Cape Town time

At night you dream of hunting mushrooms along an Austrian stream where ice tinkles; in a summer street in New York a ballet director asks you out to dinner and wishes you were his. You don't know any ballet directors. Awake and after coffee in the early morning your feet sink into the soft green lawn and are wet with dew. At midday all the leaves in the garden are glittering mirrors. You walk inside and the dark rooms are a pale blue. At 4 o'clock you want tea. At 6 you crush mint for a drink, and squeeze limes from the tree near the washing line. At 7.30 pm every long evening the coucal - rainbird - calls from the dense shrubs at the bottom of the garden, its descending scale like liquid chocolate in the evening.  In the day the poplars in the wind are water, rushing. At dusk they settle in profound silence. Hadedas fly in clarion battalions over the house to their roosting. When the moon fattens the wood owls begin to call.