Heading Backwards Going Forwards
Maybe our grandparents/great-grandparents were onto something. My maternal grandmother was weird. She would get up at around 4am every morning and zoom into a frenzy fetching coal for her stove, cleaning her house, cooking, baking, feeding the chickens etc. By 6am you could eat your breakfast off her floor it was so clean. And I thought “Dude, you’re a pensioner. At least sleep until 7am.” … No, I seriously did NOT think “Dude”. She would have probably klapped me. She was known to all as “Ma”. Just “Ma”. As to whether it was short for “Ouma”, because essentially she WAS my Ouma or whether it was just that she was quite a strong, stubborn woman and her children called her “Ma”, so everyone called her “Ma”, I will never know. Anyhow, I digress. Farm folk are usually up well before the sparrows to accomplish their many chores and early to bed because (1) it’s dark and there wasn’t – in the old days – much else to do; and (2) well, because they were flipping exhauste