Joburg Winters have their own beauty... really

Rambler had a little gripe about the cold and I commented saying it had just given me an idea for a post. I know some people that laugh at our gripes about Gauteng's cold. Minus 5 degree centigrade is but a walk in the park for them. My sister who lives somewhere in the Midwestern United States sends us her winter updates of minus Fahrenheit temperatures (something closer to -20 deg Centigrade) and multiple feet of snow!!!

A couple of years ago we also had a spot of snow.






In truth it was more of a very thick frost and bitterly cold. But every year we have frost out at the farm. Some years it's from as early as late March. This year we were 'lucky'. ANd I use that terms as reservedly as one can. The early winter was actually quite mild, until a few weeks ago. Then a nasty little cold front came trundling through and quashed my dream of a blamy winter...


I got an SMS the other day informing that the writer had seen frost... I assumed this was his first time seeing frost this winter and howled with laughter. I'm usually out and about long before sunrise, so I've been seeing frost since May. Granted, it's farm land, in a valley - which makes cold and frost a certain fact of winter mornings. It's easier walking through the greenhouses on winter mornings though. Our climate control systems try to maintain temperatures of 18 degrees Centigrade ably assisted by up to three coal fired boilers. Walking between them is little more challenging.


Winter on the highveld is a dusty affair. The air is often thickened by the smoke of hectares worth of veld fires. But the charred remains of some cows unfinished grazing land makes for a wonderful sight in the morning. Our blackened landscape is momentarily cast as a winter wonderland decked in a wafer thin layer of dazzling white ice. When I walk around outside to the irrigation dams, the tiny crystals of frozen dew glisten in the first rays of sunlight catching my eye time and time again. It makes my heart sing a tiny joyful song. Ok - the joyful song is bit of a stretch because my brain is usually as numbed by the cold as my toes and nose are - but you get the picture.


Late afternoons, with their impossibly rapid sunsets are often hazy. The dust, thrown up by the wheels of numerous trucks and cars on the dirt roads around us, hangs thick in the air - leaving my windscreen hopelessly dusty and me slightly dis-vantged. But it makes for the most incredible sunsets. I'm often greeted by crimson horizons that fade into a darkening bronze haze on the way home in the afternoon, and so long as I stay within the confines of my heated bakkie (pick-up) it really can be a beautiful sight.


But it's nearly August and at the back of my mind, even firmly in the grips of winters gnarled, dry grasp, there's the certainty of Spring, now palpably around the corner. New growth is being primed in the trees and veld around me. Within a few weeks there will be spots of colour as the first brave blossoms peep from the branches of various indigenous veld trees and the fruit orchards. Fields of corn will be planted by farmers on their enormous tractors and the germinating seedlings will transform the tilled red earth of those barren fields into endless rows of tiny green sprouts that will gain inches weekly, eventually obscuring my now panoramic horizon view to a few short meters before being met by a wall of fresh green growth.


Until then of course - I'll battle through, looking for those spots of beauty on bitterly cold mornings, hoping we're not blasted by too many frigid winds that make the sunlight deceivingly inviting.


Ciao for now.