Nine Years of Watering Other People's Ferns

The Fern in Westville

The fern that started all of this belonged to a retired pharmacist called Mrs Govender, and it lived on a wrought iron stand in her sunroom in Westville. She left me a note about it that ran to two pages. Water on Mondays and Thursdays. Never from the tap, always from the rain barrel. Turn it a quarter turn so it does not lean toward the window like a teenager.

I followed those instructions for six weeks while she visited her son in Perth. I followed them exactly. And on the last morning, standing there with the watering can, I realised that I had not owned a single living thing in nine years. Not a fern. Not a cat. Not even a kettle.

I am forty-four. I have been a professional house-sitter since I was thirty-five, when my marriage ended and I left our townhouse in Pinetown with two suitcases and a box of books I still have not unpacked properly. At first it was meant to be a pause, a few months of minding other people's homes while I worked out what came next. Then it simply became what I did.

A Life in Borrowed Rooms

People imagine house-sitting is a long holiday. Sometimes it is close. I have slept in a house in Umhlanga where the bedroom window looked straight onto the sea, and I have spent a December in Parkhurst in Johannesburg with a pool all to myself and two elderly Labradors who followed me from room to room like nervous chaperones.

But the truth is that you are always a guest. You learn which cupboard the owner keeps the good glasses in, and you do not use them. You learn how the geyser timer works, which window sticks, which neighbour waves and which one watches. You get very good at leaving no trace. I could walk out of any house I have ever minded and you would not know I had been there, apart from the dog looking a little sadder.

I carried my own pillow everywhere. That was my one rule. Everything else, the mugs, the towels, the kettle, belonged to someone else. I used a woman in Hillcrest's kettle for three months and grew genuinely fond of it. It had a crack in the handle that she had mended with blue electrical tape, and when I left I almost wrote her a note about it.

That is the kind of thing that happens to you after nine years. You start having feelings about other people's appliances.

The Morning I Counted

In Mrs Govender's sunroom, with the fern dripping, I did something I had been avoiding. I sat down with my phone and counted. Forty-one houses. Fourteen different suburbs across Durban and Gauteng. Two cats who had genuinely liked me, about a dozen dogs, one tortoise, and a parrot in Bryanston who could imitate a car alarm so well that the security company came twice.

Then I counted something else. I had been saving, almost without meaning to. When you do not pay rent for years, the money piles up quietly in the background, like dust under a bed you never move. I had always told myself it was for an emergency. Standing there, I wondered whether the emergency was simply that I was forty-four and had never once chosen the colour of my own walls.

Learning to Look

I did not know how to look for a home. The last time I had done it, my ex-husband handled the paperwork and I chose the curtains. So I started the way most people probably do now, late at night, on my phone, typing things into a search bar in someone else's spare bedroom.

The first evening I searched for apartments for sale I lasted about eleven minutes before closing the screen. It felt like reading someone else's post. I kept thinking, these are for people with real lives, people with partners and children and furniture. Not for a woman whose entire household fits in the boot of a Toyota Yaris.

But I went back the next night, and the night after. It became a small ritual. After I had fed whichever animals were in my care and locked up a house that was not mine, I would sit with a cup of tea, made in a borrowed kettle, and look at floor plans. I started to notice what I actually wanted, which surprised me, because I had not asked myself that question in a long time.

I wanted a small place. I wanted a balcony with morning light, because in nine years of sitting I had learned that I am happiest in houses where the sun comes into the kitchen before eight. I wanted somewhere secure enough that I could lock the door and go away for a few weeks without worrying, because I knew I would not stop sitting entirely. I like the work. I just did not want it to be the only shape my life could take.

What My Sister Said

My younger sister, Thandeka, lives in Pretoria with her husband and three boys who are permanently either eating or growing. I told her about my late night browsing during one of our Sunday calls, half expecting her to laugh.

She did not laugh. She was quiet for a moment and then she said, "Do you know I have never once had your address? Not in nine years. I send your birthday card to my own house and give it to you at Christmas."

I had not known that. I had not thought about it at all.

She came with me to view the first places. She is much braver than me about asking questions. She asked about levies and parking and what the building was like in the rain. I mostly stood in the empty rooms and tried to imagine my box of books on a shelf that would not be packed up again in six weeks.

The Fear Nobody Mentions

The strange thing about buying your first home in your forties, alone, is that the fear is not really about money. I had done the sums. I knew roughly what I could manage and what I could not. The fear was about staying.

House-sitters leave. That is the job. You arrive, you care for a place as if it were yours, and then you hand back the keys and the owner comes home and you are gone before the kettle has cooled. I had become very good at not getting attached. I worried that I had forgotten how.

One evening in a house in Glenwood I scrolled through a page of property for sale and felt my chest tighten in a way that had nothing to do with prices. I closed the app and went outside to sit with the owners' old Staffie, a patient dog called Biscuit who leaned his whole weight against my shin. I told him about it. He did not offer advice, but he did not leave either, which is more than I could say for myself.

Choosing

In the end I did not find the perfect place. I found a good one, which I am learning is a different and better thing. It is a two bedroom unit on the third floor, with a balcony that faces east. The morning sun reaches the kitchen counter at about twenty past seven. I checked. I went back three times at different hours just to watch where the light fell.

The second bedroom will be a study, and also a place for Thandeka's boys when they come to the coast, which they have already announced they will do every school holiday whether I like it or not.

When I signed, my hand shook a little. The woman across the table asked if I was all right. I told her I had not had a front door of my own in nine years, and she put her pen down and said, very kindly, "Well. Now you will."

The Kettle

The first thing I bought for the new place was a kettle. Not an expensive one. A plain white one from a shop in the Pavilion, and I carried it out in its box like it was something fragile and important, which to me it was.

I still sit for people. I have a booking in Ballito in February, a family with two cats and a vegetable garden. But when I hand back their keys this time, I will drive home. That word still feels new in my mouth.

There is a fern on my balcony now. I bought it at the Saturday market for sixty rand. I water it whenever I feel like it, from the tap, and I have never once turned it a quarter turn. It leans toward the light like a teenager, and I let it.

Some evenings I still catch myself scrolling past listings of apartments, out of pure habit, the way you might glance at a train timetable long after you have stopped commuting. Then I put the phone down, boil my own kettle, and listen to the building settle around me. Nobody left me a two page note about how to live here. I am working it out as I go, and that is the part I like best.