So totally me!

Nothing much has changed. I still wear cheesy hats and aprons.

I would say 44 Floss Street, but I could be wrong. The address was drilled into my head. ‘Where do you live?’, ‘44 Floss Street’. Just in case I decided to pack my bag and leave home I suppose. Floss Street was in Kensington. Not London, but Johannesburg. Our house stood on a ridge of a hill and the ‘pass’ made of flagstones, ran by our house, all the way into Bez (Bezuidenhout) Valley. That is how I remember it.

If you stood in our back garden you could see all the way down to where the pass met the road in the valley. In between there was veld and rocks. Sometimes, when the idea struck us, my grandmother would pack a little lunch for us, our ‘padkos’, travel food and walk halfway down the pass, choose a flat stone to sit on and eat our lunch. We would take Rex, our dog with us and pretend we were far from home. A little adventure; I liked adventures, I still do.

This is possibly the only photo that exists of me cleaning a car. I think that the experience didn’t make it to my list of favorite activities. However the pinafore became part of the wardrobe. I sew my own. Not very well, but aprons are not a fashion item so I get away with it. I remember all my aunts and grandmother wore aprons when cooking or cleaning. My mother was not into aprons. They do tend to make you look a little slovenly.

We all lived together in this large house overlooking the valley, seven adults and Elsje. A year or so later my parents and I moved to our own home. Seemed very quiet to me.

Our Christmas holidays were usually spent in Durban, down on the coast in Natal. The whole family would pack up and spend a couple of weeks there. This one year I went with my grandparents, aunts and uncle but my parents didn’t join us. I knew my mother was expecting a baby and when I returned home there he was. Things were not so quiet anymore. So much better.

A while ago, Kristy, Rosie, Marco and I went to Mexicali for a really delicious breakfast and on the way back at a gas station I saw a hat that probably no one else would buy. A floppy, straw, little bucket shaped thing, and I averted my eyes, just in case temptation got the better of me. As we were nosing around the store, the others saw it too and decided that it was totally me. I wear my little straw hat often and I so agree, it’s totally me.