The Map My Daughter Drew of a Garden We Did Not Have Yet

For nearly two years we lived in a townhouse in Bellville with a wall we shared with a young couple who liked their music the way I like my coffee, which is to say strong and late at night. I am not writing this to complain about them. They were kind people. But there is a particular kind of tiredness that comes from living pressed up against strangers, and by the end of it I was carrying that tiredness everywhere I went.

We are a family of four. Me, my husband Riaan, our daughter Ilse who was seven when this story starts, and a badly behaved sausage dog named Biltong who believes he is the size of a horse. The four of us and one shared wall.

The map on the fridge

Ilse started drawing maps. I did not ask her to. One afternoon she came home from school and stuck a piece of paper to the fridge with a magnet shaped like a strawberry, and on it she had drawn a house with a garden. There was a tree with a swing. There was a square she labelled BILTONG in wobbly capitals, which was where the dog would sleep. There was a vegetable patch, because her friend Amahle grew tomatoes and Ilse had decided we would too.

She drew a new one almost every week. The maps got more detailed. She added a window for her own room, and a note that said her room must not share a wall with anybody. I had never told her that the wall bothered me. Children hear everything you do not say.

I would stand in front of the fridge in the evening looking at these maps, and I would feel something between love and shame. Love because she believed so completely that it would happen. Shame because I was not sure it would.

Why the Winelands

Riaan grew up in Paarl. His mother still lives there, in the same street she has lived in since the eighties, and every time we drove out to visit her I felt my shoulders come down from around my ears. There is the mountain, that great pink granite shoulder of rock, and there are the oak lined streets, and there is a slowness that Bellville does not have. On the drive home Ilse would fall asleep in the back with Biltong on her lap and I would think, why do we keep leaving.

So we started, very quietly, to look. I did not tell my mother in law at first because I did not want to raise anyone's hopes, mine most of all. In the evenings after Ilse was asleep I would sit with the laptop and browse listings, looking for a house to buy in Paarl that we could actually afford, which is a sentence that contains a great deal of heartbreak if you have ever tried to do it.

The first few months were discouraging. Everything that looked right was too much, and everything we could afford needed a new roof or sat on a road where the trucks ran all night. I began to understand why people give up. It is not that the dream dies. It is that you get tired of grieving it every Sunday evening.

The Saturday everything changed

Riaan's mother, who eventually found out what we were up to because mothers always do, phoned on a Thursday and said there was a new development going up on the edge of town, near the mountain, and that we should just come and look. She used the voice she uses when she has already decided something on your behalf.

We drove out that Saturday. I remember it was one of those blue winter days the Cape does so well, cold and bright, the mountain sharp against the sky. There was a show house, and while Riaan talked to the agent I watched Ilse walk straight to the back and stand in the empty patch of ground that would be the garden. She stood there with her arms out like she was measuring it. Then she turned around and shouted, across the whole plot, that this was where Biltong's square would go.

I had to walk to the car for a minute so that nobody would see my face.

It was not the fanciest place we had seen in our long search through the homes for sale Paarl had thrown at us over those months. But it had a small garden with room for a tree, and it did not share a wall with the neighbours in the way our townhouse did, and Ilse's room, when we worked out the plan, would sit on the quiet side with a window that looked toward the mountain.

The part nobody warns you about

I will be honest about the middle of it, because people never are. The paperwork nearly finished me. There were bond applications and forms I did not understand and a fortnight where the whole thing hung on a single document that seemed to have vanished into a bank somewhere. There was a night I sat on the bathroom floor convinced we had been foolish to hope, that people like us do not get to buy houses, that I had let a seven year old draw maps of a future I could not deliver.

Riaan found me there. He did not say anything clever. He just sat down on the cold tiles next to me and said that whatever happened, we had already given her something, because she now believed a garden was a thing our family could reach for. That helped more than any reassurance about money would have.

The document turned up. The bond came through on a Tuesday morning while I was at work, and I read the email three times before I let myself believe it. I phoned Riaan and neither of us could really speak.

The tree is small but it is ours

We have been in the house for eight months now. The tree we planted is not much taller than Ilse, and the swing is on order, and Biltong has claimed a square of sun by the back door that is almost exactly where the map said it should be. I do not share a wall with anyone who plays music at midnight, and on the rare nights I cannot sleep it is because of my own thoughts and not somebody else's bass line.

Sometimes I think the search for a house is really a search for permission to want a certain kind of life. When we finally understood what a piece of ordinary Paarl property could do for a small tired family, it was not about the walls or the roof at all. It was about a child who drew the same dream every week until the adults around her caught up.

The strawberry magnet is still on the fridge. It holds up a school photo now. But I kept the last map she drew in the townhouse, folded in my bedside drawer, because one day she will be grown and I will want to show her that she planned this before any of us dared to.