Tuesday 21st March 2023
I could get used to having 5 hour stretches of sleep. I woke up again at 4.20am for the first time. I used to be a great sleeper. And then we had a break in at our house in 2001(I think) and my ears now go on overdrive when I close my eyes. I've learned to sleep with foam earplugs which takes a lot of the peripheral noise away but doesn't shut out everything. So I heard Rusty's scratch on the door at 5.58am.
We were on the road a quick ten minutes later and being a public holiday, I knew the traffic outside the estate would be quiet so we headed out there after a long roam in the dog park. There was no sunrise this morning because the cloud cover was so dense but it was great to walk along the avenue of pine trees. The bird life was in abundance too, with a kiewiet squawking right beside my ear, almost triggering my old bird phobia.
I really love the energy of this small piece of the city. I'm not sure why, I just trust the feelings. There's the factories on the horison with their smoke and steam and lunchtime sirens. It was once the main Dynamite factory of the country, so there should be an explosive kind of feel. But it's hilly and marshy, and wild and man-made dams, with the modern Gautrain travelling in front of a stunning heritage building opposite small 4 storey compact apartments and it all kind of makes sense to me.
My school friend who connected me to this housesitting lives here, so we met for brunch which made it even more familiar. We chatted about series, movies and living in the estate and afterwards I was thinking about how close 40 years since school days feels. Yet in other ways, years in between have been forgotten.
Tonight is my last night here and Rusty and I got caught in an unexpected cloud burst. It was refreshingly cool although I don't like get my head wet, lol. So I picked up my umbrella after the first kilometer and we went out for another one. Rusty was chuffed. One of the cats came to give me some purr therapy on the couch, just to round off a lovely few days in the east.
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