There Is a Tree I Lean Against

By Lucretia E. Pretorius

In spare yet sure strokes, Lucretia Pretorius conjures up a childhood in rural Canada, where sentient trees and winter’s aurora borealis silently wove themselves into a young girl’s imagination. All, alas, left behind when she moved with her husband and infant daughter to South Africa. To a barren land, alien culture, and loveless marriage.

Even so, meadows and trillium-carpeted woods can never be truly left behind. They are very much present, along with the people and places of Africa she came to love, in the verse of a woman who refused to be crushed by a life-time of departures.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lucretia E. Pretorius
• Release date: Apr 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310817908

Lucretia E. Pretorius

L.E. Pretorius was born in Toronto, Canada and raised in the farmlands of Ontario and French Canada during WW2 and its aftermath. She’s a graduate of Montreal’s McGill University. In the late 1960s she moved with her South African husband, a geologist, and their infant daughter to South Africa, where she accompanied her husband on field trips to San (Bushmen) country, exploring for diamonds for his employer. (Happily, he didn’t find any.) They were tempestuous years, as apartheid was rapidly unraveling and, as it turned out, her marriage. Even so, Lucretia resolutely pursued her formal voice training and performance of opera — her passion from earliest childhood. She writes with the drama and passion of a diva, in spare, beguilingly simple prose reminiscent of Isak Dinesen (“I had a farm in Africa . . . ).

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There Is a Tree I Lean Against

There Is a Tree I Lean Against

Lucretia E Pretorius

K-Selected Books

Copyright © 2015 by Lucretia E. Pretorius

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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For Nic

Still, by God’s grace, there surges within me singing magic.

Agamemnon, by Aeschylus

Preface

In spare yet sure strokes, Lucretia Pretorius conjures up a childhood in rural Canada, where sentient trees and winter’s aurora borealis silently wove themselves into a young girl’s imagination. All, alas, left behind when she moved with her husband and infant daughter to South Africa. To a barren land, alien culture, and loveless marriage.

Even so, meadows and trillium-carpeted woods can never be truly