Fools Gold

 We came pretty close to chucking up city life and buying a smallholding 23 years ago.  We had the offer to purchase papers in hand, pens hovering over the space for the our signatures.  The plan was to buy a beautiful, treed plot near Millwood in the hills behind Knysna, and grow carrots. Or was it radishes - I forget.  There was no electricity, no water on tap - just vast expanses of fertile land, a dam and a river and the peacefulness that isolation in the back of beyond offers.

The plot that got away...

  We hesitated long enough to see that we were really not being sensible, or fair to our son who would either  have to spend hours commuting to a school in Knysna or become a child of the forest like in a Dalene Matthee novel.  

Millwood is a breathtakingly beautiful area though, and I left a little bit of my heart there.  We have visited it on and off my whole life, as it is near Sedgefield where my family spent our holidays.   It is also a very interesting area for two reasons.  Firstly, the indigenous forests had been home to elephants. Sadly now only one is  known to be living wild, the herd having been hunted and frightened by urban creep.  Secondly the area is well known  because in the 1876, there was a short lived gold rush.  Millwood was the name given to the settlement that developed for the hopefuls. The gold yield was not enough to keep the mining going, and the tin homes and shops and taverns were abandoned.  One or two have been restored, and some of the mining equipment and caves are still there for exploration.  Jubilee Creek is an excellent spot for a visit and picnic and a wander in a stream. It is well worth the time when you are next visiting the Garden Route.

Overgrown mining equipment at Millwood

A lot of South Africa's wealth - and a large chunk of its misery - has been built on gold. Gold threads are woven into our history since it's first discovery in the  mid 1800s.  In 1967, the South African government decided to mint a gold coin to allow citizens to buy and own some of the wealth of the land.  So it said. And Andrew's parents decided to invest in 3 Kruger Rands (named after Paul Kruger - the President of the Boer Republic where gold was first discovered), one for each of their children.

Andrew remembers being given his.  His parents traditionally pushed coins into the steamed Christmas pudding, and when he was 18, his slice of pud contained this generous gift covered in brandy sauce.  It was a rainy day investment, and one which needed to be kept safe.  After we married, and moved into our tiny fixer-upper home, we chose a cunning hiding spot to fool any would be intruders (and we did have a couple of those who helped themselves to our worldly goods.)  When we put some extra electrical plugs in the house, we hid the Kruger Rand in the wall socket and screwed on the plug coverplate.  Brilliant hiding spot, don't you think?

So good in fact that when we moved 8 years later, in the chaos that packing up one's life entails, we forgot.

It plagued us for a long time.  Perhaps we had hidden it so well that it was still there, and we could retrieve it. It felt like unfinished business, something that needed a resolution. The house had passed through a couple of families before we plucked up the courage to give it a go.  Armed with photographs of us (looking so young!) and our house renovations to prove we were the legitimate owners of the coin, Andrew rang the doorbell.  The new owners were charming, and obliging, although they said, they had had electricians in to create double plugs, but Andrew was welcome to look. Screwdriver in hand he removed the coverplate. Obviously the treasure was gone. 

It had been a fool's errand and yet it was an important one.  We no longer wondered if the investment was there waiting to be found.  We could make peace with the fact that we had made an expensive mistake and there was nothing we could do about it.  We could - finally - let it go. In fact we could even hope that the coin was a windfall that the finder truly needed and somehow we had inadvertently put some good back into the world.  (That is just a fantasy - new found gains can also be destructive.)

Also, I realised, I tend to hang on to past mistakes for far too long, hoping to go back and see if by magic I can undo them.  I can't. But it is good to get resolution and not always be wondering "what if." Let it go, Wendy, let it go.

Besides I have unminted wealth that can't be locked away in hiding places.  And I am pretty sure my children are grateful I didn't send them out elephant hunting or panning for gold in Jubilee Creek in their formative years. One day I will ask them.

 

 

Losing the block

 When we got married we bought a small dilapidated house in a friendly suburb.  It had everything we needed - walls, a roof and some outside space.  We added love and happiness, and within four years it was transformed into a family home.  (We also added paint, carpets, curtains and a kitchen with a dining room - but those were just structural changes.) In year 5 we celebrated our son's first birthday in our back garden.  It was a big family affair, because we had a big family.  Andrew's dad made a push along trolley for R with blocks that could be taken out and played with, and then neatly stored back in the trolley.  Such handmade gifts are real treasures.  R loved the block trolley - he wobbled up, grabbed the handle and started walking.

A few years later it was time to move.  We found a dilapidated house in another friendly suburb, and fell in love with this old fixer upper. (We're still here.) Moving is a stressful task, and being young and naive we decided to move everything ourselves with the help of a borrowed truck (and a friend - thank you Hazel).  We did car trip after car trip, and were pretty exhausted by the process.  And upset.  We couldn't find one block from the trolley that Grandad had made. Just one. We searched and searched, and finally reached the conclusion we had to let it go, and move on.

 Every now and then we would drive past that first house on the way to Andrew's work, and admire the garage door we had sanded and varnished.  Or see how the trees we had planted were doing.  Time passed, as it does, and we were well established in our new home.  I used to be an avid reader of  the property section of the Weekend Argus (one of my many strange habits....) and saw our old house was up for sale and On Show that Sunday.  We couldn't resist a trip down memory lane, so off we went to visit the tiles in the kitchen I had sealed a week before R was born, and see the kitchen cupboards we finished a month or so before selling the place, and check out our much loved garden.  We wandered through, pointing out this and that to the kids. In the back garden we had made a quiet spot with a bench and surrounded it with foliage to make it private.  It looked just the same as when we left. We went to sit on the bench as a last goodbye to the place.  And here comes the point of the story:  We sat, peacefully, admiring our handiwork, when one of us reached our hand down under the bench, and picked up the missing block.  Ten years later, and there it was, waiting for us to find it.

It was another extraordinary moment in my life. 

The lost block was returned to it's home, and the memory was complete.

But this is the other point of this story:  Andrew and I were chatting  to my brother about this incident a couple of weeks ago (while we were packing up the house my Dad lived in).  When we came to the part about who reached down and found the block, we each thought it was ourselves.  All these years I had been convinced I had seen the block. Now I am not so sure - Andrew thinks it was him.  The outcome is the same, but the process is different.  This is important to me, because memory can be a fickle friend. What other memories have I (unwittingly) distorted to fit my own narrative?  How much can I trust the details of my memories?  I found myself on shaky ground. I have been doing a lot of remembering lately, and I would very much like to be sure of the content and accuracy.  

One way to do it is to make memory blocks and try to fit them together to see if they work, and fit in the trolley, so to speak.  Mostly, though, I think, I need to learn to trust my heart, and accept that my experiences are just that - my experiences, and the memory of them forms part of the fabric of me. 

Lost things sometimes make their way back to us.  Even when we think they are gone forever.  Watch out for the unexpected!