It wasn’t my best day.
Revisiting your old neighbourhood can be a bittersweet experience.
It’s amazing how many memories come flooding back, and how different things can seem at the same time.
I’ve heard people say that revisiting their childhood home can be like time traveling – it’s like no time has passed at all, but also, everything.
I didn’t write the above – someone else did but they are so right.
Last week we had to drive down to town to see a specialist. An hour and a half’s drive, and it is right in the middle of a large and impressive building that has many shops and a big gymnasium.
Across the road from it is a busy housing estate.
The thing that made me sad is that estate is built on what used to be my husband’s family farm.
Where the hundreds of town houses, flats and nature strips stand, were once two magnificent hay paddocks.
I stood there, remembering the time we all, as young people, stooked hay in them, laughing as we threw the sheaves up on the truck, while the friend of my husband’s father created a wonderful classic ten-metre-high haystack.
Do the people in the little boxy houses on the left realise their houses stand over one of the best bore water pipes in the state?
The huge mulberry tree has gone, the old house and stockyards, the bluestone stables and house and worst of all, the creek has disappeared. Covered by pipes with dirt over the top and grassed, it’s now a walking path for the locals… how nice for them.
I could see the old place in my mind’s eye and I liked it better the old way. Thank goodness the specialist doesn’t need to see me again for a year. It didn’t get any better on the way home.
The road took us past the place that held my heart. My home.
If the bushfires hadn’t taken it from me, I would still be there.
Twenty years of my life on top of a hill where I could see for miles in any direction.
Where on a full moon I could go outside and see the dams in the valley shining like mirrors, and in fog, I was above the clouds, in another world.
My husband could not face rebuilding after the fires, so we moved, and the people who bought it knew I loved the garden, and blithely told me they’d do one even better… Gee thanks.
Driving past the enormous house they have built, everything is geometric. It’s their taste and up to them, but I wonder if she, as I did, goes out in the full moonlight and wonders at the beauty of the night.
It wasn’t my best day.
The one thing I did learn from both those places, is that leaving four-legged friends behind is painful.
At both places, the precious ones were buried. You don’t give it a thought at the time, but at both places, their graves would have been disturbed by having houses built on them.
The new place is lovely, it smiled to us as we opened the front door, but burying the furbabies is not happening again.
The darlings who escaped the bushfires with us, and have since left, are cremated and resting in tiny boxes, with instructions that each will go with us when we leave. They were with us during the worst time, and they will stay with us.
They are happy thoughts.
