Posts Tagged ‘mountains

01
Nov
10

Small Things

By SlickTiger Leave a Comment
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I looked down the old and dusty road I drive home today and for the first time saw that it was summer.

All around me the vineyards were green and exploding with life and the evening was warm and the sun was setting slow and late behind the jagged mountains that flank us.

I shopped in my shorts for the week’s groceries and instead of rushing around the store to get all the stuff on our list as quickly as possible, I just walked between the aisles and watched the sparrows that nest in the ceiling swooping around the Pick ‘n Pay, free.

I listened to old Kings Of Leon after supper and remembered what summer is like back up in Joburg. The smell of freshly cut grass on a sweltering day, the feel of your fingers pruning because you’ve been swimming too long. Coke fizzing up with ice.

I’m not sure how I’m supposed to be living, who I’m supposed to be hanging out with, what I’m supposed to be wearing or saying or thinking or doing. I don’t know if I’ve got it all figured out, I don’t know that I’ve got anything figured out, but I know that there’s something in a summer day that somehow makes every single damn thing worth it.

 

 

Tonight I’ll hold my girlfriend, warm, sweet-smelling and beautiful, and we’ll drift off to sleep together and we’ll be happy.

It’s my birthday on Wednesday, I’ll be 27 years old and while I ain’t changed, I know I ain’t the same

I hope it’s a sunny day on Wednesday, that’s all I want for my birthday. That and to wake up next to her.

The small things.

-ST

16
May
10

Saturday In Jonkershoek – A Photo Journey

By SlickTiger 1 Comment
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It’s funny how ‘the real world’ has this way of catching up with you sometime in your 20s. One minute life is kinda breezing along like it always did, and the next you’re elbows deep in bills, car insurance, medical aid, deadlines at work, traffic, grumpy co-workers and then what? Marriage, children and a whole other heap of stuff I don’t really want to think about right now.

Sometimes you’ve just got to leave all that shit behind you and go for a walk. That’s what J-Rab and I decided to do on Saturday. We packed a backpack with a couple of beers and drove about 15 minutes to the Jonkershoek Nature Reserve where we had lunch and took goofy pictures of each other.

 

 

After lunch we entered the reserve, excited as kids at Christmas and got a killer picture of us getting ready to hike the SHIT out of that place.

 

 

The road we took meandered round in a wide circle past a huge dam and through a pine forest. The smell of pine needles, the cool, fresh feeling of winter’s edge biting through the dappled afternoon sunshine.

We talked about a different life for us, a different future where J-Rab becomes a rich and famous model and I become an award-winning novelist and script-writer, and we pose on magazine covers together and holiday in exotic places that we sail to on 500ft luxury yachts with all our friends.

“It’s on the cards babe,” I told her, “it’s fate, you can’t fuck with fate.”

All around us, mountains stretched up to the sky and I wanted to climb the highest one and stand on the top, my arms outstretched in the sunshine and shout down into the valley below in my own invented language until my voice got horse and the people listening all chuckled and, shaking their heads said, “Crazy fucker…”

 

 

I know Saturday is probably going to be a day I’ll remember for a long time because it was simple and easy and filled with laughter, J-Rab’s and mine. Days like that you lock away somewhere deep inside and, when times get bad, you take them out again and hold them up to the light and remember that life was better once, and it will be better again.

 

 

-ST