Some women on smallholdings might be a bit sceptical about the images that come up on Women’s Day. Here are some reasons for that.
While your townie friends are discussing the latest trends in shoes, you are trying to work out which socks help to make your new gum boots more comfortable.
Your foodie friends are discussing deboning a chicken like Jacques Pepin. You however are wondering why the phone always rings when you are plucking a carcass and you don’t want to get feathers on your screen.
Some mothers meet for coffee before they pick up their children, while you are trying to work out how to do everything that you have to do in town on either the school run in the morning or in the afternoon.
And talking of driving, you don’t care about the latest zippy little car that is supposed to be every woman’s desire. You just know how many bags of feed you can get into your bakkie – we women on smallholdings can be like that.
Fierce braks
A woman on a plot would never consider having a pampered, white Maltese poodle, because it would be dirty all the time and too vulnerable to ticks and fleas. Instead you have the meanest, ugliest braks and you love them to bits.
You have learnt not to even bother planting delicate exotic flowers in your garden, as the frost out on the plots “skriks for niks”.
When your city-dwelling friends sit on your stoep and say “It’s so quiet out here” you won’t mention how the shebeen next door really gets going on a Saturday evening.
Not for you the trendy markets. If you are at a market, it’s probably a farmers’ market, where you are trying to sell all those excess cabbages that, yet again, you planted too many of.
You won’t mind when your son has his matric after party on your plot because the neighbours are too far away to be disturbed by the noise, because then at least you know where he is!
Sure the dust and the flies and having to feed lambs in the middle of the night do get to you sometimes, but you wouldn’t change it for life in a dinky little town house, would you?