The Lawn That Finally Won, and the Flat That Gave Us Back Our Weekends

The argument that started all of this was about a lawnmower, which is a ridiculous thing for a marriage of thirty-four years to nearly come apart over, and yet there we were, my wife Sandra and I, standing on the back lawn on a Saturday morning in Centurion, not speaking, while the mower sat between us refusing to start for the third week running.

I was sixty-two. I had been mowing that lawn since I was thirty-three. It is a big lawn, part of a big garden, behind a big house that we bought when our three children were small and the mortgage was terrifying and the future was all ahead of us. We raised the children there. We were happy there, mostly. And then, so gradually that neither of us noticed the exact moment, the children grew up and left, and we were two people in our sixties maintaining a four bedroom house and a garden built for five, for nobody.

The house that had outlived its purpose

That Saturday, with the dead mower between us, Sandra said the thing we had both been not saying for years. She said she was tired. Not tired that morning, tired in general, tired of the whole thing. Tired of a house where two thirds of the rooms were only cleaned so they could sit empty. Tired of a pool that nobody swam in but that still had to be maintained. Tired of a garden that ate every weekend and gave back nothing but a sense of grim duty. She said she did not want to spend what she called the good years we had left pushing a mower around a lawn our grandchildren visited twice a year.

I got defensive, the way you do when someone says out loud the thing you have been thinking in secret. I talked about the memories. I talked about how we had always said we would never leave. I talked about the market and the timing and all the practical fog a man produces when he is really just afraid. And Sandra, who has known me a long time, let me finish and then said, very quietly, that memories do not live in a lawn. They live in us. The lawn is just a lawn, and it is winning, and she was done losing to it.

We did not decide anything that day. But something had been said that could not be unsaid, and over the following weeks the idea took root. What if we did not have to do this any more. What if there was a way to live that did not involve a mower, a pool pump, gutters, a geyser in a roof I could no longer safely climb to, and two hundred square metres of roof that would one day need replacing at a cost I did not want to think about.

Looking at a kind of living we had dismissed

Sandra started looking online in the evenings. At first I pretended not to be interested, and then I started leaning over her shoulder. She was looking at apartments for sale in the lifestyle estates that have gone up all around our part of the country, the secure ones with the walking paths and the clubhouse and the gym, the kind of place I had always, in my ignorance, dismissed as being for young professionals or for people much older and frailer than us.

I had a prejudice about apartment living. I think a lot of men of my generation do. It felt like a step down, like admitting defeat, like giving up the South African dream of a house and a yard and a dog and a braai. But the more we looked, and then the more we actually visited, the more that prejudice came apart in my hands.

The places we saw were not the cramped flats of my imagination. They were proper homes, with room to breathe, but without the acres of obligation. And they sat inside estates where the maintenance of everything outside your own front door was simply not your problem any more. Someone else cut the grass on the beautiful landscaped commons. Someone else maintained the pool, which we would actually use because it was clean and we did not have to clean it. There were paths to walk in the evenings, safely, which Sandra had not been able to do in our own suburb for years because of her nerves about walking alone.

The viewing that changed my mind

The thing that turned me, in the end, was not a feature on a list. It was a feeling I had on a Sunday afternoon when we went to look properly at one of the units. We stood on a small balcony that looked out over green commons where a few families were walking and an older couple was sitting on a bench doing nothing in particular, and I felt something I had not felt in my own big garden for years, which was lightness. The sense of a weekend that belonged to us.

I turned to Sandra and I said the thing I had been resisting for months. I said I could be happy here. Not resigned. Happy. She did not say I told you so, which after thirty-four years is its own kind of love.

We spent the next while doing the unglamorous work of it. We put our own house on the market, and watching our property for sale sign go up on the lawn I had fought for twenty-nine years was stranger than I expected, less sad than I had feared. The sale went through to a young family with three small children, which felt exactly right, the house passing on to people at the stage of life it was built for. I watched the father walking the garden with the estate agent, already planning, and I thought, your turn with the mower now, my friend, and I wish you well of it.

The weekends we got back

We have been in the apartment for over a year now. I will not pretend there was no adjustment. The first month I kept walking to a back door that was not there, looking for a garden that was not mine to tend. Downsizing means deciding what of a whole life fits into a smaller space, and we gave away and sold and donated more than I thought I owned. Some of that was hard. Not the lawnmower, though. I sold the lawnmower to the young father for almost nothing and I have not thought about it since with anything but relief.

What we gained is the thing I did not understand back when I was so suspicious of apartments. We gained our time. Saturday is ours now. We walk the paths in the morning. We use the pool. Sandra joined a book club with two women in the same block. I have taken up, of all things, lawn bowls at the clubhouse, which my children find hilarious. We have the grandchildren to stay and they love the pool and the safety of it, and then they go home and we are not left with a house full of empty rooms, just a comfortable space that is exactly the right size for the two of us.

People our age sometimes ask us, a little nervously, about the move, the way I used to be nervous. I tell them what Sandra told me on the lawn that Saturday. The memories do not live in the house. They came with us. We did not downsize our life when we moved to this apartment. We downsized the part of it that had become a burden, and kept all the rest, and gave ourselves back the good years to actually live in. The lawn won, in the end. It is the best thing that ever happened to us.