The Glass on the Windowsill

The Move

When Pieter and I bought our five acre plot outside Tarlton, west of Johannesburg, I remember standing in the empty kitchen with the removal van still idling in the driveway and feeling like we had finally done the thing everyone in our old townhouse complex talked about doing and never did. We had chickens within a month. We had a vegetable patch marked out with string and pegs before we had curtains up. And we had a borehole, already drilled by the previous owners, with a pump that kicked on with a satisfying thunk somewhere out near the old stable wall.

Nobody warned me how much of country living comes down to that one unglamorous fact, that your water no longer comes from a municipality with an account number and a complaints line. It comes from underground, through a pipe, into your kettle, and nobody along that route is checking anything unless you are the one who checks.

I did not think about this for the first year. Why would I. The water ran clear out of every tap. It tasted, if anything, slightly better than the town water we were used to, a bit mineral, a bit cold even in summer. My son Liam was two when we moved in, and he drank it from his sippy cup like he'd drunk any other water his whole short life, and I filled the kettle with it every morning without a second thought.

The Summer It Started

It was the December after our first full year on the plot that things started to feel off. Liam had his first bout of diarrhoea just before Christmas, the kind that has you doing laundry three times a day and googling things at two in the morning that only make you more frightened. Our GP in town said it was probably a stomach bug, going around, nothing to worry about too much, keep him hydrated. I did. It passed. I let it go.

Then it came back in January. And this time I had it too, cramping and running to the bathroom at work in a way that embarrassed me more than it scared me, at first. Pieter seemed mostly fine, which in hindsight should have told me something, because he was the one who barely drank tap water at all, always had a Coke or a beer in hand by six in the evening. Liam and I were the ones filling glasses from the kitchen tap all day long.

By February I was tired in a way that felt bigger than one bad stomach. Liam had lost a bit of weight, or I told myself he had, standing him against the door frame and frowning at a pencil mark that did not seem to have moved much since November. I started keeping a written log on my phone, dates, symptoms, what we'd eaten, because that is what you do when you are a mother lying awake worrying and you need something that feels like control. Looking back at that log later was strange, because on paper the pattern was so obvious, and yet living through it week by week, it never once resolved into a clear shape. It just felt like a bad summer. Everyone said Highveld tummy bugs were doing the rounds that year.

The Glass on the Windowsill

There is a particular kind of denial that comes from a glass of water looking completely normal. I would fill one, hold it up to the kitchen window where the afternoon light came in gold and low, and turn it slowly, looking for anything, a haze, a tint, floating specks. Nothing. It looked exactly like the water I'd grown up drinking in Pretoria. Clear glass, clear water, and some old unexamined part of my brain kept insisting that clear meant safe, the same way I'd once believed that food without a smell couldn't be off.

I know now how wrong that instinct is. E. coli does not have a colour. Nitrates do not have a smell. Half the things that can live quietly in borehole water, especially on a smallholding near old farmland where who knows what has leached into the ground over sixty years of fertiliser and pit latrines and God knows what else, are things you would never see or taste or smell in a million years of holding a glass up to a window.

It was my sister, on a phone call where I was probably more honest about how exhausted I felt than I meant to be, who finally said the obvious thing. She asked, quite plainly, whether we'd ever had the borehole water tested. I remember going quiet, because the answer was no, and because I could not for the life of me explain why it hadn't occurred to me sooner, other than that it is astonishingly easy to trust a thing that looks fine every single day.

Sending the Sample

The process turned out to be far less complicated than the year of anxiety leading up to it. I found a courier based place doing this kind of thing, one of the water laboratories that services smallholdings and farms right across Gauteng and further out, and they sent me a sterile little bottle with instructions so specific I read them twice standing at the kitchen sink. Run the tap for two minutes first. Do not touch the inside of the bottle cap. Fill it without letting the tap touch the rim. It felt almost ceremonial, this small careful ritual after a year of just filling glasses without thinking at all.

I packed the sample into a cooler bag with an ice brick, the way the instructions said, and dropped it at the courier office in town two days before we were due to have my mother-in-law visit for a week, which in hindsight was probably not a coincidence in my anxious little brain, some part of me wanting an answer before I had to serve someone else's mother a glass of our water too.

The waiting was its own particular flavour of horrible. I found myself reading things online at ten at night about coliform counts and nitrate levels and what symptoms matched what contaminants, which is exactly the kind of research that helps nobody and terrifies everybody. Pieter kept telling me the borehole was probably fine, that half our neighbours had been drinking from theirs for twenty years without issue, and I believed him mostly, except for the part of me that kept picturing Liam's small face going pale in the bathroom in January.

What Came Back

The results arrived by email about a week later, a PDF full of numbers I had to read three times to understand. There was, in fact, a mild bacterial contamination, nothing catastrophic, but enough, the accompanying note explained, to plausibly account for recurring gastrointestinal symptoms in a small child and in an adult with regular exposure. Probably surface water finding its way in somewhere near the wellhead, possibly a casing that needed resealing, possibly just needed after the heavy December rains we'd had.

What surprised me most was not the result itself but the feeling that came with it, which was not fear at all, but something closer to relief so total I sat down at the kitchen table and cried for about five minutes over a PDF. Not because anything was catastrophic, but because for the first time in months I understood what had been happening. I was no longer imagining shapes in the dark. I had an answer, and answers, even imperfect ones, are so much easier to carry than months of quiet dread.

We had the borehole reworked that autumn, the casing resealed properly, a UV filter fitted at the point where the line enters the house, and I now send a sample off every year without fail, usually in early spring before the rains really start, treating water testing the way I treat Liam's dentist visits, an unglamorous appointment that exists purely so I never again have to stand in my kitchen with a glass held up to the light, trying to see with my own eyes something that was never visible in the first place.

What I Tell People Now

When friends from the city ask about smallholding life, about the chickens and the space and the quiet, I tell them the truth, that it is wonderful, and that the water is the one thing I underestimated completely. I tell them not to trust a clear glass. I tell them that water labs exist precisely because our eyes are useless for this particular job, and that the twenty minutes it takes to book a courier and fill a sterile bottle is nothing compared to a summer spent doubting your own kitchen. Liam is five now, sturdy and loud and utterly unaware that he was ever the reason his mother stood at a window each evening, turning a glass of water in the light, looking for a danger that was never going to show itself that way.