CLUTTER
Liesl Jobson

There is a large ceramic jar on the top shelf of my kitchen cupboard. The jar has been thrown on a pottery wheel. Because its sides were raised too fast, it warped in the kiln and has a slightly elliptical shape. It was a farewell gift from a student who was no better as a ceramist than he was a pianist. His scales sounded like the jar looks. Uneven, off-balance, speeding. The stoneware has been glazed in a grey-green sludge, the colour of the pustules that erupted weekly on my student's neck. The jar contains a plethora of dead things that would cause my next-door neighbour who runs the up market Feng Shui consultancy to have palpitations.

Nail clippers, a gift from my ex-husband, abandoned in the jar with a broken spring. Thebe coins from Botswana, no longer in use and valueless, spare Zimbabwean dollars I do not wish to see but do not discard because I cannot bear to think of friends who have disappeared.

The children's milk teeth deposited by the tooth mouse after shelling out crisp ten rand notes. Stale peppermints, business cards not asked for, a rusting safety pin on a frayed red ribbon from the school sports day I left early because it made me cry to be a single mother watching my child come last, and an almost completed course of antibiotics. These things lurk, reminders of my losses, my failures.

A student I taught badly, missed business opportunities, a trip around southern Africa that spelled the last days of a marriage, my children's blighted infancy, my half-baked mothering, my non-compliance with doctor's orders are free-floating genies haunting me as long as that jar remains. I know I should throw it out. The jar and all its contents. I wish I could. I cannot. While the jar remains, I hope I will become competent at something one day. I will buy a small pot of chrysanthemums to fit on top of the debris. If I water it long enough, perhaps all the clutter underneath will dissolve in time.

© Liesl Jobson 2004

Liesl teaches music at a small Catholic school in Johannesburg. She has been in various stages of development a police officer, a masseuse, a psychic and an orchestral contrabassoonist. She currently fancies herself a MA student of Creative Writing at the University of the Witwatersrand. She is uncertain whether this represents progress.

on to page 7   

back to the front page