The Good Doctor

We are most assuredly in the dead in winter now. It's dark out when the alarm goes off at 7 a.m., and the snooze button has begun to look more and more attractive. We've gone five days without seeing the top of Table Mountain, and as I write this, the wind is blowing so hard that the front door and the door to our balcony are rattling in their frames. And something just made a horrendous crash outside.

The wind here is strong enough, and has enough of a personality, that locals have named it. Or, rather, they've named one of the three winds, the summer southeaster that blows up from Antarctica without gaining any purchase on land before reaching the Cape Peninsula. It's been dubbed the "Cape Doctor."

You can learn more about the Cape Doctor and the accompanying cloud formation called the "Tablecloth" here.

There's also a northwester and a southwester that do not, as far as I know, have names. But they can be brutish and mean and infuse the entire city with a strong desire to stay at home and drink rooibos, the herbal tea native to this country.

I don't know which direction the wind is coming from tonight--it seems like it's coming from everywhere at once, actually--but it's pulling a trick that I've only seen it do once before. In our new apartment, where everything was gutted and remodeled and sold to solid South Africans with an eye for good construction and excellent attention to detail, the wind has found a way inside. Tonight, as we do every night, we've pulled a light curtain across the door to the balcony, and that curtain is billowing outward like a sail every time the wind turns to blow full force into the side of the apartment building. A solid 60 mph wind gust outside becomes a gentle breeze inside, and is reigned in by the curtain. Katie and I are camped out by the heater with sweaters on, reading about global warming in our New Yorkers that arrived yesterday (thanks to some good friends). And we're drinking rooibos tea.