The last rain

The last rain
I usually get up in the pre-dawn darkness and park myself out on the khonde with my little notebook. I reflect and write and plan the day as I watch the sunrise brighten the Eastern horizon. Miriam’s house offers plenty of good opportunity with its wide khonde on all sides allowing me to follow the sun or the shade as the day moves from morning cool to mid-day heat. The weather pattern since I arrived has been comfortable evenings and mornings then intense mid-day heat. Even Wednesday three days ago, the heat was so bad at 1:00 in afternoon that everything and everybody sort of crawled to a stop. Christopher had walked to town in the middle of it and suffered from the intensity of the “classic African sun.”

But Friday the low cloud settled in and the day never really warmed up. It was a very comfortable ride to town. The road is mostly downhill going except for the last kilometre where the road crosses the dam and rises into town. On the other hand, the ride home is 4 km of what the French call a faux plat – a steady constant uphill grade –that even the big trucks have to down-gear for as they grumble their way up. By the time I am back at the village regardless of the hour on those hot-sun days, I have worked up a good sweat. In the great heat, it was a huge drenching sweat, but today it was just a hanky wipe to recover.

The morning breeze is cool now and as I sit here, I reminded of the sunrises over the Kiamika reservoir. Long slowly transforming light shows and before you are aware the full day is there and the show is over. Saturday morning there was a very overcast sky with low clouds that gave the eastern sky a lovely hue, but to my surprise a black cloud skudded over and let out some very light rain. It was so light, I only really noticed it by the noise on the tin roof. The ground is so dry that I couldn’t see the raindrops landing because it was sucked up like a blotter by the thirsty soil. Exceptional for its rarity and I guess that is why it was exciting even if it didn’t last very long.