A Complicated Memory  Lesley-Anne Scott

We left Zimbabwe, the troubled country of my birth in Africa, some some two years ago ago. In many ways I feel as if I have deserted a friend who is without hope. I sat together with my husband last evening, watching some television before retiring. It had been a full day and this was a place to unwind and slow down. Although seated in Cape Town, South Africa, hundreds of miles from what was our home in Zimbabwe, my mood was usurped as a wild life program presented. Hijacked beyond firmly established boundaries, which keep emotional responses to the familiar in check, the visuals replaced reality reminding me of a childhood homesickness. That twist and kneading massage of the solar plexus, acknowledging the absence of so much more than just my home. I miss the essence of the land and although the storms build here in their own splendor, the picture it is not the same.

I miss the clouds…. Extensive, white, cumulous, tinged in darkness, piled up and rolling higher and upward from the horizon, to a place where they encircle me in their humid and blanket warning of rain. Thirst breaking drops gather momentum, pulled to the earth, fast falling and stinging. Harder they tumble, drenching clothes and melding them to shape and form. Just seconds only from dry to drenched, from walking to running and laughing, to finally collapsing breathless behind the safety of the back door and standing in a pool of water from heaven. Curls damp and twisting, the sweet taste of rain as it trickles down, clothes sticking and clinging, peeled off and discarded for steamy water filling the tub. Coffee, hot and sweet, blended with the sensual pleasure of rain thundering down on the hot tin roof invoking an archetypal memory.

I pine for, and times there are, when caught unaware, I stumble upon them in places unexpected. On a screen, on a page, in an image sliding across a monitor. They surprise me, reminding me of season upon season of thunderstorms taken for granted, where I lived within the notion that their experience would be forever mine.

Now, here they were again… before my eyes, startling me – brown dusty savannah, game beneath a tree and the lifted lens, like an all seeing eye, focuses to capture the clouds...ominous and rolling, transporting them, without warning into my vision. So vibrant, as to experience the perfume of dust settling into the damp spaces where I walk in dreams, those messengers of the night which haunt my imaginings. Every aspect of myself transported back into all which holds me captive still, all which binds me as willing prisoner, for I would never be set free. I balance the thought as the words tumble in surprise and yearning – ‘I miss the clouds…’

I catch my breath at the pain it invokes, for I am startled into a place of absolute longing, like an un-assuaged thirst. The mirage hastens past all reason, from belly to breast in one inhalation, settling in a stinging dam behind my eyes, an amygdalin response to the rush of remembrance. I recall, I memorize, I ache for and experience the intangible absence of that which was once as familiar as my own breath. Refreshed again, acknowledged… my bitter-sweet attachment to the clouds which carry the rains to Zimbabwe.

There have been times, throughout my life there, when I would anticipate and fantasize about not being there. For the one purpose of being able to remember and long for and scribe. Perhaps because experience has taught me, that there is a significant aspect of appreciation whose expression stands guarded by the need for goodbye, and there is little as poignant or curative as defining the absent and articulating it. Cumulous as a cloud, words gather and fall like rain, beating an innovative and un-trodden pathway through the passages of the mind, culminating in the sweet taste of tears and the warmth of holding near to the heart, a complicated memory.

Bio: I was born in Salisbury, Rhodesia and lived my early childhood in a small village called Umnaiti which is not too far from a whistle stop town known as Que Que. One of nine children, I was placed fourth in line and had three brothers and five sisters. Mine was an idyllic childhood. Although we seldom had enough money, it didn’t seem to make too much difference to us as children, and certainly we never went hungry. Our family moved to Bulawayo, still in Rhodesia, when I was about five years old and I did my schooling there. I lost my own sweet Mum at the tender age of eighteen and moved again back to Salisbury, now known as Harare, to assist my Dad in the raising of those siblings still at home. Married at twenty one, I slipped into the life of suburbia for 24 years with a son and daughter who filled our lives and various accounting positions in commerce. I was forty six years old when they left home to start married lives of their own. My interest in writing developed around this time and I have written several short stories and a fair amount of poetry since then. The decision to leave our country and resettle in South Africa was taken when it became impossible to continue running our business in Zimbabwe. We left our troubled country in August 2005 and have lived in Cape Town some two years. l am loving being here in this beautiful Cape Peninsula and am grateful to this country for the opportunity to make our home here. Life is very different for us and everything that could have changed has changed, barring my husband and children who have remained my one ‘constant.’ I look back on my life knowing that it has been rounded and full of adjustments and I trust that the future will include the opportunity to expand my writing aspirations. Contact email: lesley@scottweb.co.za

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