One good place - Rietfontein

It is essential to experience all the times and moods of one good place.    - Thomas Merton

 

I am very privileged to know such a place.

It has been for such a long stretch of time that I can claim to know most of its times and moods. For the best part of forty years I have lived here on the farm Rietfontein in the district of Bronkhorstspruit. It is here that the Restory dream is now taking shape.

When I came here as a child, the farm had all the potential of  adolescence with only two Black wattle trees, a bore hole, a dilapidated old shed and veld. There was no Eskom power in the area.

We stayed in a caravan and a small corrugated iron shed while my dad was building our house and the barn. Gradually my mother established the garden and planted trees. When I grew older I took over the planting of trees and I still try to plant at least two new ones annually.

The land was cultivated and over the years we enjoyed her bounty  with crops of tomatoes, potatoes, yellow maize, green mealies, pop corn, sweet corn, carrots, marrows, water melons, paprika, cabbage, lettuce, teff, eragrostis, oats, sugar beans, sugar cane, pumpkins. For a few years we had no crops on the lands and used it only for pasture for the cattle we had at that stage.

Lately it is beautiful to watch the flock of Suffolk sheep grazing in the oats. We once even kept rabbits. At one stage or the other we also had chickens and a pig that I caught at a fête while in primary school. Like a patient mother she suffered us gladly.

The farm is situated within a dolomite area with very strong water.

I have seen the farm dry and I’ve but I have also seen it so lush that it seems as if it is bursting at the seams. Veld and crops have been destroyed or damaged in fires. Strong winds have torn large branches and have blown trees over. Quite a few times lightning has struck some of the higher trees and split them open from top to bottom.

We also had our share of hail damage many times over. One year the entire season’s crop of dry beans (which was so beautiful that seed reps came out to have a look) floated in the water down the road and into the spruit after the storm had passed.

There were other times when the air was heavy with the scent of crushed maize and pumpkins in the dead quiet after the hail. As if somebody has gone through the crops with an immense tractor and slasher.

After a particularly heavy storm, for days afterwards, we were collecting dead birds from under the trees, carrying them off in wheel barrows.

One season we had one of the best maize crops ever on the farm. We anticipated at least 9 tons per hectare, where the average is 3,5 - 4 tons/ha if you were lucky. And then the late rains came. It rained for days on end. The mature kernels on the cob started germinating because of all the moisture, pushing green shoots in all directions. Sadly at harvest time, 9 tons/ha, all low grade maize, were delivered at the silos.

Why would Merton have said that it is essential to experience one good place in all its facets? Maybe because one then experiences how many shades there are even to the term, familiar. How love takes on a different form in different times and seasons. That grace is so strongly localized, that you can have an address for it.

It gives perspective. When you have been living long enough in one place, you observe that the things that you have established and worked very hard at, rust, fade, get grown over, are uprooted, blown over, die with the frost. Our biggest accomplishments have a passing quality to them.

But you also stand next to a large tree, you look up into its wide canopy and remember how you gently lifted the fragile little stem out of the mud after a terrible storm, tied it up. You didn’t have much hope for it.

A small humble beginning quite often extends much wider, casts longer shadows than we ever could have anticipated. Therefore, one of the most important lessons that I have learnt in my years on the farm – never plant young trees too close to each other. Provide space for them.

I haven’t experienced all of Rietfontein’s times and moods. I know there are more. I haven’t yet experienced how it feels when you look over the familiar fields and for the very, very last time take in the lay of the land. To know that you will never see it again.

In this new phase of establishing The Restory, it is beautiful to see how the now calmer, wiser old lady embraces the people coming to her with her silence, how she is good to them. It fills one with gratitude when one shares her with others in this way. And you are not surprised when the newcomers talk about  things that they have seen or experienced on this stretch of familiar soil, that is even a novelty to you. After all, this is a good place.

George