What the Mountain Did With the Morning

The kettle that boiled for two

For thirty-one years I made two cups of tea every morning before the sun cleared the roofline of our house in Bergvliet. One rooibos for Marta, no milk, a little honey she pretended she did not take. One strong Ceylon for me. When she died in the autumn of last year, I kept making both for eleven days without noticing. On the twelfth day I stood at the counter with the second mug in my hand and the steam going up past my face, and I understood that I had been pouring tea for a woman who was no longer coming through the door in her old green dressing gown. I put the mug down very carefully, as if it might break, though of course it was me that was breaking.

I taught mathematics for thirty-eight years. Standard six through matric, all the way to the end. I am a man who believes in things that balance, equations that resolve, the quiet dignity of a proof that closes. Grief does not resolve. It does not sit still long enough to be solved. I would find myself doing sums about it anyway. Thirty-one years of marriage. Two hundred and forty months of school terms. One empty side of a bed measured in the cold that arrived around three in the morning.

A house too full to breathe in

People kept telling me not to make any big decisions in the first year. Sensible advice, and I ignored it, because the house itself made the decision for me. Every room had her in it. The hallway where she hung the framed photographs of our daughter Ilse at every stage of her growing up. The kitchen where Marta used to sing along to the radio, always half a beat behind, always the wrong words to the second verse. The stoep where we drank wine on Friday evenings and argued gently about nothing. I could not walk from the bedroom to the front door without being ambushed a dozen times.

A full house is a wonderful thing when it is full of a life you are living. When that life stops, the fullness turns on you. Her cardigans still smelled of her. Her reading glasses were still folded on the arm of the couch where she left them the night before the ambulance came. I would move one thing and feel like a thief in my own home. I would leave everything where it was and feel like a man keeping a museum of his own sadness.

Ilse lives in Paarl. She married a winemaker, a quiet careful man named Danie who says little and notices everything, and they have two small children who call me Oupa and climb on me like I am a piece of playground equipment. I began to drive out to see them more and more, an hour up the N1, and I noticed that the ache in my chest loosened by a few degrees somewhere around the Huguenot Tunnel. It was the mountain, I think. The Paarl Rock catches the light in a way I had never given myself permission to sit and watch before.

The light on the granite

There is a particular half hour in the early morning when the sun comes over the Drakenstein and strikes the great granite domes above the town. The rock goes from grey to a warm honey colour, then almost pink, then a plain ordinary brown as the day gets on with itself. The first time I sat with a cup of coffee on Ilse's stoep and watched it happen, I cried without any warning and without any shame, and my grandson patted my knee and told me not to worry, the mountain does that every day, it always comes back. He was four. He was completely right.

I started looking, quietly at first, almost embarrassed, at what was available. In the evenings back in Bergvliet I would sit with the laptop Marta never trusted and scroll through listings of homes for sale in Paarl, telling myself I was only curious. But a mathematician knows the difference between curiosity and the beginning of a proof. I was not browsing. I was choosing.

Letting go of the things

The hardest arithmetic of the whole business was the downsizing. Thirty-one years of a shared life does not fit into a smaller place, and it should not have to, but it must. I made three piles in the lounge like a man dividing an estate, which I suppose I was. Keep. Give. Let go. I gave Marta's sewing machine to the woman next door who had always admired it. I let go of the second dinner service, the one we used for guests who mostly stopped coming once we got older. I kept her green dressing gown. I am not ready to explain that one and I do not intend to try.

Ilse came down for a weekend to help me and we sat on the floor going through boxes of photographs, and we laughed more than I had laughed in months, and then we cried, and then we made toasted sandwiches at eleven at night like students. That was the weekend I properly decided. I told her I was going to find a house to buy in Paarl, close enough to walk to her place but not so close that I would be underfoot, and she put her head on my shoulder the way she did when she was small.

I found what I was looking for after a few months of proper searching. I went back and forth over the same few pages until I could have recited them, comparing a modest place near the town from one set of Paarl property listings against another, weighing garden against upkeep, stairs against my knees, price against the pension. In the end I settled on somewhere sensible with a view of the rock and a kitchen that gets the morning sun.

Learning to cook for one

Nobody warns you that the loneliest part of losing your wife is not the nights. It is dinner. Cooking for one feels absurd, a small daily insult. For a while I ate standing up, or not at all, or the same fried eggs every evening. Then Danie taught me to make a proper bredie, slow and patient, the way his mother made it, and something shifted. I learned to cook one portion of something worth sitting down for. I learned to lay a single place at the table without it feeling like a defeat. Some evenings I still set out a little too much, and I give the rest to the dog, and I talk to Marta while the mountain goes dark outside the window.

I am sixty-two. I have started again, not because I stopped loving the old life but because loving it meant I could not stay inside its empty rooms. The tea I make now is only ever one cup. Strong Ceylon. I still miss the smell of rooibos. But the light comes over the granite every single morning, warm and unhurried, and my grandson was right. It always comes back.