My father was never much given to sentiment, nostalgia, spiritualism or superstition.
He was practical and prosaic in belief and taste. In his last years he continued to attend church mainly because he had always done so and, I suspect, to have done otherwise would’ve necessitated an explanation to my excessively churchy mother.
I’m not sure he believed in saints or even the Holy Spirit. He used to scoff at what he regarded the oddness of nuns, especially at the traffic lights if they were behind the wheel of the next car. He certainly never believed in ghosts.
Which is why I was flummoxed when he told me he’d once seen his mother wandering around his old family home. It might have been on the day she died or, perhaps, when he locked up the old place for the last time upon selling it years later. I can’t quite remember. And it’s too late to ask him now.
Grief will do strange things to one’s imaginings, for sure. Perhaps he’d just dreamt his mother. I don’t know. But I do know that I dream of my parents often. I know they are dead. But in my dreams they are always alive and inside or around my home. My subconscious wants to keep them here, in my home.
It’s almost time to go now from this house that’s been my cocoon for almost two decades. An archive of elation and celebration, of sorrow and disappointment, too, it’s the place where I’ve written six books and a million other words, many of them terrible but all of them from the heart of home.
It’s where we brought our newborns. And it’s where we still, at certain times of the year, mourn one who never made it.
Our dead parents are here, too, and in more than just our dreams. Yes, their images are on the walls, just as they will be wherever we go next. But their time lived in this house, the days and weeks and months when they marvelled at the children mostly just for their plain ordinariness (everyone, especially on Facebook, boasts that their kids are exceptional, right?) can only remain here.
In some ways it’s my mother-in-law whose presence I still feel – and miss – most acutely around this place. She always managed to fill the joint, such was her capacity to simultaneously solve any maths problem, recite the words to an obscure hymn, oversee piano practice, sew a button, iron a shirt, change a nappy and feed the dogs, all while nuking my favourite Le Creuset, before settling in at the kitchen bench while we talked about anything and drank wine as I cooked for the adults and chiselled the charcoal from the pot.
The dead parents are fixed in my memories, in my experiences, only here, within these walls. Those who live here next, perhaps having abandoned their own ghosts, won’t know any of that of course.
And, so, I wonder: what happens to all of that life lived, ours and that of the departed, all of that human time expended here, when we move?
One of my Indigenous mates reckons you should have a modest smoking ceremony when you leave a house and another at the other end when you settle into a new place. That makes sense to me: a smoking ceremony (by which I mean some smouldering gum leaves and jasmine in a dish, with no deliberate inhalation) to signal to ancestors that you’re leaving and to please follow, and another in the new place to assure incumbent spirits you mean no harm.
We haven’t moved yet. But already I feel like I’m cheating with all of this eyeing off of pretty places by the water where I might squeeze my (by necessity new, smaller) writing desk, stow our books and hang our art, where the dogs (and kids; not quite a secondary consideration) might romp happily. A place in which to live new experiences, accrue more memories, raise people and dogs, grow vegetables and flowers and books.
There’s so much stuff we can’t take.
Like the majestic golden ash out the back, the possum ladder to our roof, whose leaves clog our gutters each autumn.
We carved our initials, the three of us, in the trunk when we moved in back in 1997: our older daughter, “EM”, and us adults leaner, darker-haired, less battered by life’s vagaries and disappointments: “PD 4 LT”.
Soon came the “JD” of the boy, now almost 18. We didn’t – couldn’t – inscribe the initials of the baby who didn’t make it, into the golden ash. It was, perhaps, a year later when we noticed the boy had taken it upon himself to write of our loss by carving grief into the trunk for all of us: “4 JD 4 ED ...”. Years later another living little girl, finally, at last, made the tree: “... 4 CJ.”
When our son was born we embarked on what we called “the 21-year project”. The idea was that, like Michael Apted’s Up series, we would chronicle on film, through interviews and footage, his life to age 21. Life – constant travel, juggling similar, though often uncomplementary, careers, supporting ailing parents and other kids – got in the way. We gave up when he was about three. But we did mark his growth with lines of pen and dates on the side of a bookcase that is fixed to one of the walls. Over the years all sorts of random visitors – friends, rellos, tradies – were marked off on the side of that bookcase.
It was our visitor’s book. It has to stay, I suppose.
I’m not at all handy. But I wonder if a hammer and chisel would do the trick.
I’m not much of a gardener, either. Our front is often the unruliest in what is, even by Canberra’s standards, a rather ruly street. But our magnolia, which briefly blooms in a flourish of aubergine and white annually, is the most magnificent in the suburb. Every year the kids – from when they first appeared as bumps in their mother’s belly – have been photographed beneath that blooming tree with their mum.
For years I’ve waged war on the possums who sit in the tree from late winter and taunt the dogs while fattening on my magnolia buds. They’re protected, so you can’t kill them, but they’re terrified of bright light. By photo time in early September, only about half the tree blooms. But it’s enough for the annual photograph.
And as fate or life or circumstance or something would have it, the woman from the Australian Bureau of Statistics who’s been leaving little notes for me for weeks, urging me to complete the ill-fated census, just knocked on the door again to ask if I’d done it yet. No. Sorry. Not yet.
“I love your home,” she said.
“I always reckon it looks so messy from the street,” I replied.
“No. It looks interesting – and loved.”
It’s photo time – No 18 – this weekend. God, it comes around fast. It will be our last here. Soon we’ll leave.
And our house, our capsule of time, of memories and spirits, will become someone else’s.
