Count your blessings, she said

Blood's Inner Rhyme offers a meditation on homecoming, resilience and the quiet, comic rituals of rural life and family

- Antjie Krog

It's my first visit to the Free State after spending almost a year overseas. As I turn the rented car from Bram Fischer Airport north onto the N1, my eyes throw themselves like obsessed lovers on the landscape of my youth. The world is all winter sky, grass and harvested maizefields. I want to grasp this specific colour of grass with all my senses foraging, caressing, tracing the benedictory plains with their blinding flaxblondness, their soft-seeded grass-plumes, all bleached by frost. It is said that one's body can only truly love one landscape. I pull over. Roll down the windows, burst from my rind, spread shoots to breathe the pure wind-dried winter air.

During the two-hour drive to Kroonstad my favourite sites greet me like close relatives: there's that clump of thorn trees where I once saw the amber smear of a jackal; here is that plain that has no single human blemish — no wire, no border, no telephone pole, not even a tree, just a lush hill of unmolested grass; beyond this farm are the four eucalyptus trees where I once ran out of petrol; in a while I will see the smoke-blue tips of the far-away Maluti Mountains, leaching their blue into the sky. My neck lifts, my blood goes quiet, the seams of my self-control loosen, my hinges are suddenly light as thistle... I am where I am supposed to be.

It's already dusk when I enter the town. In the weak streetlights it is difficult to avoid the sudden potholes, dark stretches of water or rubbish, and the enormous sombre monsterhulks of transport lorries that have parked along the main street for the night.

I press the button at the gates of Arborpark. "I knew it was you! Always earlier than the time you gave," my mother cries, impressed, over the intercom. I stop under the tree by her flat. The garage door lifts. "Just come in over here."