There is always one weekend when you realise winter is finally starting to lose its grip.
Nobody announces it. There is no official date circled on the calendar. You simply walk outside one morning and something feels different. The jersey you automatically pulled on is suddenly too warm, the back door stays open a little longer and someone suggests having lunch outside. Somewhere nearby, you can smell the first proper braai of the season.
Spring in South Africa doesn’t really arrive with flowers. It arrives when we start living outside again.
After months of hurrying from the car into the house, eating dinner indoors and planning weekends around how cold it is going to be, warmer weather has a way of changing our routines almost overnight.
Morning coffee moves onto the stoep. Lunch stretches well into the afternoon. Gardens, balconies and pool areas that have barely been used for months suddenly become part of the house again. And a friend popping in for a quick visit has a habit of still being there several hours later.
There is something about warmer weather that makes entertaining feel easier too.
Some of the best spring get-togethers are the ones that weren’t really planned. Someone sends a message asking what you’re doing later. Another person offers to bring something for the braai. Chips are tipped into bowls, whatever needs to be cold gets put on ice and someone inevitably arrives with an extra friend.
Nobody minds.
After a winter spent largely indoors, there is less appetite for making a production out of seeing people. The house doesn’t have to be immaculate. Dinner doesn’t need three courses and nobody is worrying about matching glasses or putting together an elaborate drinks menu.
Something on the braai, a few things to snack on and enough cold drinks in the fridge usually does the job.
Even the weekly shop starts to look a little different. Ice suddenly matters again. Fruit gets eaten outside instead of slowly ageing in the fruit bowl. Cooler boxes come back out of the cupboard and cold drinks begin claiming considerably more space in the fridge.
PURA Soda fits easily into that kind of spring fridge. A few cans can go from a weekday lunch to a Saturday braai, into the cooler box for an afternoon outside or straight onto the table when someone who only popped in for an hour decides to stay for dinner.
And perhaps that’s the best thing about the first warm weekends of the year. They remind us that some of the best time spent together doesn’t need much organising at all.
It’s a chair dragged into the last patch of afternoon sun. Shoes kicked off under the table. Music playing through an open door. Children staying outside until it gets dark and friends who arrived in the afternoon somehow still sitting around the table long after dinner should have been over.
It’s getting halfway through the evening before someone suddenly realises nobody has needed to go inside and fetch a jacket.
We’ve spent enough of the year behind closed doors.
It’s time to open them again.
