We spent a day over Easter with my brother on the property we grew up on. Without inhabitants the old house is becoming derelict. Roly poly weed is piled in the corners of the rooms and mice scuttle across the ceiling. My childhood bedroom was at the end of the back verandah. Where I lay on my bed and dreamed of being a grown-up my grandmother's hats and suitcases spill over the peeling lino. My mother's weaving loom is still strung with the greasey wool she was spinning and weaving on the day of her heart attack 34 years ago.
The pencil pine that Mum planted has grown so that only the trunk and a few split branches are now visible through the window. It grew so slowly that for years I angled my bookcase across the space to shade the room from the summer glare. Compared to my children I had few books but each was read and re-read. My imagination was populated with hedgehogs, rolling green dales and boarding school antics. Few of my books matched the heat and the dust of my reality. When I visited England I expected to feel more at home than I did. While the domesticated, well-watered landscape matched my images of it, it was fenced in and claustrophobic compared to the wide horizons teeming with wild life that I'd grown up in.
2 comments:
Hey I wouldn't worry about treading on toes. in my experience people can get very personal, and they're allowed (expected) to be somewhat brazen, churlish even provocative at times. but, of course as you said, you can't help feeling the audience is out there breathing heavily and taking in what you say, and sometimes like a stand up comedy situation, they might hurl a few comments at you ... let's face it it's an intriguing medium.
and by the way i'm nikolai blaskow using my wife's computer!
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