Packing List

It's the middle of the night and I've tried three times to get back to sleep, but it's no use.  So I come to my computer to find comfort, find solace, find a way to release and quiet all the voices in my head screaming for attention.  Because tonight, the voice that's yelling the loudest is the one racing away at a speed of 120 km/hour shouting all the things I want to pack up, right now, to take back to America with me so that I don't forget a single one.

I want to take the smell of the sweet rain on the hot asphalt in January.  The pungent heaviness of the jacaranda canopy in October.  The way the entire city vacates in December and I feel like Joburg is my own personal playground.   The richness of Em's deep, thick, coloured, straight-from-the-township-of-Eldorado-Park accent when she says a Bible verse.

I yearn to take the mint ice cream from the Bryanston Market and the croquets from Moemes cafe and the impossibly rich butternut and feta quiche my friend Jenny made for a baby shower that one time.  I want to wrap myself in the complicated, delicate and robustness of the people, the history here that's beautiful and messy and gives me so much hope watching this genuine and gorgeous story of daily triumph unfold.  

I'm already missing the broad shade of the acacia tree and the brilliance of a winter brush fire creeping across the veld.  I wish I could take the glistening sparkle of the entire city after the first rains have come, each raindrop laden with the dust and dirt and dark coldness of winter.  I want to take the impossibly smooth melkterts I still haven't managed to make properly and the wonderful taste of Tizer that makes me feel like I'm 10 years old, pretending to drink a grown-up beverage every time.

I feel a deep need to uproot and take the wild olive trees Todd bought me for Christmas three years back from the fabulous little indigenous nursery that is a sanctuary in a concrete city and the naartjie tree that I've transplanted four times and yet it manages to continue to grow.  I want to take the view from my kitchen window, the only flat in the entire complex with a view of anything besides bricks, of my tender lime tree against a backdrop of impossibly purple jacaranda flowers.  I want to package the sound of all the kids in the complex playing hide and seek on the common lawn in the summertime while all the adults stand around and make impromptu plans for dinners together.

I wish I could keep the gritty feel of the springtime before the rains come and soothing feel of homemade lotion on my kids' skin when it's so desperately, desperately dry.  I want to take the fire pit I dug for Todd and wrap it up like a birthday present, along with all the friends we've gathered around it.  The view of the city, the city from my perspective not the skyline, all twinkling and sparkling with newness, freshness, just-built realizations of homeownership and growing families and new schools from that little hill you pass just before descending into the hidden valley at our end of the Earth on the West Rand.  I want to take the little cafe just around the corner from my midwife's office, and my midwife for that matter, because they're both warm and cozy and maternal in a way that makes you instantly feel like you are home.

I want to take the biting, tart flavor of a Woolworths frozen lemonade and the familiar smile of Presca bringing it to me or the way Todd smiles whenever he drinks a passion fruit and lemonade, so much the boy I dated years ago.  The way a Christmas braai tastes and the textures of the holiday season in shorts and slip-slop shoes and the smell of sweaty children and mud and chlorine.

I want to package up into a box the soothing familiarity of the long drive up north to a friend's house or my MOPS group or the church with Granny Anne sitting at the front desk.  I want to take the thrill of the hunt for one random ingredient I need for some recipe I want to make and the inexplicable sense of victory when, after months and months of searching, I find exactly what I'm looking for.

I want to take the incredibly earthy and unbelievably intense flavor of the mushrooms and the way my kids say 'portobello' with a soft accent, not quite South African, but totally not American.  The impossible silence of living in a city this big but not hearing a siren for weeks and the unearthly racket of the hadida at 5am just outside my bedroom window.  I want to neatly fold up and keep in my back pocket my kids' teacher so that when I get homesick, because I will, and am desperate for a bit of South Africa, I can pull her out and hear the sweet, lilting sound of her voice saying, "Ack, you know what...?" and be comforted.