Home
I know a house is not a home and I know you do not need me to tell you that.
I know that home is those we love; the things that make us smile and cry; the things we connect with and that usually this is all gathered in a collection of rooms we call our home.
I am upstairs just now. Alexa is doing her stuff besides me but I am hardly listening to her. Dash the dog will be asleep next to Wendy or sat at his lookout tower, searching out the neighbours cat to bark at. The children are at their dad’s but will be with us tomorrow. The rabbits’ cage has been cleaned and they have been fed.
I can hear song birds outside and it is the time of day when soon, the rooks will scatter and swirl over the fir trees across the road before settling for the night. Maybe I will hear the geese flying overhead to wherever they spend the night.
I know one of the places they will rest tonight. We passed it today when we walked up past the golf course, past Kilmahew castle ruins and, on our way back, passed a large flock in one of the fields besides the track.
It was such a lovely walk; a bright, bright, sky; icy paths, a scattering of snow. The lochan all frozen over; the icy puddles, cracked by other walkers passing that way before us. Wendy’s hand in mine and a constant conversation or rather lots of talk and Wendy laughing and telling me I can reply with more than one word to her questions.
The house is warm. We have hung the new bird feeder up. I have done a clothes wash and they are now in the tumble dryer.
I feel safer here than anywhere else in my life. It is a place where I am loved and accepted, where we can tease each other and laugh about each other; cuddle and kiss and stare at the telly.
But can I call this home? I am not sure I can. But I am not sure I can call anywhere home.
Wendy has lived here all her life, or near here. She was born in Alexandria, moved to Balloch, then Dumbarton and finally to here in Cardross. Her dad’s family tree stretches as far back as 1745 when the family lived in Cardross and before that we do not know.
Her friends were those she made at school and who she partied with in her teens and her twenties, thirties, forties. She knows here in a way I have never known anywhere.
This is the place she is connected to; where she belongs; where her wider family lives and have lived.
I have no concept of somewhere like that. When we drive out on a weekend she can say;
“That is where I threw, the wires under the cars. That is where I shared pizza every week with Paula. That is the burn Peter caught his fish in. This is where my Gran lived, the park I walked in on Sundays, the cricket ground I went to with my Dad every Saturday in the summers of my childhood.”
I think I had moved house seven times by the time I was nine and was sent away to school. My memory is hazy. I have pictures of various places I have lived in my mind but I can’t remember the addresses. I couldn’t take you on a tour of wherever we used to live and say “This is where so and so lived, this is where we did this.”
I can only just remember places we lived but the addresses and most of the people connected to such places are a mystery to me.
I don’t have a connection to anywhere really and my parents don’t or didn’t. My Dad’s family roots were from Wales but somehow there was conflict in the wider family and they lost touch. I don’t think my Dad ever went back to meet up with distant uncles or cousins he only had a vague knowledge of.
My Mum’s family was from Devon but her Mum and Dad divorced and the family home stopped being a family home. My memory of her parents was of her Mum shifting from house to house where she often worked as a ladies companion and of my grandad; he seemed to live in a series of bedsits. The only one I remember had a loganberry patch and a strop for a cutthroat razor hanging in the room that doubled as his kitchen and sitting room. I am not sure my Mum has much connection with anyone either from Devon. She has a school friend who she keeps in touch with, who now lives in New Zealand, but I am not aware of anyone else.
And us children? My dad was in the Royal Air Force so we wandered from place to place to place and when we didn’t, we were away at boarding school.
If I had a home I think it would be like Wendy’s home, where, when I walk down the street I am likely to meet someone I taught piano to when I was a teenager, or bump into someone who I remember from nights at Cheers, or a lady my Mum knew when she worked in the bookies, or someone who knows Peter my brother, or the friend of Lucy’s mother who I don’t talk to anymore. I would have been on the train to Glasgow so many times I almost feel a part of the workforce. I will have seen businesses open and close. I will know the gossip or much of the gossip; know who to go to, to buy the rabbits from, or to get the dog from or to get the plants for the hanging baskets in the spring.
And so although this house is my home, these few square miles are Wendy’s home in a way I will never ever understand or appreciate. But you never know, maybe over the years? Is that possible?
Thanks Jean’s Bothy writing group for the prompt to write this.
(Photo: the kitchen sitting room. Feb 2021)
Comments