Because of a crushing farming schedule, our friend Bruce was unable to attend my recent 50th birthday party. Instead, he sent me a folded note in which he’d wrapped 11 seeds, the color of dark caramel and the size of my baby fingernail.
“Dear Annabel,” it read. “I am so sorry I am not going to make it today. I hope you have a celebration worthy of the occasion.
The wind feels almost indecisive at this time of year. It comes, it goes. Sometimes it roars in full of bluster, other times it creeps about in quiet whispers. The other night something made the wind panic because it raced up the hill, hurtled through our open walls, and dervished through our vegetable garden, tearing off a papaya tree’s thick limb laden with green fruit.
An Irish philosopher poet accompanied me to Livingstone. When I left America I packed him away in my heart and in my mind. He boarded the plane with me in Virginia and together we took off into the wild.
I was chatting to a friend in America a while ago, telling her about my average day on the farm here in Livingstone, when she suddenly piped up: “Annabel, you sound just like a Bush Martha!”
Combretum seeds contrasted with mupitipiti seeds make for a terrific coffee table arrangement.
Trust me, I’m no Martha Stewart.
I was sitting at my desk in our tin house, corrugated iron walls all wide open in a futile attempt at tempering the 43-degree afternoon heat, when a gust of wind whipped through. I heard it before I felt it. The wind sounded like a fanfare of tapping toktokkie beetles foretelling a sudden change. Then I was wrapped in it, briefly.
Yomar Monsalve, my Michelin-starred new kitchen bestie, and I were back-and-forthing the other day about a dinner I was planning for his farewell from Livingstone, when he announced he’d bring along a “formula made from the magic sindambi for everyone to taste.
