“Relieved at the ease with which her mission had been accomplished, she drove out of the Orphan Farm…”
“Relieved at the ease with which her mission had been accomplished, she drove out of the Orphan Farm gate shortly after two o’clock, slightly light-headed at the significance of what she had achieved within the last couple of hours. A young life that had been bleak at eleven o’clock that morning now had a very different feel to it; it was not a big change in the overall scale of things; it was not something that would be noted by more than a handful of people – at the most – but it was something to be pleased with, something even to sing about. And she did sing as she drove back along the Tlokweng Road, dredging up from memory a song she had last sung many years before, when she was still a young girl in Mochudi, and a teacher had taught them the words of a traditional Setswana song about a boy who lets a trapped bird free and who is later saved by the very bird he liberated. The boy was lost in the bush, she remembered, and the bird remembered him and flew in front of him, leading him back to the path. We are all lost in the bush, she thought – every one of us, even if we do not know it. And somewhere there will be a bird that will lead us back to the place we need to be … Was that true? She smiled. Life was not that simple, even if there were songs that made us think it was. But we could still sing them; we could still open the window of our van and sing them out into the passing air unconcerned as to whether people would be puzzled, or amused perhaps, at the sight of a traditionally built lady in a small white van singing out at the top of her voice for no discernible reason …”
– Alexander McCall Smith, The Woman Who Walked in Sunshine
Reposted from http://ift.tt/1CNvWY3.
Tags: alexander mccall smith, precious ramotswe, the woman who walked in sunshine, the no. 1 ladies' detective agency.
