Some cheap plastic chairs are laid out on the few feet of brick that comprise the patio, half of it graced with a wooden picnic table and covering, the other half, eight feet or so in front of the braai, open. Late afternoon, the sky beyond the jagged, lush green peaks in the distance is already darkly clouded with the impending afternoon showers that will toss these lawn chairs. The birds twitter around the feeder, a small yellow-breasted one with black feathering perches on the large, sideways lying, ceramic pot that stands on a pedestal as a sort of pastoral embellishment. The last rays of the sun peek out from the clouds pearly, iridescent last light of a summer afternoon in the mountains and it is the time for rest. A book on the knees, feet on another plastic chair in front, and we settle to read. Something disturbs the silence, the birds, the breeze. A distant growl at first, growing ever faster and closer, and, then, deafening, from behind the brick wall of the braai it comes. He hasn’t seen us, doesn’t know we’re there as he motors around the wall. Smiling and waving out of a rosy sun crinkled face in blue shorts and an off-white shirt he rides his machine at the edge of the grass two feet from my plastic chair. We smile back, turn to each other, roll our eyes and laugh above the sound of metal blades and hot petrol fumes mingled with the sweet scent of jasmine. A long awkward moment passes, the mower making its way to the other side of the grass, us waiting for the mower to move before we resume reading.

The next day, a black man pushes a conventional mower near the garage through the soft, muddy earth.

When we returned rheumy blue eyes in a dark leathered face wait outside the gate, ready with request and silent reproach.

“Ma’am, the lawn mower, it is broken. I cannot cut the grass,” almost a mumble, in poor English.

“Well, we’ll have to ask them for a new one. I’ll do it tomorrow when the office opens.”

Later, a few days after asking for a motor and waiting, we question why it matters that the grass goes un-mowed. In the kitchen one morning, a figure stooped over the phone in blue cotton pants and shirt and old sneakers. He tries to make out letters, scribblings that mean nothing to him, to go with numbers.

“I must call Ma’am, to fix the lawn mower.”

“Oh, don’t worry. I’ll do it. Didn’t they deliver one a few days ago?”

“Yes, but that one, it doesn’t work.” “Oh, well, is there petrol in it? They don’t deliver them with that.”

“Yes, ma’am, there is.”

“And it’s not a different one? You know how to work it?”

“Yes I know.”

The lawn grows taller in these late afternoon summer showers. Almost every afternoon the sky darkens above Joburg and a drive to the city on the N1 seems like a drive into the dark sky where blue cracks in an eye blink amidst the Sahara I-tech and Eco-Décor. The sky roars open and the rain cries out on to the red clay that clings so unyieldingly to hairy paws and the grass continues to grow green and thick.