The (tin) roof over my head...

The weather and plant life of the San Francisco Bay Area are remarkably similar to that of the Cape Town region. Knowing this, when I moved from the former to the latter, I had this kind of subconscious expectation of finding the housing to be roughly similar as well.

I was wrong.

In America, wood is relatively cheap and easily obtainable. In South Africa, however, wood is too costly to choose over cheap and readily available clay and cement bricks, so the houses here are mostly made of brick. Besides, the Bay Area is plagued with earthquakes, something virtually unknown in South Africa, and that fact alone affects Bay Area architecture. Houses that are stick-built rather than brick-built are more likely to flex in a quake: rigid brick buildings tend to come apart when the earth beneath them begins to rhumba, raining bricks and mortar onto any unfortunate occupants and the streets outside.

But the differences don’t stop there. We’ve never heard of shingle roofs in this place! You can drive from one end of the country to the other and you won’t find one! Cement tile roofs, thatched roofs, even the occasional slate roof…but not one cedar shake or asphalt shingle will greet your eye. Mostly what you will see, however, are roofs made of corrugated tin, and those, mostly, will be painted green.

Americans tend to think of corrugated tin roofs as being very down market, the kind thing that you find on tumble-down shacks in rural poverty pockets. South Africans, on the other hand, find corrugated tin sheets to be perfectly acceptable roofing for dwellings of any calibre, up to and including luxury homes in exclusive areas and five star boutique hotels. But, since South Africa does very little in the way of insulation, the roofs tend to be rather ineffective for anything other than keeping the rain…and uninvited guests…out. They certainly do very little to keep a house the desired temperature inside!

Bay Area residents who don’t have air conditioning in their homes (by far the majority) depend on open windows and fans for cooling. Despite intensive vector control efforts on the part of the county, however, pests such as mosquitoes and flies (not to mention larger four-legged mammalian pests…and even some two-legged ones) are a regular problem. The solution is simple: window screens, something seen on virtually every house in America. In fact, when I was selling my house in California, it was missing two window screens and the agent informed me that I had to replace them or she couldn’t list the house!

By contrast, after four years in South Africa, I have yet to see a window or door screen! There are no vector control programs by the municipality and mosquitoes are a fact of life to the degree that bug spray companies like Raid (yes, we have Raid here) make products that plug into the wall and give off a mosquito-killing vapour throughout the night so you can sleep without being chewed alive. Mosquito nets aren’t the romantic décor items they are in the States, here they are functional additions to the bedroom…we sleep under them or risk being sucked dry in the night.

And its not just mosquitoes that fuel small industries…you know those net “food umbrellas” that are so commonplace on picnic tables in the summer? Well, they are an everyday part of the South African kitchen. The flies here are aggressive, fearless and persistent, and are not easily waved away. They fly right for your nose or eyes…I’ve had them fly up under my glasses! One would think that people would screen their doors and windows to keep the cheeky buggers outside where they belong, but the styles of windows built into the majority of houses here just aren’t screenable…and that’s assuming you could even find window or door screens at all!

Drains…yes, drains…are different here. In the US, when the water goes down the sink drain, it goes directly to the sewer without ever being seen again. While that is true of toilet drains here…they are entirely enclosed…sink drains are different. And not better. We live near a “vlei”…a wetland…and insect life is rife in such a place. Not only do mosquitoes regularly grace us with the dubious honour of their bloodsucking presence, those drains are an “open house” sign to every manner of creepy crawly creature in the environment…most especially cockroaches. They emerge from the underground drains at night and clamour up the household pipes that lead to the open drains and crawl right up the drainpipes into sinks, tubs, and showers! In America, of course, the house drains merge into a single drain to the sewers without ever seeing daylight. Here, there is an open drain outside the kitchens and/or bathrooms that multiple pipes from the house flow into, and that drain merges with the toilet drains underground and flow to the sewer. I haven’t yet hit upon a surefire solution for keeping the roaches outside, but spraying around the drain openings helps, assuming you are ok with indiscriminate pesticide spraying. I used to not like pesticides, but after four years of finding these nasty little unwelcome visitors using my drainpipes like a freeway to the inside of my house, my qualms have been laid to rest!

Another major difference between homes here and in the Bay Area is in the area of heating. We don’t have any.

Well, that’s not strictly true…we do have fireplaces and space heaters, but furnaces for winter heating? Those we do not have. And I’m not just talking about older homes or low cost housing, either. From newly built tract developments to luxury homes in exclusive areas, South African houses are built without heat.

Now I find this to be truly peculiar. With weather similar to the Bay Area, which gets damned cold in the winter time, I cannot imagine why built-in heat is absent in houses here, particularly in newly built ones. In Silicon Valley I had an older home (built in 1960) and when I remodelled in 2003 I not only replaced the original gas furnace, I replaced the thermostat as well. I was thrilled with the ability to program the furnace to come on just before I arose each morning and warm the house before I had to hop out of bed, and to automatically shut down as scheduled, only to come on again just before I get home. My heating bill plummeted as I obtained better control of my furnace and was able to heat just the rooms I needed for the limited time I needed them to be warm.

My first South African winter was a huge surprise! You have to understand that Cape Town is a thoroughly modern city, complete with freeways, smart shopping malls, and such contemporary culture icons as McDonalds, KFC, and Coca Cola. We have glass-fronted highrises, five star hotels and restaurants, and a yacht club. And mile after mile of neat suburbs full of snug modern homes ranging from condos to mansions…none of which have built-in heating systems! With winter temperatures as low as 40F…same as the Bay Area (and the optimal temperature for the inside of your refrigerator!)…but in a house with uninsulated brick walls, an uninsulated tin roof, and no furnace, I froze my buns off that first winter!

Another great surprise for me occurred the first time I wanted to use my curling iron. I have that awful baby hair…a head full of thin, silky, stick-straight tresses that cannot be coaxed or coerced into curls…or even waves…without the diligent application of heat and those heat-activated sprays. Imagine my astonishment when I first went into the bathroom, arms laden with brushes, sprays, clips, pins and curling irons (I have two…a big one and a little one) and could find no wall outlets! (We call them “plug points” here.) Well, I assumed this was some kind of oversight in the little cottage we were living in until we moved into our second home. This house had been recently remodelled and a sumptuous new master bath had been installed, and there were no plug points in the bathrooms in this house, either! It seems that you aren’t allowed to put plug points into a bathroom here, which I find bizarre.

Now this is this massively inconvenient if you want to do something like…oh, say…blow dry your hair…or use a curling iron…or an electric shaver…or plug in a charger for said shaver or perhaps your electric toothbrush. But aside from inconvenience, just think about stepping out of the shower on a 40˚F winter day…you are dripping wet in a bathroom that doesn’t have any heat, the walls and ceilings are not insulated, the floor is ceramic tile laid over cement, and there is no place to plug in a small space heater, either. Winter bathing here is for the brave…or the resourceful: I have a long extension cord and a small heater under my dressing table in the bedroom and when I go into the shower, it sneaks around the corner into the bathroom and contentedly hums its merry…and warm!...little self as an accompaniment to my shower!

While living in the Bay Area and married to my now-late husband, Chuck, I came across something I found quite curious. His brother’s new wife, a slavish trend follower (although very much old enough to know better!), decided to remodel the kitchen and in doing so, had an entire wall of beautiful oak cabinets scrapped. Now, these people had the kind of money that people like you and I only wish for, so cost was not a factor in her remodel. And yet, for some reason I simply could not fathom at the time, she choose to replace those gorgeous oak cabinets with cheap white melamine! When I questioned her choice, she informed me that these were “Euro-style” cabinets, her tone clearly implying that made them superior to the natural oak she had so cavalierly discarded. I didn’t get it.

It took moving to South Africa for me to finally figure it out. Despite its location at the southern most tip of the continent of Africa, this country is more European than not. Europeans flock here for their winter holidays because it is mid-summer here, and the place abounds with great hotels, eateries, and shopping at a fraction of what they pay for the same in Europe. The dominant culture here is Western and white, even though the majority of the population is black. This country is more European than African, and it was that fact that finally unlocked the puzzle of a rich American woman putting tacky melamine cupboards into the kitchen of her luxury home.

Wood, as mentioned before, is scarce here, and so South Africans have warmly embraced melamine as a substitute. And where did they learn that? From the Europeans, who have been faced with dwindling timber resources for some time. In a classic example of acute shallowness, my unquestioningly unoriginal sister-in-law completely overlooked the fact that melamine kitchen furnishings exist as a cheap (read that inexpensive and tacky) substitute for wood cabinets that had priced themselves out of the market for the European middle-class. Struck only by the fact that they were the latest rage in Europe, regardless of reason, she junked thousands of dollars worth of perfectly functional oak cabinets and replaced them with tacky, cheap, and tasteless white melamine. It would be like trading in her giant diamond for a cubic zirconium of the same size for no more reason that CZs had become the newest “must have” Euro-trend.

You cannot find wood cabinetry here. At least not the kind of wood cabinetry that Americans are familiar with seeing hanging on their kitchen walls. Wood furniture is amazingly expensive (no wonder my husband wanted me to bring my wood furniture here from the States!), and the average middle class South African cannot afford to have wood cabinets built for their kitchen. But South Africa takes its design and fashion cues from Europe and it shares Europe’s paucity of wood, so it’s no surprise that Europe’s answer to escalating wood prices…cheap melamine cabinets…is the kitchen furniture of choice here. But the fact that they are economical and ubiquitous doesn’t make them anything more than a cheap substitute for the real thing, despite marketing spin designed to make us think we are buying the silk purse of “Euro design” instead of the sow’s ear of cheap melamine: fibreboard covered with plastic-impregnated paper.

But for all that, South Africa really does have some lovely homes and with a little practice, some of the differences in design can be worked around. We had our handyman build us screens for an outside drain so that water can go down it, but nothing can come up. We still don’t have window or door screens, but the sumptuous gauze canopy over our bed pretty much makes up for it. And heat? Well, my husband had our bedroom suite air conditioned last year and lo and behold! It has a programmable remote and one of its settings is “heat.”

I was toasty warm last winter!

Surprises…

It was four o’clock in the morning and we were getting ready to leave on a road trip to visit my father in Oregon. My husband, Chuck (now deceased), was in the bathroom packing his toiletries.

“Hon,” he called out, “Do we have any clean combs?”

“Bottom drawer of the sink cabinet,” I called to him as I folded a garment and put it in my bag.

“Ummmmmmm…” I heard from the bathroom. “Uhhhhhh…would you come here for a minute?”

Being 6’5” tall and weighing nearly 300 lbs, Chuck was afraid of very little. But he wasn’t stupid and there were just some things he knew he should check out before taking action. And this was just such an occasion.

“What’s this?” he asked in a whisper, slowly opening the drawer a couple of inches. “Its not one of the cats, is it?”

Despite his intimidating size, Chuck was one of those tender-hearted people who couldn’t bear to see another creature suffer. In particular, he had a soft spot for feral cats and he put out food for them…resulting in a regular parade of the creatures in and out of our yard and even, occasionally in the house. We weren’t entirely sure how a little furry creature made its way into a drawer in our bathroom, but there it was, curled up and sleeping soundly. I bent down and peered more closely at the featureless ball of fur.

“It’s not a cat,” I finally told him. “Fur’s all wrong.”

“What is it, then?” my city-raised husband asked. “A raccoon?”

We lived on the edge of town, only half a block from the city limits. Across the road at the top of our street was a rural area with fields and grazing cattle and horses. And a little creek that meandered through the area. It was as close to living in the country as we could afford, and we did get some of the ambiance of country living…namely nocturnal visits from the local wildlife banditry. We had a large fruit tree in our front yard and many is the morning that I would go out to the driveway and see tell-tall prints in the dirt under the tree.

I continued to look at the animal, curled up so I couldn’t see its face or shape, and then slowly slid the drawer closed. It wouldn’t do for it to awaken suddenly and, in a panic, leap from the drawer and go hide behind our massive waterbed…we had to leave in a couple of hours! “It looks like a possum to me,” I said softly, easing out of the bathroom and closing the door behind me. “We have to get it out of here before we go.”

“I’ll get my welding gloves,” he said, and started for the bedroom door.

“No, no, no!” I cried hurrying after him. “I just saw a thing on TV where a pest removal guy had to remove a possum from somebody’s house and he said their teeth are so sharp they can bite right through something like that!”

He paused, then turned back into the bedroom. “So, what do we do?”

I mulled things over for a minute. “How do you think it got in?” I finally asked him.

It was his turn to mull. “Ummmmm…mebbe it came in through the hole where the drain pipes go through the wall? From under the house?”

I stepped back into the bathroom and quietly opened the door under the sink. This was an older house, built on a raised frame with a crawlspace beneath and the pipes ran beneath the house in this space. I looked at the hole the pipes passed through and realized that someone…or something…had enlarged the original hole until it was big enough for a small animal to squeeze through. If this was a young possum…and its ability to curl up in a small bathroom drawer indicated to me that it just might be so…it could probably squeeze through the hole.

“Yup,” I said, exiting the bathroom. “I think you’re right. And if it came in that way, it can go out that way, too.”

“How do we make it do that?” His voice dripped scepticism.

I shrugged. “We just have to find a way to make it want to leave.”

This was not my first encounter with a possum or, more correctly, an opossum. The opossum is North America’s only marsupial and they are slow-moving lumbering creatures about the size of a large housecat when full grown. They have poor eyesight and hearing, and are most often seen by Americans as roadkill…dead by the side of the road. This is due to a confluence of factors: they tend to forage at night, they move too slowly to get out of the way of an oncoming car, and they have an unfortunate habit of feigning death when extremely frightened…which would cause them to keel over and play dead in front of an oncoming vehicle.

Possums look very much like overgrown rats. I once had a cat who believed it to be her life’s work to pile my front porch with her hunting trophies and one morning, as I went out my front door to work, I found the largest, ugliest, most grotesque dead rat I had ever seen on my front stoep. It was not until much later that I realized that hideous monstrosity was a very young possum, and not until later still that I considered the thing may actually have been “playing possum” when I saw it, having dropped over in fright when I opened the door. There were, after all, a couple of half-chewed dead mice on the porch as well, and that possum (they are scavengers) might have been having a late breakfast when I opened the door and scared it half to death.

The possum in the bathroom was my second close encounter with the beasties. Chuck and I pondered our options keeping in mind that a) we didn’t want it to get out of the bathroom and into the rest of the house and b) we were running out of time if we wanted to get on the road before the infamous Bay Area commute traffic got started. We needed not only an effective way to evict our unexpected tenant, but expedience as well. Inspiration finally struck.

“Go out to the kitchen and get the biggest wooden spoon you can find,” I told him. “I’ll keep watch here.” (The creature could conceivable enter the house by exiting its drawer and, from the space under the sink, pushing open the cupboard door.)

He returned with a long wooden spoon and we stepped into the bathroom and closed the door behind us. Chuck took a thick towel (to throw over the creature if it got into the room) and I grasped the spoon by its bowl, giving me a long stick. I slid the drawer open a couple of inches and began to rapidly poke and prod the creature to wake it up. Then I opened (just a couple of inches) and closed the drawer vigorously about 15 or 20 times to scare it and make it view the drawer as a perilous place. We then exited the bathroom to give the animal time to exit.

We went about finishing our packing and loading the van for our trip and, just before it was time to leave, we crept back into the bathroom and opened the drawer a crack. It was gone! Cautiously, we opened the door under the sink…no possum there, either! We left on our trip but Chuck fretted the whole 12 hours we were on the road because we hadn’t had the time for him to patch the hole around the pipe and make it possum proof.

My father, an old farmer to whom possums are old hat, was frankly amused by Chucks fascination with the animal. “I wonder if it will come back,” he pondered. “What do we do if it is still there when we get home?” he would ask.

My father’s response was typical of an old woodsman such as himself: “They’re good to eat,” he said.

When we got back, the drawer was empty and I suspect Chuck was a little sad as he put up the wall patches to keep his furry little nocturnal squatter from returning. But the story doesn’t end there.

Possums are considered to be rather lazy, complacent creatures. They are opportunistic feeders, move slowly, and are not aggressive. But you’d never know that if you had ever encountered one that felt threatened…just not threatened enough to roll over and play dead for you. A few weeks after Chuck evicted the bathroom possum, Chloë, our little Pekingese, began to set up a ruckus in the front garden where she had been outside sunning herself. Since she was never prone to yapping for no reason, I stepped out onto the porch to see what had set her off and found her barking at something in the bushes at the base of our property line fence.

Fearing it might be a snake (there are rattlers just up the hill and they come down the hill when the water dries up and the field mice come down to the neighbourhoods to forage), I rushed over to remove my little angel from danger. Instead of a snake, however, I found Chloë had cornered a young possum…possibly our uninvited guest from a few weeks back? It was backed up against the fence, it’s mouth open in a menacing manner, ferociously hissing and showing Chloë a mouthful of wickedly sharp teeth. I am not sure if she viewed it as a threat or just an intruder, but the dog wasn’t letting move anywhere near the house! I called her away and, the moment its path was no longer blocked, the toothy little beast set off towards the street, its safe haven forever destroyed by the presence of the tiny little wolf descendant that patrolled the property.

When I told Chuck about Chloë’s discovery, he immediately rushed to the bathroom to make sure the patch on the wall beneath the sink was secure. It was…but I think he was a little saddened by the realization that the creature, after having been evicted by a snapping, snarling dog, probably wouldn’t return.

But I’m not convinced that it stayed away. The possum may have gone, but the little possum prints in the soft dirt under the plum tree did not.

I have a very nice life...

I have a very nice life.

It’s not perfect, by any stretch of the imagination, but at this time in my life I am living better than at any time in my past.

For some people, life is a struggle from the moment they are born…and it remains a struggle until the day they die. The definition of struggle is subjective, of course, dependent on the lowest common denominator for survival in the society in question. But in my life, the struggle to simply survive, to have enough to eat and a warm, dry place to rest my head, often came perilously close to being lost.

A person living in a tipsy shack on the edges of Gugulethu might find that comment laughable, since I grew up in America, but it is no less true for all that my definition of privation is richer than hers might be. Before the word “homeless” came into common use, I found myself so, staying with a series of friends and working peripatetically. When I was able to establish my own place, it was an endless struggle to earn enough money to pay for that roof and eat. There were infinite days of hunger, eating one scant meal a day or living on unsweetened, milkless oatmeal for days at a time. There was a time that my entire cache of personal possessions could be rolled up into a sleeping bag and carried on my back.

This life of privation was not freely chosen, not a vagabond manifestation of my hippie soul or artistic free spirit, but the culmination of a series of events in my life, most of them not of my choosing. From the sexist paradigm that deprived me of a scholarship opportunity in favour of a less-deserving male student to the corporate ball-gazing that deprived me of a respectable career opportunity because their tests told them I was “too smart to be happy doing this work,” I found myself uneducated, unqualified, and unemployed.

For most of my life I compounded an unfortunate beginning with expedient choices that had short term advantages but were long term disasters. But hardship creates limits, not only on opportunity but on your thinking. Long term planning is not possible when you have been forced to focus and plan only as far as the next meal or the next night’s rest. It was a relief to come to a place where I could plan week by week instead of day by day. And it was a luxury when I could indulge in month-to-month living, although no less a struggle.

My life has never been one of plenty. Even when I reached a time of having an abundance of stuff, I knew no other way to live than to battle my way through life. I never lived in an upscale community, I could barely afford to buy a house in a working class neighbourhood and then it was a never-ending struggle to scrape together enough money to pay the mortgage. Twice I came perilously close to foreclosure, and only managed to get out from under by refinancing the house…increasing my debt and monthly burden, and paying the instalments from the proceeds of the new loan, a strategy calculated to end badly, but the only solution available.

I had dreams, but unlike others, I never mistook those dreams for reality, entitlement, or even goals. Life had ground me into a pragmatist, a person who knew her dreams were just that…castles in the air…pretty fictions to be enjoyed but never mistaken for reality…or even possibility. One of my favourite dreams was to come to a place where I could work for the pleasure of it, not for the necessity. In this dream, I would have a fine house…not opulent, but generously sized and nicely situated in a pretty garden…and I would drive a nice car. My life would have security and I would feel loved and valued by my partner. In this dream I would have a nice car…practical, of course, so I would not feel guilty for having it…but a quality marque. I would not have to worry about money…and although I would be able to surround myself with things of beauty and quality, lavishness didn’t seem to be a part of my dreams. And I would be forever relieved of the drudgery of housework…I had laboured as my mother’s maid from the time I was big enough to drag a chair to the kitchen sink and wash the dinner dishes, and the ultimate luxury, to my mind, was someone to wash my dishes and clean my bathroom on a regular basis without stressing my budget.

It is perhaps a supreme irony that I grew up in the richest nation on Earth and could not partake in its wealth. I was born with a fine native intelligence but that is not enough in a society that values educational certification over intellect and quickness, that values one gender over another, that substitutes supposition for empiricism. Like most women of my generation, I ultimately looked to marriage for my salvation but I soon found myself in another situation of short term gain followed by long term loss: marriage should never be entered into with ulterior motives, no matter how compelling they might be.

Ultimately I was able to have a life free of hunger and privation, but maintaining that life was an endless struggle. Always, I was one payday away from disaster, one severance package away from losing it all. In Silicon Valley, where I lived most of my adult life and where big companies eat little companies and giant corporations swallow big companies whole without warning, sudden unemployment is a fact of life. But in a place where an executive secretary earns less than $5000 a month but the monthly payment on a modest tract home in a lower middle-class neighbourhood can take all that and more, the distance between affluence and desperation can be measured in weeks of unemployment after a sudden downsizing or corporate buy out. When it takes all you can earn to just keep above water, when you are no longer earning, you drown quickly. And all of the months of princely earnings do not blunt the sword that hangs portentously over your head…on the day the pay checks stop, the sinking begins.

And so I found myself widowed, alone, my income cut in half, my obligations undiminished. Life insurance is an unattainable luxury when you have to worry from one month to the next if you will have enough money to make your modest mortgage payment, when you don’t have enough to put new tires on the 14-year-old truck or the 24-year old station wagon, when you have given up all of your costly vices and still have to scrounge for change for enough gas to get to work. What had been a modestly successful effort by two people to live with a modicum of comfort became the uphill battle of one person to survive.

But there was an epiphany in that sudden plunge into widowhood and self-sufficiency: the sure and certain knowledge that if I kept doing the same things, I would keep getting the same results. A never-ending length of days full of scrimping and struggling stretched before me…unless I changed something.

And so I did. I took out that loan and finished the renovation of my house. I took a long term temp job that paid rather well because the boss was especially odious and couldn’t keep employees from throwing up their hands and walking out…they had to bribe us with fat salaries to stay in our jobs. I just ignored her nasty barbs, icy demeanour and picky personality and put those voluptuous pay checks in the bank. And I began rewriting my life rules.

The first rule I rewrote was the one that said I had to pinch every penny and live close to the bone. I finally remembered that worry is a wholly unproductive activity…the only thing it is good for is to increase stress levels.

The next rule I rewrote was the one about being appropriate. I started wearing brighter colours, I quit fretting about my weight, and opened myself to new experiences, people, even foods.

I then decided that people who live in the past have no future and began planning the next chapter in my life rather than staying stuck in old ones.

Funny thing about opening yourself to new stuff…new stuff happens! Today, that little old tract house is someone else’s burden and I have a lovely, spacious home set in a third of a landscaped acre. My old pickup has been replaced by a Mercedes SUV, and that horrible boss is ancient history: now I employ the sweetest little maid you could ever want to meet and a weekly gardener. My new husband is a professional man who earns a respectable income, is investment savvy, and pays the bills without stressing me about finances. “It hurt me to think of you alone and struggling like when I met you,” he told me the day he increased his life insurance…this, despite his being considerably younger than I am.

I like my life. I live in a beautiful home set in a beautiful garden, all located in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. My house and garden are superbly kept with very little effort on my part. I can buy what I want in the supermarket, although years of frugal living have conspired to keep me from being a spendthrift and I still shop the sales…but now it’s the steak and chops sales rather than hamburger!

Most of all, my life is filled with love. A horde of happy yappy little doggies dance at my feet when I return from an outing, my maid hugs me when she comes to work with her handsome little baby boy tied to her back and again when she goes home in the afternoon. And my husband…he has half a dozen pet names for me, he brings me chocolate when I least expect it, and tells me he loves me without warning or prompting.

Yes, I like my life. It is full, it is abundant, it is rich with those things necessary for a life of comfort and security and love.

Pity I had to come half way around the world to achieve it.

Have you ever seen anything more spectacular?

This is one of the plants growing at the Goble Palms Guest House in Durban. I've never seen anything like it before, and it took a lot of Googling to finally track it down.

The plant is called "medinilla magnifica" or "rose grape" and this stunning flower is about 10 inches long. A native of the Philippines, it can be an invasive plant since each flower ripens into a berry that, once dropped to earth, will become a new plant. It is, however, a breathtakingly beautiful flower.

See more of my photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/sweetviolet/

What is all this "cougar" b.s?

Far from being liberating or egalitarian, the word "cougar," as applied to older women, is a pejorative term that subtly implies a predator-victim dynamic, with the woman in the role as predator.

I am married to a much younger man. Twenty-five years younger, to be exact.

In the old days this was called a “May-December” romance and it raised eyebrows whether the older partner was male or female. Older women were widely expected to be “past all that nonsense by now” and older males often found themselves followed by whispers of “there’s no fool like an old fool.”

In today’s generally more tactless and overtly judgmental society, much-younger wives are still widely regarded…openly now…as gold diggers and fortune hunters. Their older husbands may be publicly disparaged as being “old fools,” but they are secretly envied by their same-sex peers for their young, firm, fecund trophy wives. Older women who partner with younger men, on the other hand, are pretty much universally regarded as cradle-robbing predators, as evidenced by the pejorative nickname, “cougar.”

I suppose that is because most people don’t think pretty young men…at least not emotionally healthy ones…will pursue older women, therefore any older woman who is coupled with a nubile young man must have chased him down. And there must be some kind of aberration that makes him vulnerable to her attentions…either the woman must be deceptively young-looking or the young man must have some kind of unwholesome mother fixation. Or she pursued and seduced him with her greater experience…and perhaps openness…in sexual matters, using his own carnal nature against him. Why else, after all, would a younger man seek relationship bliss with a woman a decade or more his senior?

But my own experiences…and the experiences of several female acquaintances…don’t bear out that predatory image. In every case of which I am personally aware, the younger men have approached the women first and, in some cases, actively pursued them. Sometimes a man falls for a woman and her age…or race or weight or hair colour or breast size…is just not important enough to override those things that attract him to her.

As a plumpish widow in my early fifties and possessing no illusions about my allure on the dating circuit, I decided to place a personal ad. I wasn’t happy with the dating sites as they were too structured for my taste…and too crass. I opted for placing a carefully crafted ad on my local Craigslist.org site, and waited for the responses.

In the first week more than sixty men responded to my ad and I had quite a surprise: nearly half of them were married and of the remaining half, there were a surprising number of young men who quite clearly stated they were interested in a romantic meeting with an older woman. This quite shocked me! I refuse to disrespect another woman’s marriage (even if her husband does) and I wasn’t looking for a quick fling, regardless of the man’s age. So I reposted my ad on Craigslist with a few modifications: I specifically stated that no married men should respond and made clearer allusions to my age (I said that I had “gray hair creeping into the blonde”). Over the next week I received a further sixty or so responses and while the numbers of married men declined, the numbers of younger men…and I mean men under 35…did not. (I should specify here that I did not post a photo or physical description of myself because I was not interested in men who would select/reject me based on my appearance.)

Not seeing myself as a cradle robber and presuming that I would have little in common with a twenty-something, I sent notes of polite disinterest to the boys and winnowed through the responses from the men. Three in particular stood out: they seemed to be intelligent men who were thoughtful, interesting, and well-spoken. After exchanging correspondence with them, I finally narrowed my interest down to one particularly erudite and interesting fellow, a professional man from another country who was working on a contract in my area. We progressed from email to instant messages to telephone conversations, and I was further intrigued. He was funny, engaging, thoughtful, and because he was not American, his viewpoints and insights were very novel and thought-provoking. In an IM session one evening about six weeks after we initially connected he asked me out to dinner and I happily accepted. It was then that he dropped his bombshell…

“Before we meet,” he wrote, “there is something I need to tell you.”

“OK,” I typed back.

“If you don’t want to go out with me after this, I’ll understand…no hard feelings.”

My heart sank. What could he possibly tell me that would make me want to break our date? Was he a child molester? A serial rapist? Married?

“I’m 29,” he typed.

My heart sank even further. In that moment I realized that as a result of our communication I had begun harbouring secret hopes for a romantic relationship with this captivating man. I quickly demoted him from “potential partner” status to “fascinating friend.” I would have to re-run that ad and this time specify “45+” somewhere in the text.

“Not a problem,” I responded, having mentally and emotionally changed gears.

But things were not to turn out the way I anticipated. Instead of an arm’s length friendship, over the next eighteen months we became lovers and very intimate friends. When it came time, five months after we first connected, for him to return to his home country, we both wept at the airport. Three months later he was back, on vacation, spending nearly a month with me. And he was back again six months after that. And then I applied for and received my very first passport and flew to his home for a three-week holiday that culminated in a proposal of marriage. “I just can’t see the rest of my life without you,” he said. We recently celebrated our fourth anniversary.

A cougar is a predator, a cat that preys upon other creatures to satisfy its own needs. Driven by hunger, it gives no consideration to the feelings or rights or intrinsic value of their victims. They simply take what they can get their claws into without regard to anything other than their own needs. Applied to older women who find themselves coupled with younger men, it is a pejorative, insulting term that implies that the women give no thought to anything other than satisfying their own wants and desires.

I love my husband and he is the focus of my life. He may be twenty-five years younger than I am, but I am not a cougar.

Sweet Violet and the Turkey

Christmas 2007

I am accustomed to turkeys that are weighed in pounds and roasted in degrees Fahrenheit: kilograms and centigrade confuse me.

And so our Christmas dinner started at 7:30 Christmas morning with me searching the internet for the proper length of time to roast a 4.35 kg turkey in a centigrade oven. After a bit of searching I did find the info I needed (1 hr per kg at 160C), but en route I managed to turn up amazing array of unusual, exotic, and even peculiar ways to prepare a holiday turkey.

Much as my liberal heart quails at the admission, I must confess to being a conservative when it comes to my holiday turkey. All these trendy new ways to pimp the bird just make me cringe. A few years back, the rage was deep frying the whole turkey which, I must admit, made me laugh when I first heard about it. At a time we were being admonished more and more to reduce our consumption of cholesterol-laden foods, the newest fad in holiday cooking is to deep fry the turkey! I never took the trend seriously so I don’t know for a fact, but didn’t one recipe include stuffing the bird with crinkle-cut potatoes so that it emerged from a vat of boiling grease with French fries on board?

I’ve been away from American television for some time…and I’ve never been terribly impressed with those poncy, pretentious television chefs, anyway…so I missed the new “brining” trend apparently foisted onto American home cooks by one such fellow. Evidently the hook is that brining supposedly gives the turkey more flavour and makes it juicier… Well, duh! If you soak anything in salty water, the flavour will be enhanced…that is what salt does!

And why is it surprising that soaking something overnight in liquid will make it juicier when it is cooked? I prevent pork chops from getting dry by braising them…cooking them in a liquid. Surely it is painfully obvious to virtually everyone that soaking a turkey overnight in a barrel of water will make the turkey absorb water...especially if the water is salted (hello…salt causes tissue to retain water, remember?). And the more water that is contained in the turkey’s flesh at the time it goes into the oven, the more “juice” in the turkey when it is cooked, right?

But aren’t we are supposed to be reducing our salt intake, not increasing it? My husband has high blood pressure and I make sure he even orders his margaritas without salt…I’m going to increase his sodium intake by soaking his Christmas turkey in salty water? I think not!!

I read an article that advocates cooking the turkey in a roasting pan without a rack and with a cup each of oil and water in the bottom of the pan. Eeeeek! Roasting is a dry process! You can lard the meat or baste it with oils or liquids, but you do not put water in the bottom of the turkey pan and let the bird’s backside boil in it!! This same article advocated marinating the turkey in red wine and stuffing it with ground pork…just what we all want…purple turkey that tastes like pork.

Another article warns against stuffing the bird, citing two reasons: 1) it makes the oven time for the bird longer and 2) stuffing = salmonella. Well, the oven time thing is a no-brainer…and kind of stupid, actually. First of all, a heavier (stuffed) piece of meat, whether turkey or a deboned and stuffed leg of lamb, is going to take longer to cook than a lighter (and presumable unstuffed) one. Secondly, this is a lazy man’s argument that turns the paradigm upside down: the normal, traditional, time-honoured method of preparing a holiday turkey is to stuff the bird and roast it, and the roasting time is based on the weight of the bird (which increases when you put stuffing in it). Omitting the stuffing will reduce the weight of the bird, thereby reducing the time it takes to cook. If you cut a rump roast in half, it will take less time to cook, too, because you reduced its size and therefore the time necessary to cook it. So, yes, omitting the stuffing will decrease cooking time. So will cutting the turkey in half and cooking only one of the halves.

It looks like a little knowledge is a dangerous thing when it comes to turkey, since we’ve been safely eating stuffed turkey for a couple of hundred years or so, and the salmonella thing is a very recent concern. Why has it not been a problem in the past? Because people prepared their stuffing in the morning and stuffed the bird immediately before putting it into the oven. But some bright souls who wanted to have a lie-in on Christmas morning and, doubtlessly following some contemporary trend, took a shortcut from the traditional method by stuffing the turkey the night before and putting it in the refrigerator overnight. Then, trying to steal a march on time and tradition, they popped a bird full of icy cold stuffing into the oven and failed to roast it long enough to thoroughly cook that stuffing, ultimately poisoning themselves and their guests by thoughtlessly deviating from long-established methods.

What is so wrong with preparing a traditional meal for a traditional celebration? It’s not like turkey graces the table so often that one gets bored with it. If you want some variety in the holiday meal, why not change from mashed to roasted baby potatoes, ditch the canned cranberry sauce for a fresh cranberry-orange relish, or substitute a steamed romanesco…a curiously fractal form of broccoli…in place of those limp green beans?

Perhaps the problem is one of ignorance. We grew up eating those succulent turkey dinners at grandma’s house, but nobody bothered to teach us how grandma got the turkey so moist and flavourful and the stuffing so fragrant and tasty. And, instead of asking an older generation of accomplished turkey cooks, we turn to our most ubiquitous modern source of information, the internet and, instead of finding grandma’s turkey recipe, we happen upon a zillion megabytes of misinformation intermingled with trendy ways to ruin a traditional holiday dinner.

Given the difficulty of finding clear, time-and-kitchen-tested recipes for preparing a turkey the way grandma did, as a turkey-roasting grandma whose Christmas dinner (using a free-range bird, not one of those “pre-basted” factory turkeys) won high praise at the latest family turkey orgy, herewith a traditional turkey stuffing and roasting recipe. Print it. Save it. Use it.

This is for a bird weighing approximately 10 lbs, unstuffed. Scale the portions up or down, depending on the size of the bird (works for roasting chicken and game hens, too).

Traditional Stuffed Roast Turkey

Utensils:
Meat thermometer
Roasting pan
Two thin skewers
Roasting rack*
Aluminium foil (heavy)
Basting brush

Ingredients:

Turkey:
1 turkey, approximately 10 lbs (5 ½ kg), fresh or thawed according to package directions.
½ cup melted butter

Stuffing:
1 cup diced onion
1 cup finely sliced celery, including tops
3 to 5 tbsp Bell’s Poultry Seasoning
2 tsp crushed garlic
1 egg, beaten
½ cup melted butter
12 slices bread, freshly toasted
Salt
Additional liquid if required

Gravy:
Cooked giblets, minced
Broth giblets were cooked in
3 tbsp corn starch (mielie flour)
½ cup water

Prepare the turkey before beginning to make the stuffing: do not cut the band of skin holding the legs in place, and do not remove the turkey’s tail. Pull the legs away from the band of skin to open the bird’s cavity and remove the giblets. They will probably be bagged, but if not, make sure you have all of them removed from the cavity: neck, liver, heart, and gizzard. Set these aside for now.

Rinse the bird’s cavity with cold running water and pat the bird dry with paper towels, inside and out. Place on a large platter or board.

Begin heating the oven (160C or 325F), making sure to remove all unnecessary oven racks. Locate the roasting pan you will use and make sure the turkey fits into it. Place a roasting rack in the bottom of the pan. *If you do not have a roasting rack, make a rope of aluminium foil, fashion it into an oval and place it on the bottom of the roasting pan for the turkey to sit on. Spray the roasting rack with cooking spray (or coat with oil).

Place the giblets in a saucepan, cover with water, add salt to taste and set to boil. Allow to boil for twenty minutes or until they are done. Set aside. Do not discard liquid.

Make the stuffing:
Cut the toast into cubes approximately ½ inch (1.25 cm) square and place in a large glass or ceramic bowl. Make the cubes larger for a dryer stuffing, smaller for a more moist stuffing. Sauté the onion, celery, and garlic until the onion is translucent and soft. Add to the toast cubes and toss well. Add poultry seasoning and salt, toss again. Add butter and egg and mix thoroughly with clean hands. The stuffing should cling together when a handful is squeezed. If it does not, add broth from the boiled giblets a few tablespoons at a time until the desired consistency is reached.

Pack the stuffing into the bird. Most recipes warn against stuffing the bird tightly, but this can be safely ignored. The more tightly you pack the stuffing, the less moist it will be, so let your taste be your guide. I make the dressing fairly dry, as guests who want it moist can add gravy; guests who don’t like wet stuffing can’t remove the moisture. When the cavity is full, lay the bird breast side up and slip the legs back under the band of skin that originally held them. Stuffing will extrude a bit from the cavity, but this is desirable…if the stuffing expands during cooking (it will absorb some moisture from the bird’s juices), this is where it expands to.

You will probably have some leftover stuffing. If so, you have two choices:
1) oil the inside of a covered, oven-proof dish and put the stuffing in it. You will put this in the oven during the last hour of roasting time.
2) stuff the neck cavity. If you choose this option, you will need an additional skewer to secure the flap of neck skin. Also, you can add some cooked mild Italian sausage pieces and some chopped fresh apple to the leftover stuffing before packing it into the neck cavity. This will give you two stuffings for your guests to choose from.

Last steps before roasting: use the skewers to pin the wings to the bird’s side. Try to tuck the wing tips behind the drumstick so they won’t burn. Place the bird, breast side up, in the roasting pan, being careful that the turkey does not actually touch the pan itself (the roasting rack or the rope of foil should keep it up off the pan’s surface.

Roasting the bird
Using a basting brush, brush melted butter over the turkey’s skin, making sure to brush the sides as well as the top.

Insert a meat thermometer into the turkey’s breast, making sure it goes deep into the breast meat but that it does not touch bone.

Make a tent of foil and, shiny side down, place over the turkey. Secure the foil to the sides of the pan, making sure it does not touch the turkey. Leave the ends of the foil open…you want to tent the turkey to prevent the breast meat from cooking too fast and drying out, not seal the bird into a steaming vessel.

Place pan in oven and shut the door. Do not open again for at least 3 hours. During this time, mince the giblets into teeny-tiny bits (you can discard the liver if you don’t like the taste of liver). Place the bits back into the broth they were cooked in.

After 3 hours of cooking, open oven, slide oven rack forward, and uncover the bird. If there are juices in the bottom of the pan, use the basting brush to baste the bird, If there are no juices, baste with melted butter (or a 50-50 mixture of olive oil and butter), replace the tent, and return to oven. Do this again every 45 minutes until it is time to remove the tent.

A rule of thumb for figuring out approximately how long it will take your bird to cook is to allow about 25 minutes per pound (1 per kg) of unstuffed bird. This will give you an approximate starting time for preparing the additional dishes that will be served. About an hour before the turkey should be done, remove the tent, baste the bird, and baste again every 20 to 30 minutes until the bird is done.

Turkey is done when it reaches an internal temperature of 190F (87C). Hold the turkey at that temperature for 20 minutes to ensure doneness throughout. When finished, remove the turkey from the oven onto a warmed plate. Allow the bird to stand for 20 to 30 minutes to “set.”

Gravy time

During this time, make the gravy. Place the roasting pan across two burners on the stove, light both burners and set to low. Add a cup of broth from the giblets and, using a wooden spoon, stir the water, scraping at the browned bits stuck to the bottom (and possibly sides) of the pan until they dissolve into the liquid add the remainder of the broth and giblets, stirring until they come to a boil. Cook for a minute or two, then pour the entire contents into the saucepan in which the giblets were boiled, setting aside the roasting pan (careful! It’s hot!). Return the mixture to a boil.

Mix the cornstarch with the plain water in a measuring cup, stirring until the cornstarch dissolves. With your dominant hand, stir the boiling broth mixture and with your other hand, slowly pour the cornstarch mixture into the boiling liquid. Depending on the quantity of the boiling liquid, you may not need all of the cornstarch mixture. Add only until the liquid thickens to gravy consistency and then remove immediately from the stove. If you use all the cornstarch mixture and the gravy seems too thin, just keep boiling and stirring. It will reduce and thicken in no time.

As soon as the gravy reaches the desired thickness, remove immediately from the heat and pour into a serving dish or gravy boat.

And there you have it: a traditional roast turkey with bread stuffing and brown gravy.

Enjoy!

Rain, rain, go away...

It is raining cat and dogs. It is also raining lions, tigers and baby elephants....must be, otherwise how to account for the roaring and booming outside?

It is Christmas Eve Day in Cape Town, the land of summer sun and winter rain...it is high summer...and the skies have opened up and simply drenched us! The doggies are inside, huddled in their bed, quaking with each boom of thunder, certain that doom is upon us. And in the middle of the downpour comes a phone call from our holiday tenant, a young man who has rented our cottage for his Christmas holiday, that he has arrived and can we come let him in.

"Did you bring the rain with you?" my husband quipped, knowing our tenant had driven down from Gauteng, the home of summer rain. The man shook his head ruefully and gratefully accepted the proferred umbrella.

We showed him through the property, gave him the keys, and inquired if there was anything we could do for him. "Where's the beach?" he asked hopefully. Hubby gave him directions and he smiled his thanks. A Gautenger in Cape Town is like a Nebraskan in San Francisco...just show him to the big water!

Naturally, as soon as I was no longer struggling with locks and gates and an unwieldy umbrella, the rain stopped. Our Gauteng friend was probably frolicking in the icy Atlantic before my hair was dry, the rain having stopped about the time we handed over the keys.

Oddly enough, we were expecting the rain despite forecasts and barometer readings to the contrary. Two nights ago...when the weather was bright and uncommonly hot, my hip started to ache. I had to take a pain pill to sleep, because it was like a toothache, deep in the bones. Last night it was the other hip aching. We checked the barometer and the Oregon Scientific weather station: one was predicting sun, the other predicting clouds. My hip, it seems, is the only accurate one among the three!

Hubby's Mum and Grandmum have been here for a week and we've enjoyed entertaining them. Grandmother, who turned 80 this year, is not especially impressed with the big malls and their shiny stores...it wasn't until we took a drive to the open-air market in Gatesville on Saturday that she perked up. Several hours (a quite a few rand) later we made our way back home and gratefully retreated to the cooler confines of the house, the sun having been brutal. Hubby decamped to the air conditioned comfort of the bedroom while we women sat around in the dining room unpacking and admiring our purchases. Over the course of the week we managed to decimate a mall full of factory shops and suck down half a tank of petrol finding the factory shops that weren't conveniently clustered together.

Tomorrow is Christmas and they are flying back to Durban in the evening, so tomorrow morning I'll be up early stuffing the turkey and putting together a fat Christmas dinner. We'll be having Christmas pudding and vanilla custard for dessert if I can figure out the proper way to serve them....