Jacaranda Rain

Petrus says “the jacaranda is raining”.

The sky is bright blue over the houses of parliament. Windhoek’s brief spring is already teasing a red-hot summer and Petrus’ task for the morning is to sweep the spread of jacaranda flowers making a lavender sea of the street.

The maintenance man has done this for sixteen years. October comes, with it the bloom of the city’s jacaranda trees, and Petrus, cheerful below the great doors of the National Council building, is ready with a broom.

“It’s too much work when you’re cleaning. But it’s very nice to see,” he says of the seasonal purple rain.

Petrus is one of those people who work diligently behind the scenes – an unsung scene changer who wakes up early and gets to work beautifying or maintaining the world so we may find it just so.

The ‘Unsung Scene Changers’, as I like to call them, exist in countless, different forms.

They are the people who update the movie posters at the cinema. The folks who hoist flags outside important buildings. The person who writes the soup of the day on the specials board. The groundsmen who prune and plant to perfection. Garbage collectors who relocate our rubbish and the office cleaner who works during the exhaustion of dusk or the yawn of dawn, creating the illusion of some kind of maintenance magic.

Petrus is an Unsung Scene Changer and I’m thrilled to see him.

I’m out early to photograph the city’s burst of violet around parliament and Petrus, in sunny yellow gloves and a black face mask, seems glad to see me too. As he sweeps, I ask him whether, considering his current activity, he loves or loathes Windhoek’s jacaranda season.

Like most things, Petrus says it has its pros and cons. To their credit, jacaranda trees in full, brilliant bloom are absolutely gorgeous. Even more so when the trees’ flowers begin to fall, coating the ground beneath them so that the pleasure of purple is both above and below.

It’s that last bit that heads up the con pile.

“In about two hours, the flowers will fall again,” says Petrus with a laugh. “I can leave it like that if it still looks nice but if the wind blows, then I’ll have to clean it.”

Petrus says he’s used to the purple storms and generally enjoys the spell. Like an artist whose tools are the sturdy garden broom and a leaf blower perched under a nearby tree, Petrus knows the difference between an enchanting carpet of bell-shaped blossoms and a right old mess. So he watches the scene and the season change, making sure to keep things charming.

It will all be over before we know it.

“It comes and it goes,” says Petrus about Windhoek’s jacaranda rain … and everything.

Our lavender spring is a thing with feathers and it always soars away too soon.

– martha@namibian.com.na; Martha Mukaiwa on Twitter and Instagram; marthamukaiwa.com