Location: Blue Lagoon, Umgeni River (South Africa)
Date: Circa 1960s
Condition: Sun-bleached and water-stained.
The sun was brutal that day. I can still feel the “red raw” sting of the burn on my shoulders, but at five years old, I didn’t care. I was focused on the waters edge.
We were having a family braai, and I was standing at the edge of the Blue Lagoon where the river meets the sea. I remember tossing a bit of my sandwich crust into the shallows, and suddenly, the water came alive. These tiny, brilliant, flickering jewels started dancing around the bread.
Wild guppies.
I had a little black swimming costume and a cheap hand net. I managed to scoop a few of them into my yellow sandcastle bucket. I sat there for an hour, mesmerized by them. They were the most beautiful things I had ever seen.
Then came the heartbreak.
My mum told me I had to put them back. “You have no way of keeping them alive,” she said. I cried my eyes out as I watched them swim out of that plastic bucket and back into the Umgeni.
I didn’t know it then, but that was the moment the “wet hands” started. I spent the next sixty years trying to find a way to keep those “jewels” alive—learning how to build ecosystems that didn’t just hold water, but sustained life.
Looking back, my mum was right. I wasn’t ready then. But that afternoon at the Blue Lagoon is why The Soggy Journal exists today. It’s why I’m so obsessed with making sure a plant is “hardened” and ready before it leaves my sight. I never want anyone to feel that “sandcastle bucket” heartbreak because their environment wasn’t ready.
Six decades later, I’m still chasing that feeling at the water’s edge.
