I loved to accompany my grandfather on his morning walk up Rod's Trail with their dog, Bolt. He'd go every morning, religiously, and maintain the path so that it wouldn't get overgrown, and would continue to be an enjoyable trail for people to walk on.
As a child, and a young adult, I'd always get up after my grandparents. They were always early risers, even in their retirement, and I'd often wake to the opera being played on my Grandpa's cassette player. My breakfast was tea and buttered toast with homemade Chinese guava jam that my grandmother made from the tree that grew next to the house. It was a favourite tree of ours, for its fruit, also a favourite of the baboons, who made regular harvests in the summertime.
Sometimes my grandfather would take us to Bass Lake and row with us in his blue and white canoe, which always had at least one spider in it from sitting by the reeds for weeks until its next voyage. The dark, fynbos stained water felt like a magical experience to peer into, and see my reflection in a sepia filter as the oars dipped, dipped, and swung.
The dark, fynbos-stained water of Bass Lake reflecting the mountain crags.
My dad always loved to take my sister and I on long walks through the Harold Porter Gardens, and we'd be gone hours sometimes, walking through the indigenous vegetation, as he told me facts about the yellowwood trees and the disa flowers that grow right next to the waterfall during Christmas season, and that time my great grandfather encountered a leopard sleeping on the large tree that branches over the bridge by the river.
On our way home, my dad would stop over Penguin Place, the local superette, and my sister and I would pick out sweets in grey paper bags to have on the drive back to Cape Town.
