Warming Up
Finally, winter is on its way out. It’s starting to spring.
In Windhoek, it’s surprisingly hard to tell when winter ends and spring begins. For the last four months the sky has been a perfect vastness of blue, the only clouds the occasional grey smudge clinging to the horizon’s edge. The trees have largely remained green; only a few lost their leaves. The bougainvillea still splatters the city in scarlet and hot pink, as if the seasons never changed. What reminds you is the sudden bitter cold when the sun sets, and in the mornings a cold nose and the horror of stepping on chill tiles in bare feet after the alarm has been set to snooze for the last possible time.
It’s strange to me that spring here feels just like spring at home, everything and everyone just beginning to crack a smile after the pinch of winter.  There’s something different about the way the birds sing in the morning, and how the breeze feels kind on my skin when I cycle through the city to work. The light seems to glow in a different way. In the early mornings a gauzy mist blurs the distant hills, and the air smells of creosote, fresh smoke and clean dust.
My cycle route takes me rushing through a neighbourhood packed with talent – Beethoven, Strauss and Mozart Strasse flash by on my way to work, and I labour up past Haydn, Wagner, Bach and Brahms on my return. Church spires gleam clean and white in the sun, the smoke from small brush fires lingers above the jacarandas.
I pass a broad-pathed cemetery on my right, packed to bursting with new graves, the oldest ones crumbling by the roadside. The road is lined with poplars in banks of pale baked grass that, for some reason, bring to mind the sunflower and corn fields of central Europe. I have a good view of the scrapyard to my left, men in blue overalls swarming over truckloads of rusty waste, shouts and clashing of metal leaking through my headphones. Bakkies rush past me with blue clad labourers in the back, their heads no longer wrapped in enormous blanket turbans to keep out the merciless cold. They point at me and laugh.
We have had no rain since April, and most of the rich grass is now yellow and brittle; but, thanks to the municipal sprinklers flouting the drought to come, an expanse of grass near where I work is still green. Someone has taken advantage of this, and established a shabby red snack caravan, selling pies and chips, and Vienna sausages in a bun. People come there during the day, lying with arms flung across faces, battered work boots turned to the sky, slumbering in the shade of stubby palms.
It seems that in the last few days, as the weather has started to become more generous, I have started to appreciate all over again how beautiful this city is.
Perfect spring cycling soundtrack:Â Manu Chao.