Don't know how to describe my feelings right now, if I'm honest, except "weird." The house I lived in for the first 21 years of my life (I officially moved out three days after my 21st birthday), which has been in my family since 1953, and which has always been there in my mind as a place of refuge in the bad times, solace in the sad times and celebration in the glad times, as of today belongs to someone else.
By the time we left it for the last time - last Saturday afternoon - it did feel more like "just a house" than it has ever felt. No longer a home. And truth be told it hasn't been my home for all of those 30+ years since I moved out, except in the sense of "going home" to visit Mum, as we often did. After 8 months of intermittent trips to throw away old things, collect treasured things and rearrange remaining things to present the house at its best for the purposes of sale, it looked and felt like an empty shell. Only faint echoes lingered of the happy times spent there. Lifetimes. I learned to walk there. I learned to ride a bike there. I learned to drive there. I read my 'O' and 'A' Level results over breakfast there. I found out I'd got into university there. I had my first sex there. And my first broken heart, stood by the sideboard reading that letter. My Dad died there. My Mum turned into an old lady there.
And now someone else will build memories there and put down roots - perhaps even 60 years deep like our family did. They'll put their own stamp on the place until almost every trace of the planning and saving and working and painting and tiling and building my Mum & Dad did is erased; replaced with something newer, bigger, brighter and not ours.
Well... not quite erased. It will still be there in my memory. My old family home. And that's why I'll never drive down to Ridgway Close again. Or at least, never intend to. I want that house - that home - to stay as it is in my memory. The happy, sunny, carefree home of my childhood.
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5 comments:
Ahh this made me cry D:
The home we grew up in is always "home" no matter how long it's been since you lived there. My parents moved out of the home we grew up in back in 1986 but do you know, i still dream about being in that house. and in most of those dreams, but not all, i know that i'm not supposed to be there because someone else owns it now.
Lovely piece of writing John. I fear I'll be the same when the time comes with our family home too.
Good post Dig.
I've experienced leaving the family home and all that because from 12 to 25 I lived in a maisonette and all my growing up was done there. But when I left I took very little, didn't want anything really except my old typewriter. But whenever I think of 'home' I think not of all the other flats and rooms I lived in from baby to 12 I only ever think of the formative interesting years that took place in the end flat on the second floor of a tower block.
Yep brother, it brought a tear to my eye. Funny but I was never in my fathers home (now mine) long enough to feel as you do. I do wish so many times though that I had.
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