Last updated on March 6, 2026
March has always felt like a quiet turning of the page.
On the farm nothing changes overnight. There is no dramatic announcement that summer is over. Instead, the light shifts almost shyly. The evenings stretch a little longer and somewhere in the distance a francolin calls as if it knows something the calendar does not.
The seasons never rush. They arrive slowly, the way good things usually do. Autumn begins as a whisper. The mornings hold a hint of coolness and the first cup of coffee tastes a little better in the crisp air. Standing outside with warm hands wrapped around a mug, you notice the small things again. Dust lifting gently behind cattle, the wind moving through dry grass, the quiet rhythm of a farm waking up.
Nature does not panic about what comes next. It simply prepares.
Perhaps that is why March always pulls my thoughts northward, to winter days spent between the red dunes of the Kalahari and the wide floodplains of the Okavango Delta.
Autumn mornings in the Kalahari carry their own kind of beauty. Before the heat rises, the air is cool, crisp and clear. The sun climbs slowly over the red dunes, painting the sand in shades of amber and gold. When night settles over the dunes, the silence is broken by the small but determined voices of barking geckos calling from their burrows. The tiny guardians of the desert announcing the cool of the evening.
Not far away, the Okavango moves to a different rhythm. There the mornings arrive with mist rising slowly above the floodplains. The smell of dust and wild sage hangs in the stillness. The distant call of a fish eagle carries across the channels. Reeds whisper in the breeze and the floodplains wake slowly with the light.
Two landscapes, so different, yet both moving to the same quiet rhythm of the seasons. There is comfort in seasons and landscapes that keep their rhythm.
Yet beyond the quiet of farms and floodplains, the world moves in its own restless way. Headlines flicker across screens. Tensions rise and fall in places far from our fields and kitchens. It is easy to feel the weight of it all. A reminder that others carry heavier seasons.
But outside, the veld still glows gold in the late afternoon. Cattle still move slowly through the grass. The wind still carries the scent of earth and sun-warmed dust. The seasons continue.
In the kitchen it is much the same. As the air cools, the cooking changes almost instinctively. Slow meals return to the table. Butter melts into warm pans. The smell of onions softening in olive oil drifts through the house while something bakes quietly in the oven.
Food has its seasons too.
A pot simmering gently on the stove feels like its own form of reassurance. A reminder that some things remain beautifully simple. Some seasons are busy and bright. Others ask something different of us. They ask us to slow down, to notice the small shifts in the light and air and to trust that the quiet work happening beneath the surface will reveal itself in time.
Perhaps March sits exactly there…between heat and coolness, between movement and stillness, between uncertainty and calmness.
A moment of transition.
A reminder that change rarely arrives all at once. It comes softly.
Like dust in the Okavango air.
Like the smell of wild sage at sunrise.
Like the first cool breath of autumn across the veld.