The Liminal Allure of the Countryside

By Gloria Mwivanda

In the house where my mother birthed me 27 years ago, there’s a calendar on the wall made of linen. It has a painting of a rhino at the top, and below it reads: 2005 — all the months laid out in black and red. That must’ve been the last Christmas my family spent in this house. Different members of the family still visit, but no one bothers to remove the calendar. Why would they? It’s part of the house now.
Everything is stuck, back in time.
The sofas.
The plastic carpet.
The bookshelf filled with my mother’s old course books from her undergraduate years.

It’s not just the house. The trees outside, in my mind, have always been tall. I remember them from my childhood: the eucalyptus in the front, the grevillea in the middle of the compound, whose fallen leaves I swept every Saturday morning while my mother made breakfast.
Everything feels exactly like October 2005.

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The neighbors are still there, too. They don’t seem to age either. They still rise at dawn and go to their farms. They still walk the same narrow path, always on the verge of being swallowed by grass, but somehow still there.
In the evenings, smoke curls out from their chimneys. You can hear children playing somewhere; there are always children playing. It’s funny, because all my age-mates grew up and left for the city.

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Across the river, the old cattle dip still stands, a long, weathered wooden trough where neighborhood cattle used to plunge into pesticide water. They don’t use it anymore. People have personal pumps now. The dip is a landmark, a relic of the past. Like everything else.

Sitting here at this old table where I used to do my homework, it feels like returning to a cup of coffee left behind on the table, now gone cold, but still waiting.

There’s no fast food,
No fast cars,
No fast internet.

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Everything hums in a slow rhythm, calling you back to the child you once were.

As I sit on the veranda, a bowl of hot porridge in my hands, watching the rain fall and listening to it drum gently on the iron-sheet roof,
I wonder what's happening in the world out there,
while I sit here in my snow globe village home.