The house I grew up in still visits me in quiet moments, the way certain songs do. Just bits and pieces of memories at first. Then all at once.

Our modest little home didn’t face north, as ideal homes are supposed to. It was dark and cold. During Cape Town winters, we had to switch on all the lights during the day. Yet this peculiar part of my history permanently shaped me. To this day, I still love dark spaces in homes – the ambience of lamplight, a good book, cups of coffee (plural), and if I could have my way, the gentle pitter-patter of rain on the roof.

Mornings began in our kitchen. The air smelled of toast and instant coffee. I remember the hum of the refrigerator and the steady tick of the clock above the stove. The very orange kitchen tiles, the avocado green Tupperware, the blue kitchen table with chairs that didn’t match. Interior decorating in the 80’s was scary. To anyone else, it might have looked tacky. To me, it was perfect.

I did my homework at that blue kitchen table. Dad would read the newspaper. Mom would cheerfully discuss the aunty next door’s sister’s new baby’s persistent cough. We never really listened. I didn’t realise at the time that this would become the precious soundtrack to my growing-up years.

Our neighbourhood was its own small country. We played until the streetlights came on. There was a tree in the yard of the empty house down the street that felt impossible to climb, until one day it wasn’t. There was an old, dilapidated farmhouse that we loved to make up horror stories about, but no-one had the guts to go inside. I believed, with the certainty only children possess, that nothing beyond that neighbourhood really mattered.

Now, when I think of the house I grew up in, I don’t remember how small it was. Or even the clashing décor colours. I remember how it felt to belong so completely within its walls. It was more than bricks, cement and paint. It was the keeper of scraped knees, birthdays with homemade cake, evenings in front of the larger-than-life TV, my whole little world contained within familiar walls.

Homes surround us while we write our life stories. They are the quiet covers of our books. Homes are not about dimensions and fancy furnishings. It’s about the way a space holds your familiar world. It’s the dent in your favourite cushion where you sit most often. The way the first sunlight lights up your bedroom in the mornings.

I believe any space can be a home. No space is too small to hold warmth or carry joy.

Write your life story with abundance. Fill your place with care. Let it be a reflection of you. Not the picture perfect you. Just the real honest you. No apologies


Thia Weck