The stone cottage that housed my childhood sits on a tiny peak, a “kopje”, at the centre of a pine farm, the only house for miles. To my knowledge, there is no cinematic representation of the Magoebaskloof area and surrounds. When I was about 16, however, I watched Henry Selick’s Coraline for the first time, and the deja-vu sensation I felt was overwhelming. The delicately creepy world of the stop-motion film felt like the evil doppelgänger of my childhood experience, my Other childhood.
Childish boredom and loneliness veil everything in fantasy. Listing is an exercise of rationality, an attempt to exhaust a discrete topic. But when the boundaries between reality and magic dissolve, and imaginary objects proliferate, it’s difficult to see the start and the end of things. Memory, too, is slippery and suffused with fantasy. When do my memories end? When do Coraline’s begin?
Stone cottage data:
1) Location: Limpopo, South Africa. 12 km away from Haenertsburg village at the top of the Magoebaskloof pass. The edge of the Great Escarpment.
2) Climate: moderate and wet.
3) Material: cottage made of soapstone (too heavy for the land—every year the cottage sinks a little deeper into the earth)
4) Surrounded by 26 hectares of pine forests harvested primarily for pulping
5) Known to locals as Kopje Alleen—directly translated from Afrikaans as:
a) Little hill alone
b) Little head alone
6) Known to the locals as haunted, but in a friendly way
7) Patchy cell phone signal
8) Patchy electricity
9) My parents bought the farm in 1996 from the son of the previous owner/tenant, who died trying to fix the cottage roof
10) I lived there with my family (mom/dad/little brother) from 6-12
Coraline vs Kopje Alleen:
Rhymes:
1) Mud
a) Pies
b) Facials
c) Baths
d) Poison oak cure
2) Mist
a) that drips
b) that floats
c) that sits on the ground like a blanket
d) that coats flat-topped mountain like a tablecloth
e) that has long fingers
f) from breathing
g) so thick you cannot see an outstretched hand
3) Old and haunted house
4) Stop motion looks how tween-hood feels: jerky, gangly, floppy, awkward
5) Feeling like the only-girl-in-the-world
6) Impossible thick time of boredom
7) Freaky neighbors
Differences
1) Oregon, USA vs. Limpopo, SA
a) 10,421 miles apart
b) 1 day and 9 hours and $2,000 to reach via airplane
2) Clay vs. flesh and bones
3) Only child vs. 1 little brother
Things to do when bored:
1) Build a fort in the woods
2) Make sleds out of cardboard and slides out of mud
3) Climb to the top of the tallest tree you can find and shout swear words at the mountain peaks and listen to the echoes
4) Outline your plan for running away
5) Make a love potion
6) Walk around cottage and surrounding garden with a lined pad, clipboard, and pen, jotting down lists of things that you see
Coraline’s exploration list:
1) Twelve leaky windows
2) One rusty old water heater
3) One boring blue boy in a painfully boring blue painting
4) Four incredibly boring windows
5) No more doors
Outfit inspo (shopping list):
1) Yellow rain boots
2) Thick knitted tights in blue & red horizontal stripes
3) Suede motor jacket, blue
4) Knitted knee length dark pink shorts
5) Knitted turtleneck, navy blue with silver stars
6) Short blue cowboy boots
7) Lime green collared button up with red finishings
Word Play (unfinished):
1) Hairy Bald Man (oxymoron)
a) Bobinsky’s hairy chest and shoulders and garden trail and knees and back and upper lip and poking through his mesh tank top and bouncing when he does a cartwheel and clung onto by a dancing mouse and stroked thoughtfully, sometimes angrily. But no hair on his head.
2) Eyes are the windows to your soul (give me both and here, take these buttons)
Sensations of Rottenness and Disease
1) Dead trees in the apple orchard
2) Spotted rash from poison oak
3) Slugs we salt to watch boil and spit
4) Damp bones
5) Rats with long bodies, long snouts
6) Rats filled with sawdust
7) Smashing bugs beneath bare palms
8) Black and green steak, covered in flies
9) Needles for hands
10) Sticky taffy hands
11) Other Mother's Guttural scream: “don’t leave me, don’t leave me. I’ll die without you.”
The rules and regulations of Other Mother’s finding game:
1) Task: you must find all three of the ghost-children’s eyeballs as well as where I am hiding your parents
2) Tools: a friendly, talking cat and a looking stone
3) Prize: I’ll set everybody free
4) Consequence: I get to keep your eyeballs and your soul and eat your life up
5) Timeline: you have until the button eclipses the moon
6) Clue: “In each of the three wonders I’ve made just for you, a ghost eye is lost in plain sight.”
Instructions for building charmed gardens:
To encourage a fairy to visit, says Mom, build a garden where it can put its little feet up and relax a while. It works best if you:
1) Place it somewhere it can soak in the moonlight, but out of the sun if possible
2) Build it out of bits you find in the woods: pine needles, flowers, sticks and stones
3) Build close to moving water
4) Use soft flower centers (like daisies) as seats
5) Once you’re finished, go play somewhere else, so you can’t see the garden. The fairy won’t come if you’re watching
6) Before you go to sleep at night, say “bless you fairy”
If you follow all the rules and don’t cheat, in the morning the fairy will leave a little treat in the garden (nail polish, smarties, a tiny teddy bear.)
Stone Cottage Ghosts:
1) Lightning struck the house and I watched it cut the living room in half, a split second so searing-bright my eyes water and hurt for days. It left a black mark the shape of an earlobe on the creaky wooden floors.
2) Lightning struck the twin gumtrees and killed one but not the other so that they stood at the foot of our yard, one black and dropping deadly branches and one brown and green and full of life.
∙Note: Dad calls the dead branches widow-makers.
3) My dog Rosie who is big and black won’t stop barking at the shadows in the master bathroom. From 5 pm until morning she barks and barks.
4) Cousin Luca says that outside the bathroom window is where the man who once owned the farm fell when fixing the roof. He smashed his skull to pieces, on that stone just there, see how it’s stained brown and red?
5) A portrait of the same man keeps reappearing around the house even though Mom swears she put it away in the office cupboard so that we wouldn’t have to look at his twisty smile anymore.
6) Mom wakes up still dreaming one day and tells me that I’m dying of a rare tropical disease. It’s chickungunya, she says, patting me on the head. You have about two weeks left to live.
The stone cottage that housed my childhood sits on a tiny peak, a “kopje”, at the centre of a pine farm, the only house for miles. To my knowledge, there is no cinematic representation of the Magoebaskloof area and surrounds. When I was about 16, however, I watched Henry Selick’s Coraline for the first time, and the deja-vu sensation I felt was overwhelming. The delicately creepy world of the stop-motion film felt like the evil doppelgänger of my childhood experience, my Other childhood.
Childish boredom and loneliness veil everything in fantasy. Listing is an exercise of rationality, an attempt to exhaust a discrete topic. But when the boundaries between reality and magic dissolve, and imaginary objects proliferate, it’s difficult to see the start and the end of things. Memory, too, is slippery and suffused with fantasy. When do my memories end? When do Coraline’s begin?
Stone cottage data:
1) Location: Limpopo, South Africa. 12 km away from Haenertsburg village at the top of the Magoebaskloof pass. The edge of the Great Escarpment.
2) Climate: moderate and wet.
3) Material: cottage made of soapstone (too heavy for the land—every year the cottage sinks a little deeper into the earth)
4) Surrounded by 26 hectares of pine forests harvested primarily for pulping
5) Known to locals as Kopje Alleen—directly translated from Afrikaans as:
a) Little hill alone
b) Little head alone
6) Known to the locals as haunted, but in a friendly way
7) Patchy cell phone signal
8) Patchy electricity
9) My parents bought the farm in 1996 from the son of the previous owner/tenant, who died trying to fix the cottage roof
10) I lived there with my family (mom/dad/little brother) from 6-12
Coraline vs Kopje Alleen:
Rhymes:
1) Mud
a) Pies
b) Facials
c) Baths
d) Poison oak cure
2) Mist
a) that drips
b) that floats
c) that sits on the ground like a blanket
d) that coats flat-topped mountain like a tablecloth
e) that has long fingers
f) from breathing
g) so thick you cannot see an outstretched hand
3) Old and haunted house
4) Stop motion looks how tween-hood feels: jerky, gangly, floppy, awkward
5) Feeling like the only-girl-in-the-world
6) Impossible thick time of boredom
7) Freaky neighbors
Differences
1) Oregon, USA vs. Limpopo, SA
a) 10,421 miles apart
b) 1 day and 9 hours and $2,000 to reach via airplane
2) Clay vs. flesh and bones
3) Only child vs. 1 little brother
Things to do when bored:
1) Build a fort in the woods
2) Make sleds out of cardboard and slides out of mud
3) Climb to the top of the tallest tree you can find and shout swear words at the mountain peaks and listen to the echoes
4) Outline your plan for running away
5) Make a love potion
6) Walk around cottage and surrounding garden with a lined pad, clipboard, and pen, jotting down lists of things that you see
Coraline’s exploration list:
1) Twelve leaky windows
2) One rusty old water heater
3) One boring blue boy in a painfully boring blue painting
4) Four incredibly boring windows
5) No more doors
Outfit inspo (shopping list):
1) Yellow rain boots
2) Thick knitted tights in blue & red horizontal stripes
3) Suede motor jacket, blue
4) Knitted knee length dark pink shorts
5) Knitted turtleneck, navy blue with silver stars
6) Short blue cowboy boots
7) Lime green collared button up with red finishings
Word Play (unfinished):
1) Hairy Bald Man (oxymoron)
a) Bobinsky’s hairy chest and shoulders and garden trail and knees and back and upper lip and poking through his mesh tank top and bouncing when he does a cartwheel and clung onto by a dancing mouse and stroked thoughtfully, sometimes angrily. But no hair on his head.
2) Eyes are the windows to your soul (give me both and here, take these buttons)
Sensations of Rottenness and Disease
1) Dead trees in the apple orchard
2) Spotted rash from poison oak
3) Slugs we salt to watch boil and spit
4) Damp bones
5) Rats with long bodies, long snouts
6) Rats filled with sawdust
7) Smashing bugs beneath bare palms
8) Black and green steak, covered in flies
9) Needles for hands
10) Sticky taffy hands
11) Other Mother's Guttural scream: “don’t leave me, don’t leave me. I’ll die without you.”
The rules and regulations of Other Mother’s finding game:
1) Task: you must find all three of the ghost-children’s eyeballs as well as where I am hiding your parents
2) Tools: a friendly, talking cat and a looking stone
3) Prize: I’ll set everybody free
4) Consequence: I get to keep your eyeballs and your soul and eat your life up
5) Timeline: you have until the button eclipses the moon
6) Clue: “In each of the three wonders I’ve made just for you, a ghost eye is lost in plain sight.”
Instructions for building charmed gardens:
To encourage a fairy to visit, says Mom, build a garden where it can put its little feet up and relax a while. It works best if you:
1) Place it somewhere it can soak in the moonlight, but out of the sun if possible
2) Build it out of bits you find in the woods: pine needles, flowers, sticks and stones
3) Build close to moving water
4) Use soft flower centers (like daisies) as seats
5) Once you’re finished, go play somewhere else, so you can’t see the garden. The fairy won’t come if you’re watching
6) Before you go to sleep at night, say “bless you fairy”
If you follow all the rules and don’t cheat, in the morning the fairy will leave a little treat in the garden (nail polish, smarties, a tiny teddy bear.)
Stone Cottage Ghosts:
1) Lightning struck the house and I watched it cut the living room in half, a split second so searing-bright my eyes water and hurt for days. It left a black mark the shape of an earlobe on the creaky wooden floors.
2) Lightning struck the twin gumtrees and killed one but not the other so that they stood at the foot of our yard, one black and dropping deadly branches and one brown and green and full of life.
∙Note: Dad calls the dead branches widow-makers.
3) My dog Rosie who is big and black won’t stop barking at the shadows in the master bathroom. From 5 pm until morning she barks and barks.
4) Cousin Luca says that outside the bathroom window is where the man who once owned the farm fell when fixing the roof. He smashed his skull to pieces, on that stone just there, see how it’s stained brown and red?
5) A portrait of the same man keeps reappearing around the house even though Mom swears she put it away in the office cupboard so that we wouldn’t have to look at his twisty smile anymore.
6) Mom wakes up still dreaming one day and tells me that I’m dying of a rare tropical disease. It’s chickungunya, she says, patting me on the head. You have about two weeks left to live.