The winters

My winters number more than 40 now, but it’s hard to recall them all. Some blend together; others are too vague to put a date stamp on. I was born in Cradock, just after the winter of 1977. Was there good snow that year? I’ll have to ask my mother. I’ve never thought about the winter just before my birth. I was around already, floating inside my mother, a beach ball on the surface of a warm, blue swimming pool…

The winters of my childhood were firstly Eastern Cape farm winters, then Highveld and Kruger Park winters. Most of my childhood was spent on our farm, where the rest of the world hardly intruded. Television came at some point, and I remember