Monday, 24 December 2012

In Loving Memory

Last week Saturday our precious Granny Hilde passed away.

When we think of Granny we think of some of her passions: family, pets, cooking and gardening. These are some of our favourite memories

Family

Granny loved having family around her, and she loved talking about her family back in Germany. She would often tell us stories about life in Germany, moving to South Africa and the naughty things her three kids would get up to.

Pets

Keeping her company in Cape Town were her two jack Russels, Yogi and Snoopy, and her cat Miauwi. Granny ensured that her pets were all well looked after and lived the good life. Lamb chops for lunch was quite normal. Everybody agreed that they would quite happily come back as one of Granny's pets in a future life.

Cooking

We would often accuse Granny of having a feeder gene. It would be quite normal to arrive for lunch and find that Granny had cooked a chicken, a roll of beef, a roll of pork, various vegetables and two cakes. And that was considered enough for four of us. We had various tactics that we tried in order to keep Granny out of the kitchen:

- organising to take her out for lunch, only to find that she wasn't feeling up to going out, and so had cooked her usual spread anyway.
- arranging to bring lunch with us resulting in her cooking a late breakfast (steak, egg, chips, mushrooms, tomatoes and croissants) to keep us going until lunch was served.
- arriving at Granny unannounced only to find that she had a chicken pie in the oven - just in case!

Gardening

Granny had the type of green fingers that would make any garden enthusiast jealous. Whether it was the 'left-for-dead' shrubs from the previous owner or the most difficult of bonsai, Granny knew how to get them looking like prize winning beauties. Even in her 80's she would still spend a full day in the garden mowing, chopping, cleaning and re-potting.

Sometimes if we were going away on holiday we would ask Granny to look after our plants for us. We would drop them off and 2 or 3 weeks later come back to fetch them, only to find them twice the size, flowering (we didn't even realise they could flower) and looking like they were ready to be photographed for a nursery catalogue.


Granny believed in keeping things simple. If there were two of us sitting down for lunch, the cake would simply be cut in half. 


Celebrating Granny's birthday at Simons in Constantia.
Bronwen, Granny, Carol and Mark.


Granny getting animated as she gets into another story with Kirsten 


Granny's 80th birthday celebration


Justin, Bronwen, Sue, Gary, Granny, Mark and Brenainn


Dad and Gran


Gran and Mum


Christmas 2010
Granny, the Cross's and the de Villiers's


Granny and one of her well pampered pets


Snoopy


Yogi


At Brenainn and Kirsten's wedding


And at our wedding with Granny Mickey


Bronwen's brother Craig and his date for our wedding


Enjoying the garden show at the Lourensford Wine Estate


Hilde Zsohar
21 Feb 1928 - 15 Dec 2012

We will miss you Granny!!
May you rest in peace.

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