I felt like dressing up for breakfast on International Women’s Day on Wednesday. It’s apparently a Traminer tradition to host a breakfast for women accompanied by a fundraising sale of early spring flowers to support an organisation for cancer patients. Of course, it is women who organise all of this for other women, and perhaps it is also fitting that all of us who are invited to partake of breakfast donate to charity. There is an inbuilt generosity premised on conditioned generosity that is worth celebrating. I was among the first few guests. Monika, my partner’s aunt, was expectedly among the chief organisers. 

When she asked me what I’d like to have, I felt spoiled for choice. There was a luscious looking Black Forest cake, a Zopf (a braided bread), three or four other kinds of cakes, including a Chocolate Roulade with whipped cream, and one fabulous bready pastry Maridl, my partner’s other aunt, made with the leftover nuts and raisins from Christmas. I chose a slice of the Black Forest cake and sat alone at a table, though Monika and another woman whose company I enjoy, often came to entertain me and my little one. Steadily, the other Traminer women came in, all sitting on other tables until I began to feel a bit like the new kid in high school movies. I noticed, later, a Black woman who occasionally hustles outside the local supermarket, was peeping in. Monika waved her arms, eagerly inviting her in. She responded with a hand gesture suggesting she would come later. I wished she had come in then so that we could have coloured the room a bit. I am sure I would have had more in common with her than everyone else who was dining in the same room as me.