THE JOURNEY
My husband Rob and I started off in a one-bedroom flat after we got married. After a couple of years, we moved to a small flat 2-bedroom just down the road. We’re simple people whose main indulgence is eating out. 5 years into our marriage, my father passed away and my mother came to live with us. We stayed in the same small flat and we were happy. After a couple of years, we got a dog. A pup from the litter born just outside our apartment building – My Love. We were still happy. A small family in a small flat. We were centrally located with our office just 2 km away and plenty of shops and restaurants. Indeed, the size of the flat and the presence of a dog was a good excuse to keep people away. For anyone who continues to read my stuff, you’ll soon find out that neither my husband nor I are very social. Well, actually, he’s more social than me.
There was also another main reason why we didn’t move away. I would feed about 20 street dogs in a 2-3 km radius. Every day I walked the streets carrying bags of food in the hot sun. The dogs would run to me with joy. I couldn’t just leave them. But as time passed, the number of dogs dwindled. They died in road accidents or illnesses. And also, as time passed, the face of the neighborhood changed. It became congested and dirty and you couldn’t step out without having to dodge a bike or a car. That’s when we decided to look for another place.
It was my idea to move outside the city. Generally, when I have ‘ideas’ my husband tends to ignore them until I go on and on and on. Then he knows that it’s something worth actioning. He’s the scout of the family. He set about scouting and finding options for us to check out on weekends. We drove to the various corners outside the city. I still remember being taken to places where there was no road. With a real estate agent pointing at open fields and dry mud and telling me to imagine the houses that would eventually be there. Of course, I’m sure that by now, they are there!
In case you haven’t figured it out yet, the reason we were looking at imaginary houses was because, while our dreams were big, our budget was small. We had started our careers with low salaries and worked our way up slowly over the years. We had a comfortable life with indulgences here and there. But buying a house was definitely going to break the bank. The bank that had hardly any money. This went on for a while, driving out on Saturday or Sunday and returning home tired and disappointed.
Then one Sunday, Rob the scout, had a new place for us to check out. He had met a colleague in the loo in office and in talking, the guy said that there were houses on sale where he stayed. Please note that this man is 2 or 3 levels Rob’s senior at work. I had my apprehensions but anyway, we left early and drove and drove until we were near the state border. That’s where we turned off and drove down a road (yes, an actual road!) lined with trees and flowering bushes. There were charming houses with pretty gardens side by side down the road. And yes, these weren’t imaginary houses. I remember turning to Rob and saying, we can’t afford this. His reply was, we’ve come here, let’s see.
THE HOUSE – BITTERSWEET
Rob’s colleague Ray showed us his home and then took us around the community. I was drawn to the house in front of his. It had never been occupied. The owner had built it only for a sale later and was living in another country. Because it was unoccupied for so long, it had deteriorated. The front door was eaten by termites and almost falling off its hinges. The same with the other doors in the house. It was just a shell. But I was drawn. Not to the house, but to the garden. Or at least, what could become a garden. At that time, it was just barren land filled with rubble from construction work. Rubble and weeds. But all I saw was a big garden for dogs to play. At last I would have a home big enough for more than one rescued dog. And it was a corner plot, so I’d only have to deal with 2 neighbors. Little did I know what lay ahead. But neighbors are a different story for another post.
I decided that we wanted it. Now we had to talk to the owner. Well, at least, Rob had to. I just pushed and prompted and followed up with Rob every day, several times a day. The price was way beyond our budget. The owner refused to budge from his first ask. Rob tried to negotiate but every time he tried, I was scared that someone else would agree to the asking price. The owner was planning to come and close the deal in the summer holidays, with whomever was ready to buy. I worked myself up. I really did. I needed that house. It was an hour or more outside the city, but I worked from home. Yes, Rob would have a commute time of 2 hours daily, but well, yeah. Being able to have more rescued dogs mattered more. Plus, it was in a community that seemed to have like-minded people. Ray lived there, we’d met a couple of other working professionals. It was quiet and surrounded by greenery. We could have a peaceful retirement life here. It seemed perfect.
So, I dug into our savings, drew from investments, ‘borrowed’ from my mother’s retirement savings and finally we had enough to pay 20% of the price, while the bank would cover 80% in a loan. Now to initiate the bank loan. That went on for ages. The personal verification, the financial scrutiny. I even went to the bank to rant and rage because they weren’t moving fast enough. The owner was already in town and due to return back home shortly. I’m downplaying it here, but it was a good 2 months of extreme stress and anxiety. But finally, the day came, when we’d managed to scrape together our share and the bank came with the cheque to the registration office. We even drove the owner and his family to and from the registration. I remember that his son was car sick on the way back. And that we pulled to the side of the road to hand him our 20% in cash. Yeah, he certainly recognized two suckers and took advantage of it. I have to accept the blame though. Rob would have walked away from it all, but I wouldn’t let him.
We bought the house in the last week of July. In August, our dog, My Love, was diagnosed with lymphoma. She really was my love, my half human daughter who was my shadow. It’s always been that way for me. Nothing comes easy to me and when it does, it’s always bittersweet. Finally, I had the house of my dreams, and yet, my darling dog of 11 years would probably never live in it. For 11 years she had been the sweetest and most understanding dog in a tiny apartment. All I wanted was for her to able to enjoy the garden. So we set about trying to make the house livable quickly, while juggling office, chemo sessions for My Love and driving more than an hour each way to check on the workers. We had the worst carpenters. I’m not exaggerating. They were slow and almost everything they did had to be re-worked. This went on until December, and we still hadn’t moved in. Time was running out for My Love. I wanted her to spend some quality time in her new home. I had also now rescued another dog, Sting, so there was even less space in our flat. We had to rescue Sting. She had had a road accident which left her with an inability to pass motions and she would pry it out with her mouth. Eventually she had a surgery that healed her, but I couldn’t put her back on the streets.
The carpenters were finally kicked out, with most of their work completed, and we moved in on 6th Dec 2019. I clearly remember the day. Rob supervised the packers while I drove my mother and the two dogs to our new home. Then I drove back to our old home to pick up Rob and a third dog. She used to sit outside our flat and we would feed her. We couldn’t leave her behind either. She was petrified of loud noises and at the slightest sound of thunder or firecrackers, she would run into the nearest drain and stay there for days. So, the three of us head out of our old neighborhood, but then Rob wants to stop for lunch at our favorite nearby restaurant for the last time before leaving. But lunch and travel and traffic takes more than 3 hours and in this time my mother is alone in a new house with 2 dogs in completely unfamiliar surroundings. So, when we finally reached, she was a bag of nerves, crying loudly. She’s misplaced her mobile while packing and didn’t have any way of contacting us. She was worried we’d met with an accident and that she’d be left alone in this big house with the dogs. The dogs are tied up in a room, barking their heads off. That’s when I realized how silent the neighborhood was and that with the crying and the barking, we’d moved in with a bang.
As Rob would say repeatedly when we first moved, I was like Moses leading the family to the Promised Land, LOL.
Now, I have to mention, that because we were in a hurry to move in, only the carpentry work had been completed. The house had not been painted. So while it was livable, it certainly wasn’t beautiful. There were large cement patches around the door frames. There was scribbling on the wall by the carpenters. Someone had stolen our taps. That’s when reality set in.
We were perceived as poor folk who couldn’t afford to paint their home before moving in. We had three street dogs, so obviously we couldn’t afford to buy breed dogs. And oh my, the dogs barked. So much noise. The complaints poured in. I had neighbors shouting at me from the street. We were living with minimal furniture because we moved with the furniture from the flat. One sofa for two dogs and three humans. The third dog couldn’t get up on the sofa :). It was not a pleasant situation. All because I wanted to move in for sick dog to enjoy a garden.
And then, just as we were trying to get our bearings with electrical and plumbing work, Covid hit us. By mid March 2020, we were all in lockdown. Indeed, very bittersweet. I was stuck in a half empty house, with dirty walls and no way of remedying the situation. However, we were relatively much better off with open space all around us (the next door house was empty), far away from the congested city.
We spent the whole of Covid struggling to put the house together the best we could. I would buy gardening tools off Amazon and hope that they would be delivered. The garden was sparse and bare because we couldn’t go out to buy plants. One day, while walking in the park, I picked up some seeds that had fallen off one of the trees. I took it back home and put them in pots. When they started to shoot, I planted them into the ground. Five years later, those are the biggest flowering trees in my garden.
HOME
We had moved outside our comfort zone. We soon realized that barring the few working professionals that we had met, the majority of the residents were rural folk. They couldn’t relate to this odd family, who dressed and spoke differently and had so many street dogs. But we soldiered through. We had no other option. My Love passed away in Oct 2020. She had ten months of enjoying a new experience with two new friends and place to run. 2021 was the worst health period for us all. I will save that for another post. Ironically, none of us got Covid. But we made it through by God’s Grace.
It’s been five years since we moved here. Now the walls are painted and decorated. The garden is filled with fruit and flowering trees. The house is filled with five rescued dogs. We’re still different from everyone around us, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. When people visit and say ‘oh so lucky’, I smile to myself because only I know what it took to get here.
The House is finally our Home.
The Fiery Woman 