Lessons from a Small Piece of Land
When we left Johannesburg, South Africa, we told
everyone we were moving to “the countryside.” It sounded idyllic: birdsong
instead of sirens, soil instead of pavements, trees instead of streetlights. In
truth, our new home is only semi-rural — a hectare of scrub and sky, not quite
wilderness, not quite suburb, with a road a few hundred metres away. Yet in
every other sense, it remains utterly foreign.
I grew up on the border of Wales in the United Kingdom,
and though I am technically English, I have always felt more Welsh. My home was
a small village folded between mountains, where sheep outnumbered neighbours
and clouds clung to the hills like gossip. My husband Paul’s childhood was the
opposite: Derby, all brick and soot, where streets were narrow enough to make
their own weather. Between us, we carry two versions of England — mine pastoral
and wistful, his practical and resilient — and somehow we have ended up here in
South Africa.
The first morning in our new home, I woke to a horizon
so wide I almost felt seasick. Dogs barked in the distance while ours,
overwhelmed and mildly agorophic, stayed close to the door. When I stepped
outside barefoot into the red dust, the land’s warmth rose through my soles and
seemed to whisper, You’re welcome, but don’t think you own me.
Our garden was large and unkempt, and the idea of a
pond was mine. South Africans call the same thing a dam, but I couldn’t bring
myself to use a word that sounded like a restraint. A pond feels domestic,
English and manageable. A dam feels biblical.
The man with the bulldozer arrived at dawn and began
shaping our dream into being. First a hollow, then a basin, and finally, after
days of work, a smooth bowl of concrete-lined earth. We left an island in the
centre for birds to roost on. When the first rains came, the hole filled
quickly, turning the red soil into a mirror, and one morning a heron appeared,
gliding in with the authority of someone who had received an invitation —
which, in a way, it had.
The ducks were our first mistake. We found them at a
local market, two forlorn creatures in a wire cage, the sort sold for Sunday
dinner. Their feathers were dull, their eyes half-closed, their fate already
sealed in someone else’s imagination, but I couldn’t bear it. “We’ll take
them,” I told the seller, and probably paid twice the price.
We brought them home in a cardboard box and released
them onto the pond like liberators. They waddled a few uncertain steps, then
plunged in, quacking triumphantly. We named them Napoleon and Josephine and
congratulated ourselves on our kindness — until every water plant we had
lovingly arranged vanished overnight. The ducks, it turned out, had a taste for
aquatic landscaping, leaving the water mottled with drifting stems, as if the
pond itself were shedding a skin.
“We’ve rescued two vandals,” I said, but I couldn’t
help thinking how, in their blunt, feathered way, they reminded me of us — a
pair of well-intentioned but slightly clueless immigrants learning the rules of
a new ecosystem.
Soon we realised that “rural” in South Africa is not
the same as “rural” in England. There, the countryside behaves and is more or
less predictable, but here, fences bend under the weight of the wind, ants
build empires in plug sockets, grass grows in anarchic bursts, weeds plot
revolutions, and the soil changes its mind hourly — dust to mud to concrete and
back again. When the rains come, everything hums; when they stop, everything
waits.
The ducks were only the beginning. A neighbour soon
arrived with a goose who “needed company.” We thought she was a female and
christened her Daisy, though she has yet to lay a single egg. Daisy has
opinions and enforces them by biting the backs of my legs whenever I hang out
the washing.
Then came the hens. I wanted free-range eggs and to
know they came from happy providers. We started with four and now have seven,
thanks to a lively cockerel we had mistaken for a hen and three determined
chicks who hatched under improbable conditions, each one a reminder that life
insists on itself.
And there are the larger souls: a mule and a horse who
once lived at an equestrian centre before joining our accidental menagerie.
They graze at the far end of the field, aloof but content, until we ask them to
do any work, of which they have done very little. Both have grown round on
spring grass and look ready to produce triplets, though it’s biologically
impossible.
Each creature adds a note to the household symphony,
honks, squawks, brays and clucks, all woven into the fabric of our days. Our
new home has given us new vocabulary: grey water, boreholes, load-shedding
schedules, and solar limits, to name just a few. I’ve developed a farmer’s
stoop from carrying buckets and coaxing plants that seem determined to die.
Paul, who once lived in the abstract world of servers and systems, now
approaches the land with the same analytical precision he brought to code. He
designs irrigation plans as if mapping a data flow, monitors the pump as if
debugging a rogue program, and is quietly pleased when everything finally runs
as it should.
In the evenings, we sit on the stoep, or a porch,
to everyone else who isn’t Afrikaans. We talk about compost and connectivity in
the same breath —the practical and the virtual entwined —and, though we’re
tired, in the midst of the chaos, a deep calm has settled. When the sun drops
behind the acacias, the light softens into something almost edible. The dogs
lie at our feet, their various phobias overcome, and with a beer in hand, we
realise the silence is not empty but full of things deciding whether to let us
stay.
Sometimes, in the quiet hours before dawn, I think of
the Welsh hills where I used to ride my pony. I remember that childhood as both
idyllic and sheltered, yet beneath it ran a restless current—a longing for
something larger. Here, where the horizon stretches so wide it renders such
longing redundant —or perhaps fulfilled —another feeling has taken its place: a
quiet awareness of being alive in a time when so much life is uncertain, or
already lost.
A few days ago, I read a headline in The Guardian:
“World’s landscapes may soon be devoid of wild animals.” The word ‘devoid’ lodged
in my throat like grit, and suddenly the small daily gestures — recycling,
planting indigenous shrubs, and rationing water — felt both essential
and futile. Since then, spreading compost or harvesting algae from the pond has
seemed like tending a relic or a miniature version of the world we are losing,
but to stop would feel like complicity, so perhaps, futility, done properly, is
its own form of hope.
Paul shrugs when I talk this way. “We do what we can,”
he says, and of course, he’s right. But I can’t help noticing how much quieter
the sky has become, in my own lifetime. Our windscreens stay clean now; the
squashed insects are gone, and the air feels oddly hollow without their
murmuring. At dusk, the swifts still appear, looping and crying over the
fields, but fewer now, their arcs more cautious, as though uncertain of their
inheritance. The bats have grown sporadic too, their quick, silent movements more
memory than presence. The absence accumulates, and some of us pretend not to
notice.
Last month, we installed an owl box. The idea came from
a YouTube tutorial and several earnest blog posts assuring us we were
“supporting biodiversity.” The phrasing comforted me, suggesting we were still
part of a global effort to repair what we’ve damaged.
We found a tall oak at the edge of the paddock and
followed the instructions as if performing an arcane ritual. The opening should
face east, the box hang high and clear of branches for a direct flight path, but
low enough for us to maybe glimpse a tenant. And here’s the uncomfortable
truth: the owl box came from Temu. I had sworn never to buy from that sprawling
online bazaar of instant gratification, but I couldn’t find anything well-made
or at a sensible price locally, so it arrived wrapped in plastic and shame. Its
journey from a distant factory to our small, wind-rattled tree felt like a
parable for our times. A fragile gesture of faith travelling across the world
in search of something wild enough to answer it.
Some evenings, when the light softens and the fields
seem to exhale, I look up at that box and imagine an owl slipping soundlessly
through the dusk, wings wide, eyes steady. I picture it gliding over the pond,
skimming the reflection of stars and reclaiming the air that has long been ours
by assumption. Whether it comes or not, the thought alone feels like grace.
This morning, the heron returned, circling once before
landing on the island, elegant as a thought completing itself. I stood quietly,
coffee cup cooling in my hand, and watched as it dipped its beak, then stood
motionless, as if time had decided to rest beside it. In that stillness, I
understood a thought that had been circling unformed in my mind since coming
here: that belonging is not a place you reach but a conversation you learn to
have. The earth does not need our plans, but it needs our attention. The pond,
the birds and the soil are not ours, but we are theirs, in the simplest and
most forgiving sense.
When the heron finally lifted off, its wings caught the
light, scattering it as small blessings across the water. And so life goes on,
and the earth keeps teaching us, even as it slips from beneath our collective
feet. Perhaps belonging now means caring, even when the outcome is uncertain.
Babette Gallard
Babette Gallard is the author of the novel Future Imperfect (BadPressInk,
2023) and has written both fiction and non-fiction, including published
accounts of her two 1,600km horseback pilgrimages along the St. James Way and
the Via Francigena. Her short fiction has appeared in Mslexia, Panorama, Steel
Jackdaw, African Voices, and After Dinner
Conversation, among other publications. She also co-manages the LightFoot
Guides series, which celebrates slow travel along ancient paths
through historical context, personal narrative, and cultural commentary.
She is preparing to launch This Way Up, a podcast showcasing
changemakers reshaping the future through powerful stories and lived impact.
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