27/12/2025
My story.
I was built in 1955, a small cottage beside the road, a place for the family to live while the main farmhouse was being built.
For one precious year, my rooms were warm with life - soft footsteps, gentle voices, lamplight glowing against my walls. I remember every moment. I held it all close.
And then the big house was finished, and my door closed. The family I loved moved into their new home, and I stayed behind - quiet, still, and growing older under the great Karoo sky.
The years that followed were long. Some days I felt lonely, my rooms heavy with dust and silence. Some days I felt forgotten, as if time itself has settled over me, like a soft, unlifted blanket.
But always, I watched. I watched the same family grow - children becoming adults, adults becoming elders, each generation carrying pieces of the ones before.
I watched the animals move across the land - sheep drifting like soft clouds over the veld, cattle ambling home in the evening light, birds building nests in my roof, and horses trotting past with their quiet strength, manes lifted by the Karoo wind. Their footsteps and calls were the closest things to company I had, and I cherished every sound.
I stood through seasons of drought when the earth cracked open and the air tasted of dust, and through seasons of blessing when the veld shimmered green and rain softened even the hardest places. The Karoo held me in all its moods - harsh and beautiful, quiet and endless. And though I stood empty, I never stopped hoping.
Then one day, footsteps returned. Hands touched my cracked, crumbling walls again. Feet danced over my dusty, stained floors. Tools, laughter, paint, effort, love - slowly, gently, they woke me up.
And now after almost seven decades, after all of my waiting, there is light in my window again. Warmth in my rooms. A fire glowing in my fireplace once more, and at last, a thin line of smoke curling up from my chimney into the endless starry night sky - the quiet sign that I am no longer empty and alone, that I am lived in, warm and home again.
Voices in the doorway. Life moving softly across my floors, and a joy rising in me as steady and honest as the Karoo sunrise.
It feels, with a depth I cannot explain, as if I am breathing again - as if every lonely year has folded into this one beautiful truth:
I belong to this land. I belong to this family. And at last, I am alive again.
--- The Cottage
