The Weekend I Stopped Mowing and Started Swimming

The house that was built for a family I no longer had

For twenty-six years I lived in a four-bedroom house on a large stand in the older part of Pretoria, the kind of property estate agents call established, which is a polite word for a lot of garden and a roof that is always about to need something. We bought it when the children were small and it was the right house then, full of noise and bicycles and a trampoline that killed a patch of lawn that never recovered. It was a good house for a growing family, and we were a growing family, and for a long time that was simply what my life looked like.

Then the children grew up and left, as children do, one to Cape Town and one overseas, and a few years after that my wife and I came to the quiet, undramatic end of a long marriage. There was no great scandal, no single terrible thing, just two people who had slowly become strangers sharing a house that was far too big for either of us. When we finally decided to go our separate ways and sell the place, I found myself, at fifty-four, standing in a driveway I had stood in for most of my adult life, realising I had absolutely no idea what kind of life I was supposed to build next, or where.

A weekend measured in chores

What I did know, with total clarity, was that I was tired. Not tired in a way that sleep fixes. Tired of the house. Specifically, I was tired of my weekends disappearing into the maintenance of a property built for a family that no longer existed. My Saturdays had a shape and the shape was this. Up early, mow the lawn, because the lawn was enormous and if you let it go for two weeks it became a hayfield. Then the pool, which was a constant low-grade war against leaves and algae. Then whatever had broken that week, a gate motor, a geyser, a section of fence the neighbour's tree had taken down. By the time I had finished keeping the house standing, the weekend was mostly gone, and I had spent it alone, serving a building.

I remember one particular Saturday, late in the day, sitting on the step with a cold drink, aching, looking out at a garden I had just spent six hours taming, and realising that I could not remember the last time I had actually enjoyed being there. I was not living in the house. I was its caretaker. And the thing I kept coming back to, sitting on that step, was a simple and slightly frightening question. If I no longer had a family to fill this house, why was I giving my whole life to keeping it?

Letting myself want something different

The honest obstacle was not practical. It was in my head. I had a very fixed idea of what a man my age, with grown children and a certain standing, was supposed to live in. A house. A proper house, with a garden and a wall and a double garage. Anything smaller felt like a step down, like an admission that something had gone wrong, and I was already carrying enough of a sense that something had gone wrong without volunteering for more of it. The idea of moving into an apartment felt, at first, like giving up.

It was my daughter, on a video call from overseas, who cut through it. She asked me, bluntly, in the way she gets from her mother, what I actually wanted my weekends to look like. Not what I thought I should have. What I wanted. And when I was honest, the answer had nothing to do with lawns. I wanted to swim without first spending an hour cleaning the pool. I wanted to lock a door and go away for a week without arranging for someone to water things and chase off anyone who noticed the house was empty. I wanted to walk somewhere, to a gym, to a coffee, without getting in a car. I wanted, she said, gently, for me to stop confusing the size of my house with the size of my life. She was right, and it stung the way true things do.

Looking at a different kind of home

So I started looking, properly, at a kind of home I had never once considered in my adult life. I was drawn back towards the east of the city, partly because it is where my remaining friends had drifted, and partly because the son who is still in the country had settled out that way and I liked the idea of being near him without being on top of him. I began browsing the lifestyle developments, the secure estates with their own amenities, and I made myself go and actually walk through a few of them rather than judging from the gate.

The first time I looked seriously at the new apartments in Pretoria East, I went in sceptical, half expecting to feel the step-down I had been dreading. Instead I felt something I had not felt in years, which was lightness. The grounds were maintained by someone who was not me. There was a pool I would never have to scoop a single leaf out of. There was a gym a short walk from the units, and a clubhouse, and the kind of security that meant I could genuinely lock up and leave. I stood on the balcony of a show unit and I did not think about what it would cost me to maintain, because the answer, for the first time in my adult life, was effectively nothing. I just looked at the view and breathed.

Choosing the lighter life

I spent a few weekends weighing it up, because a man does not undo twenty-six years of assumptions in an afternoon. I looked at several options, compared what was on offer, talked to people who had made the same move. The more I looked at the available property for sale Pretoria East, the more the old fear loosened its grip, because I kept noticing that nobody who had actually downsized into one of these places seemed to regret it. They talked about their weekends the way I wanted to talk about mine. They talked about travelling. They talked about the pool and the gym and the fact that they had somehow got years of their lives back.

I bought one. A good-sized unit, more than enough for one person and the two children when they visit, with a balcony that catches the morning sun. The day I handed over the keys to the old house, I expected to feel grief, and I did feel some, because a lot of life had happened in those rooms. But underneath the grief was something lighter and more surprising, which was relief, pure and uncomplicated.

What I do with my Saturdays now

It has been a while now, and I can tell you exactly what my Saturdays look like, because they are the whole reason I did this. I get up, and I walk down to the pool, and I swim. That is it. No cleaning first, no war with the leaves, just a swim in water that someone else keeps clean, early, before the day is warm, with the estate quiet around me. Then sometimes the gym, sometimes a coffee, sometimes a drive out to see my son. What I do not do is mow a lawn, and the absence of that single chore has done something to my whole mood that I find hard to describe to people who have never spent twenty-six Saturdays a year behind a mower.

People sometimes ask whether I feel I gave something up, moving from a big house into one of these Pretoria East apartments, and I understand why they ask, because I used to think the same way. The honest answer is that I gave up a great deal. I gave up hours, and worry, and the strange loneliness of serving a house that was built for a life I no longer had. What I got back was time, and lightness, and the slightly embarrassing discovery that at fifty-something I could still change my mind about what a good life looks like. My daughter was right. The size of the house was never the size of the life. I just had to stop mowing long enough to notice.