The Relatives of Fabulousness

I could bear my self-pity no longer. I needed to get away from Heartbreak Hill and into loving arms. So I pointed my little white car, Princess, in the direction of Tzaneen and headed down the dizzying Magoebaskloof Pass to have lunch with my aunties and uncles at the Nut Village.

Reasons to be cheerful 

It’s a beautiful, soulful drive and luckily for me, they live next door to each other, so it’s like two for the price of one: One roast chicken and a bottle of wine gets you two momma bear hugs and two avuncular cuddles, on tap. Plus, jackpot, they also have wine. And both uncles are called Mike, so that’s one less name to remember after the wine.  The Nut Village – its real name is the Macadamia Retirement Village – sits calmly and quietly on the banks of the Tzaneen dam and has gorgeous gardens, indigenous trees and a host of extraordinary characters including my fabulous rellies. I always sign into the Nut Village as the Ministry of Fabulousness, and I always cite the reason for my visit as: G&T. 

And it’s always so good to lunch with the aunts and uncles. 

Billo Tooley

We all stem from one Billo Tooley who came farming in Agatha, near Tzaneen, in 1904 and begat the wild Tooley clan who are still alive and kicking and doing everything from politics and cheese making to brewing beer and having their hearts broken. There is strong ancestry and deep love; never a shortage of gossip or wit. I never met him, but Billo Tooley was a strong and handsome (ahem) man, they tell me. He married twice – once to Muriel Frances who started this particular Tooley branch that I lunched with; and then second time to my grandmother Elsie Margaret whose branch and lineage I’m afraid, is unquestionably madder.  Oh dear, that’s me. 

My grandmother Elsie

But I love my aunts and uncles stories. Depending on their moods and the weather, they regale me with tales of avocado farming and the perils of growing cucumbers in subtropical climes; the goings on at the old tennis club and how they found the biggest mashatu tree in deepest Africa. They tell me about how they once took ten children on a flatbed truck to camp in Mozambique for a month, how my mother once hung naked from a tree with my godmother Jean Solomon, how that lot lost everything and that bunch turned out disastrously, how so and so married twenty times and how one aunty once left her baby behind at a party. Mostly we just love each other and love each other’s company. I draw deep from ancestral wells when I lunch with my aunts and uncles at the Nut Village. I leave them with a fuller heart and belly.

The road to the rellies

They are older and wiser people, they have known deeper, greater life and they ease my broken heart, up my humour. They impart love and wisdom and the sense of this lovely quote I found from author  Louise Erdrich that: "Life will break you. You have to love, you have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree (or in our case an avocado tree) and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could."