Memories Vol2

There is a lot to be said for losing photos of one's childhood and the kicked in gut feeling that it leaves knowing that you can't go back and get them seeing polaroids never got backed up onto hard drives as those didn't even exist in the seventies and eighties and how would you get them on there if they did?

How lucky people are with the tech these days. Well it did happen to me, losing all our photos I mean. It sucks, but although I can't get them back I do remember a lot and find that many memories are sparked by events and music.

My previous piece started a journey of where I grew up and some of what I experienced as a child. One of those fond memories was spending time on my grandmother's smallholding in a small village like community called Ganspan near a small town called Jan Kempdorp in the Northern Cape South Africa which was and to some extent is still a farming community. The people from the district were not rich people, but the warmest, most hospitable and helpful church going family people you could imagine.

The 3 bedroom houses were small, but held a warm atmosphere with all the family love inside. Outbuilding to the left if the kitchen door with an outhouse toilet next to it and to the right of the kitchen door some 45 meters away was the brick chicken coop. Gran's place had a Mulberry tree next to the chicken coop, a Quince hedge on the road front to keep some dust from the house as the roads were gravel. Apricot tree next to the water canal, peach trees on the edge of the vegetable garden, prickly pears behind the outbuilding and all along the back of the house in front of the kitchen door and toward the road was a driveway under cover of a enormous grape vine consisting of three different types of grapes which she pickled along with just about everything else to supplement her pension as my grandpa died not long after the war.

The whole district was watered by canal from the dams further upstream and at the plots people still had to walk and open a manual sluice till the fields are watered and then have to run all the way back to close the sluice again. My grandma still did this all at the age of 66 after she got up at 4 a.m, knee'd dow, stoked the woodstove, baked bread and got everyone else going. I miss the woman like crazy.

The old farm district church we went to every Sunday when visiting gran

The exact model wood stove gran chopped wood for and cooked on for many many years

and a canal sluice exactly like operated by my granny

and one more song from my childhood

Such great memories from a safe, clean and free time. Why is the new world so against all good?