a church, a wedding, God, a friend and two dogs.

I am sorry this is late!!! I am guilty as charged, I skipped my Sunday blogging. To my defense, work was crazy (and still is) BUT my loyal best girl fans gave me a kick in the behind and so here, finally, is the promised post. It is a little emotional, a little spiritual, and a lot of happy. Enjoy!

So I was going to write about a lot of stuff that happened the past week, like the fact that I hung out with the lovely artsgang (see pic).......

artsgang members 1 and 2 - the yoga instructor and the german one. These are the people who you MUST know if you ever visit our little town Mtunzini, in Zululand. they are lovely. These and two below are the people who I can read poems and stories with, and they are always producing new stuff. member 2 thought up the name 'artsgang' for us bunch of looneys.  



artsgang members 3 and 4. number 3 is philosophy professor (can you see it?) and his wife is v. cool. She writes and listens and studies psycology and makes best seafood paella I've ever tasted. They also have a grandhild who is the next Barbie. It's adorable!


...and the fact that fiance and I had a visit with the dads (yes, I have two and their dating. Have been for 16 years). I won't say much about them, besides that they live in Zululand and look at the room we slept in...




yes, that is the new SA flag. yes, those pillows are of the old SA flag. Ask no questions, hear no lies. All I'll say is that my dads have an interesting sense of humour.


I was even going to write that I had a hectic week at work and am thinking of stres management classes and all kinds of things. But then I got to my friend Lesley's wedding and I forgot everything.

So this post is dedicated to my fellow journalist friend and her lovely husband, Pieter. You may have noticed that I don't usually use names, but I've decided to use their names for this post because they are so open and honest about their story, and I think it can serve as food for thought for anyone. This is the part where I get a bit emotional and a bit spiritual...

I remember meeting Lesley that first day she walked into the newspaper office in Zululand and thinking: 'mmm... I don't know if we'll get along so well. She's way too churchy...'.
But then Lesley became a friend, and very soon her churchy-ness became a big comfort in a scary newspaper world. We shared chocolate muffins (I'm lying, we each ate our own!), wished Laurie (the other, fun journalist who didn't yet share our office) would come visit to input stories on the system (I don't think she ever got anything done when we were there, we just talked to her all the time), and we complained about deadlines and difficult sources to each other. Lesley  never made me feel like I should be going to church, or was bad for not going, or anything like that - and this is big, because it is not very hard to make me feel guilty. Whenever something bad happened, she would just say that she's praying over it. I didn't think much of it, but times weren't always easy for me and some days I found myself hoping that Lesley was praying. She seemed to be like my grandmother - one of those people with a direct line to God.

During that time a lot of hectic things happened at the paper. I saw a very nasty accident one day, one I couldn't really cope with. I had anxiety attacks, I felt nervous constantly, I couldn't cross a street without thinking that I might be run over or something. One morning the editor walked in to tell me Lesley was going to be late, because she'd been in an accident over the weekend. She had been on duty that weekend, and parking at yet another accident scene, a drunk driver passing the scene smashed into her little brown VW Beetle. Luckily, she was okay. (But Beetle was no more, and after that she had to drive some other fancy white thing).

A few times she invited me to church, once I even went. For some reason (and Lesley doesn't know this), I was fighting back tears in church that morning. Afterwards I just gushed about the chocolate cake they give after service to take attention away from the teary thing. But the thing is, standing there in church with her felt like I was eight years old again and in my grandmother's church. It felt good. Safe, happy and right - even though church and God still didn't make complete sense to me.

Somewhere in the middle of all of this, Lesley met Piet. She'd always been a bit of a head-in-the-clouds person, but now she became like a full on airy-fairy, a goner. Half the time you had to snap your fingers to get her back to reality. And she started learning Afrikaans. Her first word? 'Asemrowend'. It means 'you take my breath away.' Three guesses who said that to her! (well done, Piet!) 

About the same time, I took a break to do a course in Cape Town and ran into - which I didn't know at the time - the man who would be my fiance in the near future. Lesley and I started dreaming together. I told her I was crazy about him, she told me she and Piet went on a date. Then I moved and not long after - ping! Engaged! Both of us! Within a month or two from each other, we both promised our lives to these men.

As fiance and I drove through sugarcane farms to get to the venue this weekend, I basked in being home - Zululand. Smelling the sweet sugarcane and feeling the breeze, spending time with the dads, seeing Laurie the fun journalist.

Lesley did not take her eyes off Piet even once as she walked down the path to him. When she got there, she held his hands like she was holding on to life. The wedding car? A VW Beetle. And when it came time to say the vows (they wrote their own), the very English Lesley said hers to Piet in Afrikaans, while the very Afrikaans Piet said his to Lesley in English.

Me? I bawled my eyes out. Couldn't stop crying. At first I didn't really know why. Laurie the fun journalist said it's 'coz I was there from the very beginning, and someone else says it's because I'm getting married soon. But I've been to weddings before - lots of them. So this is where my own history came in a bit. I realized that Lesley and Piet, who have been so very dedicated to each other and who has not for one second pretended that they have the power to keep their own marriage together but that it is God who will keep it safe, has allowed me to believe in marriage again.

I got engaged in complete happiness, but it was mixed with a large element of surprise. My parents (as you might have noticed) are divorced. My friends's parents are divorced... I barely know a happily married couple and before my amazing fiance, who refused to stop believing in me or in love, came along, I was a bit doubtful whether I would ever get married. But Lesley and Piet, together with fiance's dedication, have shown me that it's okay to suspend your cynical side and believe in marriage. To let it be special, to let it be something meaningful instead of just something people do becuase everyone else is doing it. And to put everything into it.

So this weekend, fiance and I are starting a premarriage course at church, and after the wedding, we prayed for our marriage. I am still grappling with these things - I don't always agree on things they say in church and I once even mailed Lesley in a rage about a sermon - but I have found there is one thing that stays constant: the safety. God is a place, like Lesley and Piet, where it's okay to believe in love, in the fact that somewhere, someone is looking over you and your relationship, and to be okay with the fact that you don't know how to keep a marriage or relationship together, because God does know.

Filmmaker has been the drum I bounce everything off on morning walks and communal breakfast in our beautiful home. She is wonderful free soul, it seems, who despite having her own heartaches, still does not hold back in sharing my joy about getting married.

So, dear friends, I leave you with a pic of the happy couple, as well as a few lovely pics from the filmmaker who has been listening to all my laments each morning as we walk the neigbour's adorable dogs through beautiful Bo-Kaap and into the mountain.

congratulations!



ahh... bliss.

Dog and mountain pics by filmmaker at Butterfly Films.