Farewell to Kalk Bay
In the last quarter of 2016, I made the decision to leave Kalk Bay. I’d been up the West coast to a nature reserve at Pater Noster to see the spring flowers with my friend Sharon, and had had a powerful dream. The massive sound of the heaving ocean, incessant and insistent throughout the night permeated my whole body. But my Soul had reached me with the clear message that it was time for me to leave Kalk Bay.
I shared my decision with Sharon over breakfast. She was surprised as this news seemed to come out of nowhere. But I knew the portent of the dream and throughout my life I had taken action in response to strong impulses . I would act on this one too.
I narrowed down my criteria and started visiting small towns within a radius of two- to two- and- a-half hours from Cape town: Macgregor, Greyton, Stanford and Napier were places I started to visit, viewing property and working through what it was I really wanted at this stage of my life if I was to leave Kalk bay after almost 25 years.
I was 65, in good health (apart from my two hernia operations) and active. The Amani Harmonic Foundation was beginning to have a profile, and a series of regular partnerships and activities had started in Switzerland. There had been earlier disappointment with how things had unfolded in South Africa, prior to my walking the Camino. But that was in the past and the soirées du coeur had refreshed everything. This was a new start, a new phase and we could now extend the work of the Amani Harmonic Foundation to include South Africa, so I knew I would be moving between the two hemispheres regularly.
Wherever I decided to base myself would become the southern pole part of my two-fold life.
Planning the short trips out to potential new homes was delightful and I got the feel of what small towns had to offer. Increasingly I felt myself drawn to Stanford, 20 minutes from Hermanus.
A couple of days before I left for Switzerland for our October /November programme, I mentioned to the agent who had sold my previous home on Norman Road, and then three years later had found me the cottage on Windsor Road, that I was considering the move. I had just landed in Switzerland when she let me know she had a buyer, without even putting it on the market. Such was the desirability of Kalk Bay. They wanted it from January 2017. I agreed to be out by the 9th.
***
The final soirée was held in mid-December 2016. It was a ‘farewell’ event, and we had a record attendance. Roy had long since progressed to a 12-string guitar which he played masterfully and had joined forces with Giles an accomplished flautist. Together they were enchanting.
My friend Francois le Roux seemed always to appear at significant thresholds in my life, and when he heard this was a ‘finale’ he said he’d be there, driving down from Johannesburg. He arrived having driven through the Karoo and had stopped during the night to lie down in the open veld and look up at the majesty of the stars. He shared this experience evocatively on the piano. The old Bechstein sounded ecstatic. Later I joined his cello with my piano and I expressed what I was feeling deeply, my impending departure from this warm-hearted Kalk Bay community.
This was a particularly powerful and heart-opening soirée du coeur. Some of the gathered friends were perhaps a little perplexed, however, that I did not yet know where I would be after my things went into storage.
Two days later, on 19 December, they came to fetch my piano. A big truck, too wide to come down the one-way Windsor Road, had parked 40 metres up the hill at the top. I watched in trepidation as my beloved Bechstein was placed on a trolley and bounced up the cobbled street, hearing every jarring jolt. I’d been disappointed when I saw that it wasn’t one of the smaller piano-specific vehicles used by Ian Burgess-Simpson. He’d needed to engage an outsider being too busy on the Monday before Christmas, he told me on the phone when I called later to ask about its safe arrival.
My piano was going to have an extended period of ‘rest and restoration’, while I took the time required to find my home, now most likely to be in Stanford. A home to which she would finally return after her reconstruction. Actually, as Ian and I discussed the idea, it was becoming a ‘philosophical project’.
After the initial diagnosis he suggested a range of interventions, assuring me repeatedly that she would not lose the soft touch that I loved so much. Nor would they change the feel of her keys, keeping the cracked edges on some of them and the yellowing ivory despite the fact that a young technician was keen to apply his skill to whitening the keys. The original hammers were going to be replaced, however, and Ian was sourcing several other pieces in Germany.
A couple of months into the project I got cold feet, asking Ian if she might lose her soul, with so many foreign new products entering her system. Ian replied.
‘Marilyn, you’ve actually never heard her soul – as it might have sounded in 1901.
Would you like to?’
And so reassured and somewhat curious, I accepted the fact that it would take as long as it would take. We had agreed on the items in the quote. It was going to be a long project. I was in no rush and Ian offered to send a ‘courtesy piano’ for the duration of the restoration work to wherever and whichever address I settled on.
After the piano left rattling up Windsor Road, I started packing up. Boxes of books from the bookshelves got delivered to various charities and the Fish Hoek library. I was lightening up; down-scaling, they call it. Several loads filled my small Toyota RAV (1996) and got delivered to Felicity’s RDP house in Capricorn Park, which she had turned into a little oasis. Faithful Felicity who had helped me pack up and leave Norman Road in 2010, and then three years later, with tears on her face, helped me unpack the same original carefully packed boxes.
Felicity had helped out with my mother and had a long association with my family; quite an understanding really. I remember how packing up the first time, I’d been quite ruthless and piles of the stuff of my life lined the raised walkway outside my house. Surprised at finding items returned from this pile, for example the roll of drawings from my architectural thesis, Felicity informed me:
‘Your father would want you to keep this’.
Writing now, I remember how I’d lined the walkway with all sorts of bric-a-brac and items to be recycled or offered to anyone passing. A few hours later walking up the steps, known as Norman Road I saw Arthur, a street person or bergie, whom I was particularly fond of. He was always to be found sitting on the steps, reading something, anything he’d found, and he had shiny blue eyes. He was not a drinker like many of the colorful characters I’d seen through the years, watching their physical deterioration as alcohol became a priority over food. Arthur just had no resources.
Now he sat on the steps, shiny blue eyes looking up at me as I looked at the small square of coloured cloth he’d found in the pile of stuff outside my house. On this half meter square fabric, he’d carefully placed a number of items he’d selected and which he was now selling.
I saw my small Christening mug, which I’d thoughtlessly thrown out.
‘Arthur, so how much do you want for this?’
His eyes twinkled.
‘You know – they say its solid silver’
So, for R150 I salvaged my little tarnished Christening mug with ‘Lyn’ engraved on it and a pewter beer mug, which my father had won in some golf championship, hoping the rest of Arthur’s spoils would bring him further income.
***
This time, however, leaving Windsor Road I did toss my thesis, along with much else still cluttering my life. And on 9 January 2017, a small removal truck which could go down Windsor Road, disappeared with the remnants of my cottage and what I thought I would like around me in my next home, wherever that was to be.