#05 Biggest Compliment
We had a visit from Philip Matzigkeit, a mural artist and interior designer from San Diego who spent a few days here at our home, Tuwa The Laughing Fish.
We hit it off very well because, one, both our roots anchored in Africa, he had lived in Zimbabwe -or at that time Rhodesia- and I was his next-door neighbor, being from South Africa. Sharing patterns of artists like the Ndebele, Malcolm X and freedom, brought forth memories alike of what great lives of riches we have spent.
In all my travels around the world I found one of the most intriguing things was how people worked with plants, how they shaped them to either suite an easier way to harvest them or create a shape to enhance the settings around a building.
So when we set out to design our gardens here at Tuwa, we chose for scented corners, floral areas, food production and wildlife zones. Our water features like canals and ponds have grown into beautiful reflections of the sky with vegetation snuggly wrapped on its banks and edges.
It was Penelope’s dream to grow water lilies and we tried in vain to introduce seedlings for a few seasons. A few months ago it happened out of the blue that there was a cluster of bright pink lilies greeting us after their nights blooming; can you imagine the joy we experienced in seeing this?
And it was this that inspired Philip while he was here, the morning before he left, he brought out his water colors, a folding table and settled in the shade like a true artist does, painting away the soft beauty – mesmerizing us all.
When he handed me the small picture he explained with a broad smile that the setting reminded him of Monet’s gardens. Wow, what a statement!
This put me a state of flashback of twenty years when my cousin Belinda invited me to celebrate her wedding anniversary with her because her husband Roger was abroad at the time. We got in the car and drove from the region of Versailles where she stays to Giverny, the home of Monet. The beauty that he captured in all the gardens was a joy to the eye.
So, can you imagine how moments in time can intertwine and bring forth so much exhilaration due to aspirations, dreams, and their manifestations? After all, that is the zest of life.
