Against a luminously verdant green, the absolute blue of the sky is too blue.  The overall affect artificial although it is only a natural color saturation, brought out each summer with rains like clockwork – bringing winds that toss plastic lawn chairs and thunder that startles and lightening that makes the power go out – which wash away winter and establish a pleasing, pastoral landscape.  Not so remarkably different from other pastoral places on earth, except for a few details.  Too many flat distances for Europe, too much green for the American plains, too temperate for central Africa’s rolling hills.  It is the sky here, approaching the highest peaks at the tip of Africa, which seems somehow different than the sky anywhere else.  Caused, perhaps, by the Southern Hemisphere slant of light, the blue seems at once warm and cool, vast and cozy, until five in the evening, when the pearly rain clouds begin to form as the sun dwindles and the breezes demand a covering for bare skin.   Sad, lovely and full of hope – hope for the rain, a good mealie harvest, full bellies, sad because hopes amount to so very little.   Lovely in the way a Lake Poem, vague and pastoral, offers a satisfied sigh and an aesthetic escape from urban concrete.