Pavers and palava

It started like a regular enough day. The dolphins cruised past, as they do when the sea is calm, and I tried to figure out which weather forecast to plan my day around. I checked the grocery list for my increasingly infrequent trip into town.

Alex

Alex, the old gardener, arrives, as he does more or less every two weeks. He’s been working here for the past 20 years and he came with the garden. I don’t know much about his life, but I do know that he once was a migrant labourer, working on the mines near Johannesburg. He also receives a state pension, but despite his age, he’s one of the toughest gardeners I’ve known.

Alex does not speak English and I don’t speak Xhosa. We communicate in Afrikaans, and much of our conversation consists of him correcting my words and chuckling at what I end up saying.

Anyway, this morning I ask him to cut back some of the overgrown vegetation around the teak table and to pull out the grass that has crept into the beds (I’ll get in there in winter when the snakes have gone into hibernation). I am beginning to hate grass – it gets into everything, except where you want it to grow.

Careful! Bauble missile

Creepy crawlies

This is all necessary stuff, but the timing is mostly for the benefit of my sister K, who lives in Geneva. We’re very excited because she is coming to visit with her daughter next week. But as much as my jet-setting sister in her high-powered job can light up a conference room anywhere in the world with her presentations, she is really, really scared of creepy crawlies.

Alex dives into the most overgrown bed. “Watch out for snakes!” I shriek in my kind-of Afrikaans. It comes out something like: “Careful vir die slang, Alex!” He chuckles. I withdraw to my office to check my mail for the work that helps me pay the bills.

Before: bare dirt

And then the pavers arrive: 44 big ones. They’ve been expected since Monday, but things are delivered whenever around here. After a bit of a fuss about whether the truck will get stuck in the mud – it’s been raining – and overloading my wonky wheelbarrow to within an inch of its life, the pavers are piled up, ready for work to begin. Eish!

The intention is to pave under the big table. The grass here has died, groundcovers have refused to grow, and it’s now all sitting in bare dirt, which can be unpleasant at times.

Caution! Fairy helpers at work

Fairy helpers and all

Alex and I move the table to the side, and he trundles off with the wheelbarrow to load it with sand left over from when Oom Piet replaced the fence: he did a beautiful job, by the way, with unsealed latte (wattle poles). The fairy helpers pull in: my niece, age 3, and nephew, age 6. After a few hairy moments involving rakes and even a spade waving in the air and baubles that turn into missiles, they decide that this work is too much (or there is smoke coming from my ears, maybe?) and they go off and play a game with the granny in the granny flat.

Instead of thesis work ...

The grown-up boy-child is dragged away from working on his chemistry masters thesis (apologies, Dr supervisor) to help me lay the pavers. I am begging the powers that be that my space calculation was correct and that we have enough pavers. Turns out that we do – almost; we are just one short. Not bad.

Shell plugs contain the gravel

It’s dirty work, and so sweaty. I dash upstairs to change out of my town clothes. We painstakingly level sand under each paver. Alex loads up the barrow with leftover gravel and we start filling the gaps – oops, they are a bit uneven – between the pavers. Note that Alex and I have understood each other perfectly well through all of this. 

I see that the gravel is overflowing onto the grass, and run off to find something to plug the ends: ah, all those shells that I can never resist picking up on the beach … “Jy maak baie plan (you make a lot of plans),” Alex tells me as he twigs onto the idea.

After: much better, don't you think?

At last, a quick clean of the most soil-encrusted chairs (okay, not so quick with puny pressure from the water tanks), and it’s done. It’s much nicer to sit at the table now. And we can pretend that there are less goggas around when K arrives from Genf. 

Voila! Just a regular day.