Visiting the Family

To step off the plane in Ghana feels different each time, just as Beryl Markham warned that it would.

The first time I felt anxiety, dread and excitement, the second time it filled me with unreasonable joy to see the giant "Akwaaba" sign. This time I didn’t even look out the window. We were on the ground before I realized it. It was old-hat to go through immigration. I know the drill. I know the drill.

All of which made the first night in Accra rather depressing. Grey, dreary and drizzling. Everything mildewed and wet from months of rain and humidity. An empty apartment. Why did I come back? Did I really want to be here? Really?

My first full day in Accra, though, and all seemed well. A tro-tro ride introduced me to Wilson, who offered computer help -- even for the Mac-minded -- and his phone number and paid my fare as well. Christian, the taxi driver, dropped me off at the house even though it was a shared cab. The kids shouted obruni. The goats bolted in front of cars. And the jollof was just like I remembered it.

That hollow, doubtful feeling is mostly gone. I've started taking African dance and joined a gym and have filed two stories. I've lined up two more sources to sell work. Orla and I spent an idyllic day at the Botanical Gardens in Aburi, having a surprisingly ant-free picnic. I will begin this week to hunt for apartments and will put together a proposal by week's end to do some traveling, first to Cote D'Ivoire, then to Liberia and Sierra Leone. Guinea should be covered, but since Lebanon exploded, I suspect there will not be enough money unless I can get there overland. (These countries are in a line, but not one that is easily traversed.)

It feels good to be back. In his "Letters to a Young Poet," Wilke says writers need to write like they need to breathe, they simply live to write and must write to live. I held my breath for seven weeks, exhaling only when I touched down back on African soil. For nearly two months I was so stuffed up with writers block that I could not put pen to paper or fingertips to keyboard. Even emails were somehow tainted by this absolute need to just shut it off, turn it off, give it a rest.

After two years, my conclusion is that freelancing is not for the insecure: it brings out the absolute worst in you, makes you wheedling and obsequious, doubtful and suspicious and paranoid. Being home felt like such freedom that I did not want to be weighed down by the responsibility of earning a living, writing about the trials of other people’s existence while spending my nights picking raspberries and systematically, in a sickening sort of way, chewing my way through the pantry.

It rained buckets, turning everything into this lush, green, vibrant wonderland. The grass grew long and sort of sticky. Twilight in the raspberry patch, knowing that this was a gift to me: early season raspberries and plenty of them. Enough for pie. Enough for ice cream. Enough for a whole summer, squeezed into a couple weeks that came a month earlier than expected. Slipping down the side of the hill, reaching further and further for blackcaps that have suddenly appeared: another gift. Sitting, silently, on the deck. Just looking at the flowers. Mind a complete and total blank. Just looking at this wonderous thing that is just growing so beautifully. Just there. The place where I bond with my mom, bent over with gloves and shears, babbling about the neighbourhood gossip or plans for the next trip. So many gifts, to be able to see these flowers in their August intensity in the middle of June, absolutely bursting with colour and bees and butterflies. In the hands of someone else, it is probably some sort of metaphor for time, or for my relationship to the people who tend it when I am not around. But my mind is a blank; filled up with just the image and nothing more.

(And speaking of visiting family, this is my nephew, Kitty.)