Sunnyside is a guest farm near Golden Gate in the Free State, tucked into the foothills of the Drakensberg where the mountains have mystical names: Angel’s Wing, Snow Hill, Face Rock (spot it in the art quilt!). My father-in-law first went on holiday there at sixteen, the very year Denis and Ann Boland opened the place. Two generations later, Jake celebrated his sixteenth birthday in the same dining room, with a chocolate cake, in a space that had hardly changed in sixty years.
That is the thing about Sunnyside. Time seems to stand still there. The mountains are the same. The crabs in the streams are the same. The walk up into the mountains is the same walk it has always been, except now your children are big and strong enough to come along.
April: Ingci
This is the time when it gets colder and fires are lit to keep warm.
The quilt holds memory fragments: snippets of family photographs from multiple holidays there across the generations. Four figures walking into mountains. Autumn gold everywhere.
Ann Boland ran Sunnyside for over sixty years. By the time my children were catching crabs and walking up mountains, she was already a legend of the place — a well-spoken, tiny lady, her snow-white hair pulled into an immaculate bun. She passed away at ninety-four, having given the guest farm the whole of her working life (which ended only in her last days). After she went, things started falling into disrepair. Sunnyside is that kind of place — held together not only by its landscape but by the particular person who chose to tend it, year after year, decade after decade.
The fragility of life is woven into the quilt alongside the celebration of Jake’s sixteenth year — the awareness that the people and places we love are not permanent.
Autumn Gold
Autumn gold
Rains down, leaf-by-leaf
Sixteen candles, sixteen years
Your summer, just beginning
Joy-son
I savour moments, now
I savour
bitter-sweet joy
growing-up son
Sunnyside
will clouds enfold?
Rain heavy, soul heavy?
I savour the sunny side, now
But winter comes
When snow-white hair
Lies icy still.
Beyond simply looking back with nostalgia, this teabag art quilt speaks to the truth that nothing stays the same, even things that have been the same for a very long time. Now all that is left is memories that we hold dear.
April: Mabasa: Sunnyside celebrates a son that turns sixteen, as Jake’s voice deepens and hugs begin to enfold from above. I am also aware that I’m left with just a couple years before Jake, too, flies the nest. Nothing stays the same; soon, we will learn life with a completely empty nest, and I will replay the feelings behind October: Imphala: When you go.
The fires are lit against the cold in April. You gather around the warmth and you hold what you have, knowing that winter comes.