era before digital photos. That time when mommies who could attend sports or other events had to bring a tripod or a steady hand and an extra spool to capture one or two good images of us precious darlings. Sports photos? Hopeless.

I have vivid memories of walking into Clicks to collect that little packet of developed photos. It smelled funny. Mom would flip through the photos and laugh or snort at the blurs, missed shots, and fingers in front of the lens. She’d take the good ones and put them into real-life albums with sticky plastic things you lift up.

When they get old, the photos don’t stay behind them anymore and get all mixed up when you take the photo album off the dusty bookshelf. But the images are still there. Immortal, for a while. That eighties hair on my friends’ moms was something else, I tell you. Perms, beehives, and bright colours stand out, even in faraway group photos.

It jogs the memory, even if you have to flip back a few pages to slip the lost photo into its correct place. In the history of things, photos feel like treasure to me. A silent glimpse into what’s come and gone that speaks far louder than many of the stories people tell.

Ordering school photos might not be a thing in a few more years. I think I’ll miss it.

Oh, and the answer is that green sunlight soap bar, of course. That’s the cure for yellow stains and everything else you want to sparkle.

Publish here.

Oribi Mom

Oribi Mom: Shifting Seasons (South Coast Herald Lifestyle Column)

What a gift it is to be able to pass the winters in such rich company.

PHOTO BY PIXABAY

July 4, 2023

There’s a definite shift as autumn fades on the South Coast. The grass starts turning brown, even with these strange storms every now and then that give it a boost of green for a few extra days.

When we look out over the valley to the opposite slope, the brown is obvious between the evergreen pines. But when you look at the canopy of the indigenous forest just below the house, it still looks as green as mid-summer.

Different Seasons, Different Visitors

But the stickiness in the air is gone now. And there are very different sorts of birds around the garden. The scarlet firefinches come out to hop over the short grass and through the thickets.

The toppies pair off and make a racket in the berry trees, competing with the clumsy mousebirds for the fruit. Even the Crowned Hornbills fly up from the bottom of the valley daily now.

The hornbills’ orange beaks glimmer in the sunshine as they noisily flit from tree to tree. They always look like they’re going to fall out of the sky and then pump their wings to lift their bodies again and again. It’s a very awkward flying style, and easy to identify if you can only see a silhouette against the glare. They’ve got quite a melodic sound compared to the screeching Trumpeter Hornbills, too.

So Much Colour and Life in Oribi Gorge in Winter

The Greater Double-collared Sunbirds are also fluttering about chasing off rivals so that they can sample the aloes in peace. The orioles are wonderfully vocal, too. They flash bright yellow with black heads, zipping right over our house as they disappear back to the safety of the forest in the late afternoon.

The kingfisher’s turquoise, the Amethyst Sunbird’s black, and the tinkerbird’s red dot are also daily gems. With all the colours, we rarely notice the brown grass or the dusty roads. What a gift it is to be able to pass the winters in such rich company.

Published here.