Gotta love how easy it is to be connected
across the globe today. I’m old enough
to remember airmail letters, those flimsy blue gummed sheets we used to fill
with childish letters written to longed for grannies a world away. The yucky tasting edges were licked and the
missives sent on their way and in a few weeks, we’d have a reply. This is how we kept in touch. Phones were large,heavy, Bakelite instruments
firmly placed on a special telephone table and never used – call rates were
pricey and international calls absolutely out of the question!
A shrinking world has resulted in many
moves, either ours or friends, to distant places and caused tears
a’plenty. However, digital cameras,
wifi, social media, email, Skype, What’s App - all accessible when we are on
the move or stuck at our desks keep us in strong contact and it’s a wonderful
thing. We share special moments, bad
moments, tears, giggles, drama and the ordinary and when we finally meet up in
person it feels as though we just have a week or so to catch up on, not a few
years. It also allows us to ‘introduce’
current friends with faraway ones so everyone is familiar when we’re all
together again.
And so to this morning’s tale. A dear friend moved to the opposite side of
the country 5 months ago. She’s a tad
homesick and I miss her dreadfully, so we What’s App every so often to share an
electronic hug, as it were. It was fab
to see her message arrive earlier and good to get caught up on the news, even
though the distance at the moment is further than usual – she’s in Cape Town
where she should be but I’m in Nairobi though of course, you wouldn’t know it
from the amazing electronic miracle that we communicate by these days.
Listening with a heavy heart to her
struggles in adapting from a very small town to big city, an image came to
mind. Her popular,
has-the-neighbourhood-fighting-for-the-last-piece Orange cake. Its famous in our ‘hood and much missed now
she’s no longer here to take orders for it.
A rich, fresh crumbly cake, sunshine hued with strands of orange peeping
through, melt in the mouth, leaving the zesty hint of orange and richness of
cream to embrace the pleasure centres and dusted with icing sugar, it’s as
gorgeous on the eye as it is in the tummy.
But it doesn’t start out that way.
In the beginning, her famous Orange cake is
broken eggs, a sticky mess in a bowl which is thoroughly beaten before being
poured into the baking pans. Blasted by
fierce heat it firms up and rises to it’s dazzling maturity. Reaching out to be the best it can be, a
shimmer of white sugar completes the perfect picture and perhaps an orange
blossom or two is scattered playfully on top (well, we do live in the Lowveld,
citrus country!)
Presented on a beautiful plate, it elicits oohs and ahs and is appreciated and savoured slowly and with absolute
pleasure.
Are we not like this striking work of
art? Sometimes we’re bashed and broken
and at our lowest, the beating continues.
Then gets worse until we see no end in sight, the intensity of our troubles
(emotional or physical) burning deep.
But lo, something is happening. Be it an unexpected, tiny something, a
flicker of hope and light emerges and slowly, slowly, we emerge from our ‘oven’.
And in time, this ordeal has passed. Whatever we feel about our troubles, there is
no doubt that having survived them we are wiser as to our strength, our
friends, our ability to cope.
And that extra line etched into our
foreheads, the lovely fold of flesh that has appeared at our waist, is a
beautiful reminder that we are maturing into the best we can be.
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