Missing Home

Fresh air, nature sounds, hugs from strangers and "popping sevens"

April 2025

I’ve lived away from home for more than a year now.

What do I miss? You, of course. My friends, my family.

And Cape Town weather. Fish Hoek Beach.

That was all to be expected.

Can I tell you what’s been unexpected, that’s made me especially miss the light and noise and gestures and accents of home?

Air.

Washington DC is a city where you can live with all the doors and windows closed.

Really, closed. All the time. Well, because Winter is very cold and Summer is very hot and humid.

Our rental home (and our car) have central heating and air conditioning. You can be sealed inside all the time. There’s no wind blowing your papers off the table, and you can hardly hear the neighbours.

But it’s an odd feeling, if you’re accustomed to having doors and windows open. You feel like you’re in a library, or at work, like you need some movement of the air, some faint smell of leaves or grass.

There’s something enlivening about the natural chill of the air in the morning, or its sluggish heat in the afternoon. With all the doors and windows closed, the light feels slightly off –dull or thin or metallic-bright.

I like sleeping with a window open at night. I love night air, the crispness of it.

At home, our cat, Shade, was in and out of that window at night. Every night she would do her rounds, sometimes for hours. There was something about that I liked. When she hopped onto the bed in the early hours her fur was cool and her eyes were bright. I liked the idea of her being out at night. I like being out at night. At least one of us was enjoying the moon and the liberation of darkness.

Sound.

Being sealed in, there’s a muffling of sound that can be welcome. We live in cheek-to-jowel over here so you don’t want to a full-volume experience of the next door dog barking – given that the dog is effectively in the next room.

But when the neighbourhood is quiet, like it is now, and I’m sitting opposite an open door – because it’s Spring and it’s early and it’s a Saturday – then you can hear birds cheeping, some close by and some further away. Cheep and chitter and caw and trill. These are sounds that make you feel at home.

The sound of branches creaking, that’s another one you don’t hear from inside. You can watch the wind or the rain through the windows – but you can’t hear it. The sounds of dry leaves skittering on bricks is another sound too soft to penetrate the house.

Seasons.

Season changes are super-dramatic here. Every season the city does a full wardrobe change. In winter all the trees and bushes are dark skeletons. There’s no green –or another colour – against the sky or on the ground. It’s like living in a black and white photograph, especially when it snows.

Spring is a riot of colour: whole trees turn meths-purple. There are lipstick-red tulips, yolk-yellow daffodils and white blossoms like new petticoats. For the cherry blossom weeks, there are ballet-pink splashes in your eyeline everywhere you go.

In summer, the city is immersed green. The light is very bright, and green tinted. The heat and humidity make you feel like you’re underwater. In the heat, damp tree trunks and branches laden with green can feel kelp forests.

The autumns here are another kaleidoscope of colour. But this time, instead of feeling like you’re part of an every-pastel Easter bouquet, it’s like being surrounded by coppers and brasses, ambers and golds. Fall is living inside a dusty treasure box. It reminds me of semi precious gems and metals, and also of long, curly red hair and animal fur.

You know that line in makeover shows, the one about ‘you should wear the clothes, don’t let the clothes wear you’?

Over here, the backdrops are demandingly gorgeous. I mean, it’s dreamy to feel like you’re in a Meg Ryan rom com every time you step outdoors, but I’m used to subtle season changes. I’m used to the kind of season changes that don’t require adjustment and comment – and further elaboration, somehow, by means of wreaths and table still lifes and colour-coded clothing and shop decoration.

In Cape Town, it’s hot, then it’s less hot, then it’s cold and then it’s less cold. The mountain and beaches don’t change clothes. Most trees don’t opt to shed everything and stand around buck naked in the cold season. We have plenty of excellent flowers and fruits, thank you very much, but we don’t herald the arrival of any of them with a city-wide festival of frolicking and photo-taking.

Strangers

It’s odd for me to drive around in all this changing colour and temperature with the windows closed. I witness nature’s changes from the other side of tinted windows. My car temperature is set to 68 degrees Fahrenheit (20C). There’s no movement of air and no noise, except for the news and features being piped into the car by National Public Radio.

Everyone here drives with their windows up, and all the windows seem to be lightly tinted. You don’t hear other people’s car music much. I miss the surprise of thumping beats as a minibus taxi passes. I long to see a guy with his elbow out the window, “popping sevens”. In my memory, every second driver waiting to turn toward the malls in Noordhoek had an elbow out.

I’m not sure if it’s the shaded windows, or because we drive on the right here, but somehow you don’t see the faces of other drivers. I’m constantly wanting to wave at other drivers, to thank them for letting me through or to apologise for needing to cut in. But you don’t see faces, and you don’t communicate on the road like that here. There’s no grateful flashing of your hazards, or impatient flashing of your brights.

What you do often get – and my Cape Town sensibility doesn’t like it – is a short, loud hoot (which is very much the aural equivalent of a shove in the back). It’s never a long hoot. No-one “stands on the horn”. It’s more like a goose honk, a sharp smack of the centre of the steering wheel. It happens if you don’t pull off the second the lights change. It’s because everyone who lives in The Nation’s Capital is so very B-and-I (Busy and Important).

I miss having the windows open to enjoy the long curves and dips and vistas of Boyes Drive, Ou Kaapse Weg and Philip Kgosana Drive. I’ve driven on some beautiful roads here. I genuinely love driving next to the Potomac River, around and through Rock Creek Park and out in the Virginia countryside. But I think I miss the smells rushing in, and the glare bouncing off the glass in the car. I even miss the racket on the roads, and all the mouthing and gesturing.

I definitely miss the gesturing. I long for the speeded-up wave, the thumbs-up, the hand lifted off the wheel and – my personal fave – the full, straightened arm out the window, held aloft as the driver takes the corner at a leisurely pace.

Speaking of human interaction, we need to talk about hugging. I imagined there would be a lot of hugging here. People on American shows always seem to be saying “I’m a hugger!” – before going in for the big squeeze.

Hm.

I think the reason hugging makes it onto screen is because it’s special. And by special, I mean unusual. There’s a lot of touch-free greeting that goes on here.

I long to be hugged by complete strangers at parties.

Also, no-one asks “how are you?”. I have a years’ worth of banked “I’m-fine-how-you?!”s.

We’ll be back home in July. I can hardly wait to see you. Just so you know, we’ll be hugging. I’ll be “fine-how-are-you?!”

If you drive past at night, I might be walking around the garden.

We’ll be driving with the windows open and waving at other drivers.

We won’t be stopping to photograph trees.