Where we love is home;
home that our feet may leave,
but not our hearts.
- Oliver
Wendell Holmes, Sr., Homesick in Heaven
I took a forlorn, last look around me
from the throne of my childhood.
The huge old tree under which I sat was
leaning against the neighbour’s brush fence, as it always had. Suddenly, I had the sense that it was
from exhaustion. We won’t play like this
again, but it was grand, wasn’t it? It had grown in a curious arch from the
ground and curved overhead, the pendulous branches creating a cave-like space
larger than a truck, enclosed on three sides, once you included the fence. I
had crafted the opening into a door with bales of straw and woven branches. It
was a dappled, cosy space, but the day was cold and wet.
I sat on one of the branches inside that
formed a natural seat. I had to hunch forward a little more than I used to. It
used to be a more comfortable fit. I wondered if it was as much the tree
growing, as I.
I smiled as I ran my hand over the
marks, in liquid paper, painted on the adjacent branches; crude icons and
buttons. Power, I mouthed silently. Shields. Lasers. Scanners. I surveyed, for the last time, the bridge of
my ship; the console of my time machine; the keep of my fort… the last line of
my defence against growing up, fallen silent now in valediction.
And there, over in the corner, was the
depression where, years before, I had commenced digging a hole which I had
announced would be the entrance to a series of underground tunnels, lit and
paved, like in Hogan’s Heroes. My
grandfather, impressed and indulgent, gave me a shovel and a knowing wink. The
hole never got more than 3 feet deep.
How many hours, I wondered, were lost in
this space? No, not lost; found. My
sister said once that she had spied on me, and wondered why I wasn’t doing
anything. “You were just staring into space, for like, hours.”
“Of course,” I replied “but you didn’t see what was
going on up here” as I tapped my forehead.
“Well I should know,” my sister, four years younger
than I, argued. “We never played my games
there.”
“My prerogative. My cubby, my rules.”
“What? Like that time you insisted we had landed on a,
a…” she searched for a word, “a mystery
planet that looked just like ours, and we had to go into the house and
pretend everyone were aliens?”
I smiled at the recollection. I warmed to the topic.
“I remember that!. And the time after we had just come
back from Jenolan caves, and we were in the house and I said we would pretend
the cubby was the Skeleton cave and
we had to sneak up to it to see the real skeleton, and you were so frightened
you wouldn’t go in.”
My sister affected mock bluster. “I was, like, six.”
My reverie was broken by the whine of
the removalist van laboring up the driveway. I hated it, with all the lack of
ambiguity only a 15 year old can project onto the world. Because it wasn’t fair.
I looked toward the house to see if
anyone was emerging to direct the van, past the huge, imperial Jacaranda that
dominated the centre of the property. The Jacaranda was losing the last of its
autumn leaves, and dripped with the drizzle that had set in.
It matched my mood.
That tree was planted by my great
grandfather, and that one by his father, my heart cried. Well,
probably. But our property had been in my family since the 1850s and at that
moment, every blade of grass was sacred, and its abandonment, an outrage. My world was upended and ending.
Mum, haggard, had indeed emerged from
the house and was futilely gesturing for the driver to drive beside the driveway at the top because
the unparalleled comings and leavings had turned the top yard into a sea of
mud. Yesterday’s truck had become bogged. Yes,
I thought. Our place… she doesn’t
want us to leave. She’s hanging on. I felt the weight of history like a
physical force. I felt it radiating out of the ground. Not fair.
Mum sighed in frustration.
“You’re not making this any easier,” she
had said, months before. We were sitting at our kitchen table. She took my hand
in both her own; her sure sign that what she was saying needed to be absorbed.
By osmosis, if necessary.
“Your grandparents aren’t well enough to keep up the
place any more. Won’t you look forward to them coming and living with us at our
place? There’ll be all the building, while we build the granny flat. And then,
well, you won’t have to wait to visit; they’ll be right here with us.”
My mouth made shapes while I considered the
proposition, like I was turning over a sourgum I couldn’t decide if I liked or
hated.
As if. I would be irrational; “No. It’s the family
property. No one will care like we do, who grafted which tree, and which
gardens the pets are buried in. It’s everything that’s constant in my life, and
I don’t want it taken away.”
Mum’s look of sadness was almost enough to tip me over
the edge, because she knew I was right. Nevertheless, the pitiless Universe
said she was right, too, and I knew it. And the knowing made me just that bit
less a child.
I hope, I thought, as I left my cubby behind
for the last time, I hope someone finds
you. I brightened. Maybe this will
will become a special place for someone else. Maybe they will find it and
marvel, like ‘The Secret Garden’. I was told that the buyer had a family,
but the details were sketchy.
I left behind a part of myself on that day, but I also
took the seed of what that space meant. In time, it took root.
I glance out my window. My eight year old son is
shouting at the world from the cubby I have built him, defending it against invisible
foes. Our property is salted with good climbing trees, many of them scions of the trees of the old place,
gifted by my grandparents when the family moved.
Continuity is preserved. The force of history still
radiates from my ground, and it is warm.
I smile.
This piece was written for a creative writing unit
I am doing at University. The brief was to write 1000
words about a vivid childhood memory.