HEATHER LIND: Oribi Mom – Hello darkness my old… eish!
Do you think loadshedding will be a thing when our children's children are listening to that same nightjar calling, 'Dear Lord, deliver us' in the dark?
Did you know that fiery-necked nightjars still call when it’s raining? I hear them as I venture out into the still dark rainy dawn to put on a load of washing. Why am I doing this again? Oh, yes. Loadshedding.
School sandwiches, cups of tea, baby reflux medication and sterile syringes, showers and baths, vacuuming, getting things out of freezers and fridges, cooking, charging things…all confined to random slots in a 24-hour period. Only, life does not fit so neatly into those times when you have three children and work online from home. It doesn’t fit neatly even if you don’t have children or work from home.
You need electricity to have an internet connection. On the farm, you also need electricity to pump borehole water for household and farm use. Rain tanks help, but not for long, and they don’t work either if they rely on a little electric pump for pressure.
It’s okay. We are used to it now, right? We are even grateful that enterprising apps tell us when it is going off and for how long. But, any length of power outage is still inconvenient. Changing a baby’s nappy at 3am by the light of a cell phone is challenging, to say the least, especially where you’re trying to locate random spots of butternut-colored mess while holding tiny feet out of the way. When you only manage to get one eye open and half a brain awake, the task is almost impossible.
Yet, the eagle owls manage to come and hunt crickets on our lawn easily enough at that time. The rats run through the roof sounding like a soccer team at certain times of the year. They don’t need light to smell their way through life and find an easy meal of discarded toddler snack items. Thankfully, they didn’t find the half-eaten biltong in the couch I happened upon the other day.
Some time ago I also had a reminder why lighter coloured tiles were, in fact, a good idea. I question this choice occasionally. I was walking to the kitchen for a baby bottle or something at 1am and stepped over something dark, thanks to my peripheral vision. I thought it was a sock or a broken toy, both common items waiting to pierce tender soles.
Instead, shining my cellphone torch on it revealed a giant black scorpion casually crawling near my bare foot. Close one (and nothing a toddler-sized cup with a lid can’t handle for chucking outside).
Like our schedules, our eyes can adjust to the dark somewhat. But I’m still hoping and praying that we don’t have to make it a permanent arrangement in this country. Do you think loadshedding will be a thing when our children’s children are listening to that same nightjar calling, ‘Dear Lord, deliver us’ in the dark?
HAVE YOUR SAY
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