Mole Cottage, the Land

Ron and I were missionaries in Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu Natal, South Africa, from September 1995 through May 2007.

December 27, 2006

I’ve been suffering from SADD the last couple of weeks. Though it is summer, it has been rainy, cold and half-twilight so long I’ve battled with seasonal depression. Add to that the many stresses I’ve been under with health issues, Ron being gone to East Africa, Christian Listeners-KZN’s admin realignment, missing our children over the holiday, etc. – I seem to have lost more than won the fight! Yesterday we arrived at Mole Cottage, a farm stay in the Drakensburg Mountains, where we’ll remain for three days. This is one of the loveliest places we’ve ever visited in South Africa. We drove down miles of country roads lined with blue gum trees that appeared as phantoms in the mist only to disappear just as quickly. Today, however, the sun shines. I’m listening carefully, deeply, and I still don’t hear it – traffic! The air is crystal; the surrounding green is emerald. I find myself wondering about how privileged the people are who get to live here. Or do they become so used to paradise it fades like yesterday’s phantom mist into their workaday world? Somehow, I think even with the responsibilities of making a living, the call of the land is greater still, and once one has heard its siren ‘s song, one can never be quite the same. I’ve heard it here, in the back places of KZN, and even though I don’t belong to this land it haunts my every waking moment and sometimes my dreams. It’s an irresistible tug on my heart. How much more if my children were born here, if my people were buried here. Which begs the question that has baffled me for some time now. Where do I belong? Where is my land? Where is ‘home’? When I leave South Africa to return to the States I’m going ‘home’. When I leave the States to return to South Africa I’m going ‘home’. I guess that’s why Copper speaks so much to me: Copper, the miniature dachshund the color of a copper penny, who in my imagination searches for home in all the wrong places. Only within his “dark night” does he realize that he is there all along – in his heart. For home has something to do with the heart – where it is fed, at rest, at peace. Lacking the first two, or either one, it will be difficult to find the third. Copper’s search is as much mine as his. In this paradise in rural KwaZulu Natal I spend time letting the beauty and peace of this place sink deep in my heart. I receive them as a gift for today.

(Copper became a reality when my children’s book Little Pete’s Great Big Life Lesson was published in October 2019 by Lucid Publishing.)