Domesticity

I’ve lived at my new digs for more than a month now. I’ve begun nesting as a sort of tentative psychic sigh of relief at having found a permanent home in South Africa (knock on wood). Because I’ve been having difficulty intuiting the domestic order here (the yard is swept and floors are hand washed daily, but dirty dishes are usually left around for a while and stray trash is thrown into the neatly swept yard), I’ve assumed responsibility for the outside. I’ve been taking care of garbage disposal and working toward transforming our spacious swath of backyard into a garden.

The yard is graced with three mango trees and a papaya tree and so these too fall within my jurisdiction. Over the course of the last week, the fruit has started to ripen, depositing dozens and dozens of ripe mango on the yard. I’m kept busy madly dashing about the backyard collecting mangos. By the time I’ve thrown the rotten mangos in the compost, cleared the ripe mangos from the yard, washed them, and put the ripest ones in the fridge, I find that my efforts will have been frustrated by another half dozen that have fallen in the meantime.

I also have this pet peeve about wasting food so I’ve been trying to find ways of incorporating mango into every meal. This has ranged from the mundane (straight mango or mango nectar) to the more experimental (mango curries, soups and scones). Everyday is Iron Chef where the secret ingredient is mango. It’s not like you can give them away either; everyone is dealing with their own mango surplus. Anyway, I end up eating A LOT of mango in one day. I’m sure the season’s end will see me delightfully corpulent. The kicker is mango is related to poison ivy and I’ve slowly been developing an allergy to it. So my lips end up getting kind of swollen and if I handle unwashed mango too much I can develop little blisters on my hands. Still, I persevere.

My weekend was consumed with dumpster diving. It started innocently enough: I completed pouring over my cache of magazines sent for Christmas from the US* and thought it would be a real shame to have to throw them away or stuff them in some box. Unfortunately, our living situation is limited to our respective bedrooms and the kitchen, leaving us without any central place to leave magazines for casual perusal. The only public space we have for the sort of relaxed repose conducive to leafing through a magazine is in fact the toilet. And so the inspiration for a homemade magazine rack was born. Thula and I set about scouring the neighborhood for stray wood to craft our first Thula-Sonia collaborative piece. But inspiration was not quite enough and we ended up with a rather hideous eyesore – one that only barely fit in the toilet. Below, Thula demonstrates use of the toilet magazine rack.



It actually looks better with all that pretty stuff on top of it. Anyway, the process was so enjoyable and we had so much leftover wood that we’ve gone a little overboard on the carpentry front.




Applications of the do-it-yourself spirit have not been limited to furnishings, either.



These homemade improvements to our house have really done a lot to make it feel like home. I’m currently on the look out for garbage from which I might fashion myself an Ottoman.

* Thanks to everyone for their support this holiday season. Special shoutouts to: RoboTom, Grim & Grip, Mom and Tat and Luke and Mirth, Sebastian, Laura, Schainker, Mike and Diana (?)