Last words from Karin Brynard
She lost her innocence early in life, says Karin Brynard – the day she looked in the mirror for the first time.
SSometimes you look in the mirror and the image looking back at you suddenly gives you the shivers. Because usually you don’t really look, like properly; you glance, as you quickly check for parsley between your teeth or to see if your hair is still behaving. Or absentmindedly as you floss.
The other day I made the mistake of actually taking in what I was looking at. And it gave me a fright; no, a real skrik.
The problem is, I’ve lost a bit of weight and I’m suddenly saddled with concertina syndrome. You know: when a concertina loses air and it collapses in on itself in a fold of wrinkles. That syndrome. It made me think of pumpkin. I was little, a young child. We lived in Calvinia with my Ouma Stienie. To earn a little extra cash, Ouma made clothes and when the dorp ladies came for fittings, the ‘long mirror’ was hauled out – that abomination of an invention and the bane of every woman’s existence.
I was barely four years old, a tender green shoot, far too fragile for a first encounter with that instrument of evil. It would have been a late morning and I’d have been playing in Ouma’s work room while she sewed a piece of fabric together. The full-length mirror would have been out because someone was coming to try on an outfit. Maybe I’d been playing in front of the mirror, I can’t really remember. What I do know for sure is that I looked in that dastardly glass and discovered the dots on my face! Then came the painful revelation that they were permanent. Part and parcel of my life.
My mother laughed away my tears. And then she went and betrayed me.
That Sunday after church, when we went to my Oom Danie for lunch, the story was told at the family table. Once the laughter had subsided, Oom Danie asked me if I knew how good pumpkin was for freckles – knowing full well, of course, about my loathing for the orange vegetable.
“If you can manage to eat pumpkin for an entire week,” whispered Oom Danie, “those freckles will disappear.”
So I ate. Begrudgingly at first, but after a while with more determined enthusiasm. And every evening after dinner I’d drag a chair to the mirror above the bathroom basin to do an inspection. In the dim light of the single 60W bulb I fancied that those freckles were fading just a little.
Come next Sunday, Oom Danie conducted his own inspection. Running a finger over his Clark Gable moustache, he mused: “Hmm, seems like there’s progress. But I think it would go even quicker if you tried some sweet potatoes.”
Courageously, I applied myself to sweet potatoes, inspired and driven. That week I tackled those greenish, lumpy tubers one by ugly one. And carried out the necessary inspections every evening, imagining that those dots were indeed a little lighter. Maybe those nasty old lumps were really doing the trick.
But during the day, in Ouma’s devil mirror, the freckles were once again garishly obvious. Then Oom Danie, of course, came up with some new advice.
I think I persisted with this charade through all the root vegetables, through the full range of yellows, followed by a whole set of the pestiferous legume family. But it was when the Brassicas came into the picture that the joke really turned sour – for me, at least. I simply drew the line at cabbage, not to mention its ugly sisters, cauliflower and broccoli.
Besides, none of this veggie frenzy worked. It helped not one jot. To this day, those freckles are intact. Right through my school years, my awful puberty, my sorry university years, my exciting career and out the other side until now – they remain.
And now they have company: wrinkles. No improvement either, as the wretched mirror confirms.
Not until I looked deeper. Only then did I see it: a wonderful map of my life, that’s what is evident there. Everything I’ve gone through and experienced. Everything I’ve learned, even the things I’ve forgotten. Everything I’ve loved. And lost.
What I see there is precious, actually. An entire life, borne by the simplicity of a breath. I see the miracle of being alive, the privilege of being here. Of feeling the sun on my skin, of hearing a child laugh or a sugarbird’s song, of seeing how I snugly shake myself into an old woman’s skin, older than I’ve ever been.
And suddenly I’m happy. What does a freckle or a wrinkle matter? I’m old enough. I have loved, I am loved. And I’m rarely frightened; I’m not easily skrikked. Not by mirrors, let alone pumpkins.