Today was a windy day in Cape Town. People here call the wind the “Cape Doctor” because the wind, when it blows hard, as it often likes to do, takes the dirty air away. Today there was the windy doctor, and clouds poured from the top of the mountain that towers over Cape Town and lept out into the sky. I sat on my favorite bench in De Waal Park and listened to the wind and felt the dappled sunlight warming my cheek. I sat, and I watched the leaping clouds. The clouds left nothing behind before they disappeared forever. Then a memory blew in from somewhere. It was the memory of an old dog who can no longer walk, and of his human pushing him in a wheelchair around the park. I have not seen the old dog for some time, and I remembered how the dog, though they could not walk, watched everything with keen eyes. I wrote about the dog in my journal, and I watched as the memory danced in the air in front of me like the curling clouds leaping into the sky.
