Upside Down

Bouleverse, in a whirl, head over heels, is my state of mind at the moment. My previous posts telling of changes in my life seem pedestrian compared with the broad brush of change that swept us up yesterday.

News just reached us of huge development proposals for our area. We live on the lower skirts of a hill with views of the mountains, a rural area of farms and lots of smallholdings like ours. It is a commutable distance to Cape Town but far enough out to be country. Over the last seven years on our property we’ve established the infrastructure of road, water and electricity, we’ve built our houses, planted trees, cleared alien vegetation and created a beautiful place to live and bring up our children. With two of my husband’s sisters, his brother in law and his mother we have made a wonderful family community.

Now developers are buying up land around us at inflated prices, as some proposed rezoning seems about to allow us to turn into a ‘garden city’ suburb of Cape Town. There doesn’t seem to have been any public announcement of this so it came completely out of the blue. Now we have to decide: do we stay and find ourselves surrounded by an enormous construction zone fof close packed starter homes, for several years, even though our property presumably would increase in value dramatically once it had settled down again, or see if they are paying out enough to make it worthwhile for us to buy land elsewhere and go through the whole building a home process from scratch. There is also the dreaded word expropriation being bandied around, to frighten everyone into playing their game.

I love our house, our view, the special place here where we hold our festivals. When I was learning about numerology, the numbers showed change. Then I couldn’t envisage it, still now I can’t imagine anywhere as nice as this. As I drive the kids to school along a straight country road past a line of hills and small farms, the thought of it all becoming a concrete suburb appals. In a water-scarce country where will they get that from for all those new homes.

I just have to find faith from somewhere, that we will make the right decision for our future, if our destiny lies elsewhere please let us find another home as lovely as this one – if only I could take our straw-bale house with us! Please send a prayer or some positive energy our way.