I just came across this reminiscence, written on 25th October 2010, still in my files though it was obviously meant as a blog post. Can't find it in any of my blogs. In amongst all my writings on my recent widowhood, both in poetry and prose, I think it's nice to revisit this happy mood. Hence I'm posting it on today's date, not the date of writing.
We are having a second day of taking it easy, flopping around in our
nightwear with warm woollies on top. Yesterday we spent most of the day in bed.
Our bedroom in this new home has become a sanctuary — even though it’s never
completely uncluttered, because we avid readers and compulsive writers keep
piling up books and notebooks on the bedside tables. It’s a small enough room
to be cosy and big enough not to feel cramped. We look out through one wall of
glass on to our private, enclosed little courtyard garden. Though it has been
low priority so far and the weeds flourish, the potted geraniums are bursting
out of their pots and blooming in bright pink, the big plant in the corner
—whose name I’ve never learned in years of caring for it — has glossy new
leaves, and the vines are thickening on the fence.
Today we have finally got out of bed, late morning, and sit at our
respective computers in our respective offices. This whole house is our
sanctuary. Like the bedroom, it is both spacious enough and compact enough, and
the offices are not so far apart that we feel disconnected from each other. We
get up and wander about between typing, get a cuppa, fetch a book, talk to each
other in passing. The cats come and find comfortable spots near us. Usually Levi
keeps Andrew company and Freya clings to me, but this varies. Sometimes they
wander off to the places they like best of all: Freya on the bed, Levi beside
the heater.
We’ve had heavy colds for days. I’m paranoid now about the slightest
infection, after Andrew nearly dying of influenza a few weeks ago — but we’ve
now had the flu injections for the first time ever, and we’re taking echinacea
and zinc. The doctor couldn’t suggest anything else helpful. Giving in to it
seems to be working. We try to remember to drink lots of water, we flake out
and snooze as inclination takes us — we get tired often — and we avoid anything
too energetic. Bare minimum housework, and nothing but pleasurable tasks on
computer. The huge, loud, repeated sneezes that shook our whole bodies have
pretty much stopped. The aches and pains are less acute.
I realise my body is trying to process and clear some stuff. ‘What
are you two unpacking from other homes?’ asks a Reiki Master friend, and
mentions a couple of places with unhappy memories for us. She’s right on the
button as usual. I have indeed been doing the last of the unpacking and
thoughts of those other homes have been arising, and even earlier homes in my
earlier lives (as child, as young mother ...). As for Andrew, he has been sorting
out his files and boxes of papers at last, and looking through photos; and I
realise he has been mentioning his own past homes too. It is as if, now we’re
settled in a place that we love and know is permanent, we can allow ourselves
to relax enough to release old angst.
I think back on the homes we’ve shared, particularly the ones that
weren’t so great. I see how brave and optimistic we were, knowing the drawbacks
but — having to be there for a time — actively seeking and even creating
positive aspects. We explored our neighbourhoods, found places to go for walks,
set up our books and ornaments and our writing spaces ... and sadly, at the
worst places, had to leave a lot of stuff in storage. That wasn’t what made
them so bad, but it became part of the general dissatisfaction. Without going
into ancient recriminations, I could sum it up as difficulties with places that
were unsuitable in themselves but all we could find at the time, exacerbated by
further difficulties in sharing those spaces with other people — a residential
landlady in one instance, fellow tenants in another. As most of our homes have
been delightful, we haven’t dwelt on the few bad memories; it seems it’s time
to deal with them now.
I seldom remember my dreams these days, but the last couple of
nights I’ve had dreams around the theme of home. I remember little of the
first, but in last night’s dream I was returning to a large hostel where I have
lived in recurring dreams. (In this dream, I didn’t live there all the time; it
was a place where I rented a permanent room for times when I might want to stay
overnight in town.) It was a while since I’d been there, and there had been
extensive remodelling in my absence. I walked along what at first seemed the
familiar corridor to my room, looking for the number — but a laundry had been
installed halfway along, and girls in undies and hair curlers were dashing in
and out to wash and iron their clothes, laughing and chatting to each other on
the way. I became confused, and when I got to where I thought my room should
be, there was a wrong number on the door.
I decided to leave, and went downstairs to the foyer and then
outside. The hostel was on top of a cliff. There was a steep, sandy path
leading down to a street below. I stood at the top of it, about to go down,
when something made me turn my head to the left to look out over the sea. I
gasped at the beauty of the view: hills, ocean, islands, horizon, sky; at once
sunny and slightly misty. Some other women came up behind me to go down the path.
I stood aside to let one go ahead of me. Two others waited politely for me, but
I told them to go on because I wanted to look at the view. They turned to look
too. ‘It is lovely, isn’t it?’ one said, before they went on. ‘Isn’t it ever!’
I replied.
I don’t remember walking over to the edge of the cliff top, but next
thing I was falling. I was falling very slowly, upright, and although it was a
deep drop and I was probably about to die or be seriously injured, I was quite
calm. I had some notion of making the most of what might be my last minutes. I
kept moving my legs back and forth, with the idea that I might be able to catch
the side of the cliff with my heels and find a footing. Another fast forward
and I had come to rest at the bottom, sitting in a sandy hollow in the cliff
wall, with my feet on one of those tubes that people put under their backs when
exercising.
I looked again and realised it was actually a tube-shaped bag with a
zip. I opened it and saw jumpers belonging to my [former] husband Bill and our
schoolboy sons. [One of the jumpers does exist in real life, but Andrew and I got it in
Peru long after Bill was dead and the boys grown up.] I saw that this bag was
one of a number of items stowed under a low hedge at my feet. The beach disappeared
and I was at home in the back yard. In the dream I knew it as the first home
Bill and I and the kids had; now I realise it was actually much more like the
home I lived in when I myself was a child.
How should I interpret this? There are suggestions there of several
real-life homes besides the ones I mention, but no exact matches. It’s
interesting, though, to recollect that I have a sort of parallel life, or more
than one, in various series of recurring dreams. I become aware of this
whenever I have another of those dreams; it always evokes the recall of others
in the sequence. Then I forget again until next time. This time it aroused the
waking memory of another series too, where I visit a particular shopping area
tucked away behind main streets in a Melbourne suburb. I have a notion it‘s
Prahran, but it might be Cheltenham. These dreams also contain a huge,
sweeping, curving road I must drive on between this little shopping area and
home, and there’s a fork that I have to be careful of because it’s confusing
and a bad choice could take me miles in the wrong direction. I’m not altogether
sure this is a dream, but it can’t logically be an accurate memory either;
there were no such roads approaching Prahran or Cheltenham when I used to drive
to either place. It’s more like one of the roads I could take home from
Melbourne when I lived at Three Bridges in the Upper Yarra Valley. Maybe it’s a
combination of two different recollections, or a dream series that has mixed
them up.
[As an aside — I look back in wonder at all the driving I’ve done
over the years, in what a variety of places and conditions. It’s amazing
because I’ve been so shit-scared of driving most of my life, yet I did so much
of it so successfully. Even today I don’t exactly take it for granted, but now
that I’m the main driver in the family, I’ve become much more at ease with it.
I see (again) that my past self was brave; also that my present self is
competent.]
This home we love so much won’t quite accommodate all our remaining
possessions; that’s becoming obvious. We’re having to make hard decisions now
about things to discard or give away. Perhaps that’s what has led to this
mental stocktaking of places I’ve lived, and griefs and trials associated with
them, as well as fonder memories and things I find myself proud of. Or perhaps
it is the knowledge that we won’t have to move again, and the very pleasure we
take in this place, which occasion the looking back and putting into
perspective all the ups and downs of the journey that brought us here.
Since I began writing this, our handyman mate Phil has come and put
up a blind over the little bedroom window that looks out onto the street. The
street is at the bottom of the sloping lawn, beyond our big back gate; even so
we felt a bit exposed, and now we’re secure. He hung some canvas panels in the
garage, which is taking shape as library / consulting room / temple: paintings
of Indonesian dancers, which Bill and I picked up in Bali 47 years ago. I found
them rolled up in a plastic bag the other day, in the course of unpacking the
last boxes. It’s been years since I had a place to hang them and I’m glad to be
able to look at them again.
They and other artefacts from Bali are mementoes not only of travels
shared with Bill and our boys, but also of the house we lived in longest, where
we first displayed them; the house where the kids grew from kindergarteners to
university students.
‘You’ll have to get rid of that,’ said someone decades ago, of my
precious coffee table. (I was moving house then, too.) I don’t know why she
thought so, and I have it still. It’s big. It has a timber frame with no metal
nails, just wooden bolts, and the top is ceramic tiles in burnt orange and
darkest brown. (‘Of course she picks the most expensive one in the shop,’ said
Bill when we bought it in 1972. And it was, but that wasn’t why I picked it; I
just took one look and fell in love.)
The aforementioned residential landlady piled a heap of stored
furniture on top of it in her shed when we lived with her — chairs and other
tables, boxes full of crockery — even though she knew it was one of my
treasures. ‘I thought it was solid,’ she said. It survived, but has been a bit
wonky ever since. I don’t let anyone sit on it any more, though it invites
sitting. Years before that, my very large dog took a chunk out of the corner
one night when he was looking for something to chomp on. I was upset at the
time, but it’s hard to notice the missing bit now, and when I do, I smile and
think of my beautiful dog. That table has been with me in ten previous homes,
and here it still is.
One of the first things we did here was put up pictures. Both our
fathers were artists. My favourite painting by my Dad is above my desk. It is
of Mt Roland in Tasmania, his and my favourite mountain while I was growing up,
and for many years thereafter. (Mt Warning, near my present home, is my
favourite now.) Andrew has his father’s etchings in his office and a photo of
his father, his brother and himself sitting astride a cannon in a park in the town of Ballarat, which they were visiting. He’s at the front, being the littlest. He’s six, and he’s
laughing with joy.
When we sit in our armchairs and watch TV in our well-heated house
on these cold nights, I think back to evenings by the radio in Launceston when
I was a girl, the whole family gathered around the fire. This is safe and warm
like that.
Yes, we’ve arrived home: a home that partakes of all the homes
before.
A very sweet post. I imagine you together. k.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Karin. I'm touched that you read it.
Delete