“I really do not remember, Rra,” she said. “I just feel that we have known one another forever. She has always been there—like Kgali Hill or the Limpopo River. Do you remember the first time you saw Kgali Hill?”

“But that’s quite different, Mma,” he had said. “You can’t compare Mma Potokwane to Kgali Hill.”

Mma Ramotswe considered this, and the more she thought about it, the more she felt that one could compare the redoubtable matron to Kgali Hill. Both were solid; both were unchanging; both would not be budged from where they stood.

Of course there were other friends—Mma Ramotswe was well known in Gaborone and could rarely make a trip to the shops without bumping into somebody she knew, and most of these would be friends of one sort or another. There were old friends whom she had known all her life—people with whom she had grown up in Mochudi—and there were newer friends, those whom she had met during her years in Gaborone: neighbours, friends of friends, fellow attenders at the Anglican Cathedral, members of the Botswana Ladies’ Winter Blanket Committee. This last group met in the months immediately preceding winter and planned fundraising events for their annual blanket appeal. People forgot that Botswana had a winter and that there would be people, poor people, who felt the cold. Just because a country was drenched in sunlight did not mean that the temperature could not drop when the sun went down, especially on the fringes of the Kalahari. On a winter night, with the sky clear and filled with white fields of stars, the cold might penetrate to your very bones, as a dry cold can so easily do. And that was when you needed blankets to wrap yourself in, to make a cocoon of warmth to see you through to the morning.

So there were the ladies of the Blanket Committee, and they were all her good friends, as were the ladies who attended to her at the supermarket bakery and who always kept the freshest bread for Mma Ramotswe, even though she protested that she did not want any special treatment and would take her chances like anybody else. Then there was the man in the Vehicle Licensing Department who invariably clapped his hands with delight when Mma Ramotswe came in to attend to business on behalf of Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, and who would shout out, “My favourite lady has just come into the office! Oh, this is a very happy day for the Vehicle Licensing Department!” That had embarrassed her at first, but she had become accustomed to it and took it in her stride, laughing along with her admirer’s colleagues. She realised that if you worked in the Vehicle Licensing Department, then you might need your moments of levity, and if she could provide those just by stepping in through the door, then she was happy to do so.