Saturday at Maasai Mara

"The evenings here on the north bank of the Zambezi River are tremulously beautiful. A shaky ribbon of blue smoke from a nearby village cooking fire hangs over the farm. Emerald-spotted doves are calling, 'My mother is dead, my father is dead, my relatives are dead and my heart goes dum-dum-dum.' Frogs are bellowing from the causeway. The air boils with beetles and cicadas, mosquitos and tsetse flies. Egrets, white against the gray-pink sky are floating up-river to roost in the winterthorn trees in the middle of Dad's bananas . . .




. . . But you can't have all this life on one end without a corresponding amount of death and decay on the other; in the morning, my parents' maid, Hilda Tembo, will sweep up half a bucket of insect carcasses and two gecko bodies from under the Tree of Forgetfulness . . .




. . . Months from now three of the Jack Russells will have been killed by a cobra in Dad's office, and one will have been eaten by a crocodile in mom's fish ponds. And dad will walk out of the bedroom one morning to see a python coiled in cartoonish perfection around Wallace (the late cat) . . .






. . . 'You learn not to mourn every little thing out here,' Mum says. She shakes her head. 'No, you can't, or you'd never, ever stop grieving.'"


From: Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness
by Alexandra Fuller