First on my list was to plant creepers to try and cover the hidious fence that Peter had put around my house. As it was so hard on poor Hendrix to travel up and down to George with me, seeing that I could not leave him alone for a whole day, I had asked Peter to put up a barbed wire fence around my house, as that would keep keep Hendrix in, and the stray cattle out. Many a morning, I had stepped into a heap of fermenting dung that these cattle and horses left for me as a present, right in front of my doors! The Haarlem lawnmowers as we called this animals, were so clever, and would just ever so noncahalantly push open the gate, that not being very strong anyway, and have a feast on your veggies or fruit trees.
It was an arduous job, as the ground was baked hard by the sun, so I made a few small holes which I filled with water, and after the water had all filtered away, I would take out the soft soil, and repeat the whole performance over and over, until the holes were big enough! Was so pooped after that, I had to rest for the rest of the day, but when the fierceness of the sun had abated a bit, I planted my climbing roses, and told them to please grow quickly, and make many leaves to cover Peter's fence.
I was sitting on Irma's veranda when my eye caught sight of this huge animal in the pen where Rosy, Ronalee's beautiful pink teenage piglet lived before I went to Scotland. I squinted for a long time to try and decide what kind of monster it was that had taken over Rosy's stye, and when the sun shifted enough not to blind me, I saw that it was one BIG pig! I had no time for speculation, as I had to go on with my tasks, the one now first on my list being my front door that was looking a bit tattered and in need of a mending hand! I had an electric tool that is used to heat up the old paint until it makes bubbles, and that is then scraped off with a flat iron tool, but me not owning one I just used my putty scraper. It took ages, as there was about ten layers of paint to get through, and in between this some brown, sticky stuff that just would not lift.
Later I walked up to Ronalee to see what kind of monster had ousted the cute Rosy, and was staggered when Ronalee told me that the monster that now looked at me with small, red, round eyes full of hatred, was no one else but that cute little piglet that was so playful when I left.
It was during this time that I made the acquaintance of a new inhabitant of Haarlem, Johan du Plooy, an artist and a man with the zaniest sense of humor, and a hearty, out of his stomach laugh, that I knew I could be friends with. He told the most hilarious stories about his stay, and the one about the young boys pestering him, had me in stitches.
Some of the Haarlem kids have quite a hard time, as they are stuck there almost their whole life, and over week-ends they roamed the streets unsupervised, and bored, as the parents would be sleeping it off after a night at one of the shebeens. According to Johan, this kids threw stones at his dog and his windows, and when he came out they shouted obscenities to him that made him so cross that he gave chase, his almost seventy year old legs not carrying him as swiftly as the wind, as they were not so agile anymore. But the kids, egging him on to come after them, seeing it as great entertainment, then climbed over a barbed wire fence, and with that between them became even more dapper, shouting and waving him on with: 'Kom Oubie kom! Kom Oubie kom!', and that means of course, 'come on old dodderer, come on!' He was as cross as a teased wasp, and swore vengeance. But it was a serious problem, as throwing stones at our windows was like a sport to them, and in the beginning we had a lot of broken windows when we've all been away over a week-end.
I had also, a few mornings before the sun was out, been busy in my garden, trying to get rid of the weeds and kikuju grass that had quite usurped my whole garden while I was away. I have found the ground below my house was very rich, as there was once a dumping spot for a lot of the previous occupants of my house, and all their waste had deteriorated into a beautiful black compost.