When dusk swallows up the day and digests it into a faded blue-purple, all those who are victims of the struggle to survive become one with the simplicity that speaks out of still twilights. Our quiet bond with nature, and our close bond with one another, gives a balance to our lives and our personalities — inasmuch as we allow it to break in on our busy lives. For we learn from one another, and we learn from nature.

In an age where haste and technology no longer allow you to fall spontaneously into a hopeless surrender to intense moments of nostalgia, swellings of sentiment are a privilege. Hurry's impact on our lives is a deep wound. It comes to lie heavy in your spirit and heavier still in your body. It makes your children's childhoods feel like a mere thought and your own being-a-child feel like a fairy tale. All that is left behind, like a sediment in your mind, is a mingled melancholy about a life gone too fast or about children who have grown up too quickly.

To have, somewhere in your recent past, lingering memories of a two-track path that winds for miles through the veld is, in our hasty century, an inspiriting privilege. More so if you yourself walked that worn-smooth route, tame and well-behaved, from childhood out into the adult world. Not to mention that the emotional ecstasy we drew from this footpath experience fully satisfied, and even surpassed, every expectation ever made of an adrenaline rush!

Memories of a candle that used its faint glow of an evening on the kitchen table to catch the coarseness of the night and reconcile it with a busy day that suddenly turns merciful and anoints you with the soft shadows of its cheerful little flame dancing about in the breeze — these are feeling-full memories. It is a privilege cum laude if you were able to eat home-baked bread, baked with some or other sourdough starter, by its humble but eager little light. This was before the coming of margarine and of stainless steel knives and forks that never had any patina. Everyone ate butter on bread and had lower cholesterol too. My family was exceptionally privileged and slapped thumb-thick cream uncivilly and lavishly onto our bread, under uneven layers of home-boiled jam. Without label, without the ritual of tablecloth or napkin. The last leftovers of a day that had walked slowly downhill were the smell of your candle's little smoke-wisp, growing stronger than the darkness just before it became the last remembered thing in your senses.

How wonderful, if somewhere in your life — sometimes not so long ago — you had the privilege, just before the sun set, of being able to walk out into the veld, or to go and fetch wood for the donkey-boiler, or to round up the sheep and drive them on to the kraal where one of us had to go on ahead to count them in. Who still remembers the charm of a branch-kraal — that simple but masterful feat of mechanics where buttons would not have worked in any case?

What an interesting privilege, to know exactly how soft and how thick the luxury of a carpet of dung built up over time caresses the hard side of a bare foot as you tread into it. How do you ever forget the precious newborn lambs that, on wobbly little legs, stamp-stamp and feel-feel for the teat of a ewe who sniffs proudly and contentedly at the busy little tail beneath her nose, fulfilling the most intimate instinct of motherhood with mastery?

At slaughtering time, after my father had chosen the wether or the ewe, we children always had to help. Year after year, from when we were small, he performed this merciless gesture with a practised ease and without ceremony, so naturally that it was never upsetting, but part of the workings on any farm where life and death take turns as the most self-evident thing in the world. Meat as flavoursome as the bushes and the veld on which it had grazed. Everyone still blissfully unaware of feedlot ghettos full of formulas in which future generations would be fattened up to get a slaughter-thing market-ready quickly for greedy grabbers. Animals deprived of the privileges of finding their own veld and their own bodies on instinct, until their own little circle was closed and they were ready to lay down their lives on the altar.

And then there was the ice-cold thick milk with sugar after a meal, before juice became the staple drink.

Back then there was substance in food, substance in relationships, substance in the news, substance in school syllabuses, substance in the church, and substance in your own thoughts. My own substance I gathered together piece by piece out of these experiences until I was half full and it was time to go. Nothing that has filled me up since comes near the artlessness of my life on Wilhelmshöhe together with my father, my mother, my little brother and my little sister. To tell the truth, everything since has been either too much preserved or too much artificially made tastier. Along with a great deal of sweat. Or with too much adrenaline. Everything is sweeter and easier too, but not necessarily tastier, and not necessarily better.

Groete Amanda Kreitzer