Coming home is a strange thing when you’ve been doing it for years. The key fits in my hand, fits in the lock, just right. The turn is so natural it feels like a finely practiced art. I’d know the sound of the door opening anywhere. The key of it is the opening note of an album containing the song of everyone at the table laughing, the soft clink of cutlery on China, and the quiet music of conversation. though you could argue that this house was more familiar with raucous cacophony than quietness.
Moving through the door, every bump and turn is so known that locking the door behind me is as much a part of opening it as putting the key in the lock. The act begins with the walk up the drive. And ends with taking off my shoes.
Standing in the hall i realise I’ve performed the last late-night homecoming. Putting the keys on the shelf in the hall. Putting my hand on the newel, kicking off my shoes. The streetlight noses through the windows in the door, and shudders through the window on the stairs. On summer evenings the sun lights the hall golden, like the inside of a lantern. The final echo of all our summers hangs in the air. The house is quiet, and inside the beginning sounds of rain running soft fingers across the roof – i imagine the house begins to dream.
I imagine a hundred projectors play moments of the last sixty years on the walls of every room. Overlaid and interspliced days and months and years. Faces layered on faces as they grow and change, the house altering, the people shifting. Hundreds of birthdays and Christmas parties, and nights spent waiting, and mornings getting bad news, and good news coming, and kisses, and fights, and back garden picnics. I wonder, looking at the dark kitchen, hearing laughter caught in the refrigerator hum, if houses miss people when they go. Did they learn our quirks? The way we went through a room, they way we like to hum coming down the stairs on winter mornings. Did the walls lean closer when we cried? Did they expand outward at new year parties to fit another reveller in the kitchen? Did they watch your children grow, and leave, and come back? Did it help to weave bonds, like lengths of twine, leading out through the front door into the world?
moving involves picking up the tangled centre of the web we’ve woven. Packing it into a box with the cups and bowls and boxes of photos from 40 years ago. In the photos, this house and all that’s happened in between is an imagined future. It doesn’t exist in there. Do we ever wonder at 21 what we will be doing 40 years later? Do we dream up our houses? Do we dream up our lives? I don’t think you dreamed of this one.
Some houses are like harbours. Safe port and safe passage away from uncertain waters, built to withstand the weather raging around it. I imagine our arrival like this:
The four of us washed in the door on some errant wave. Clutching bits of driftwood we’d salvaged from the wreckage of an old life, battered and broken by the storm. here, you collected the pieces splinter by splinter and rebuilt a fraction of it. Filling the cracks with gold. No. Not gold. Filling the cracks with parts of yourself. Filling the gaps with kindness, and trust, and honour, and love. With laughter and jokes and good music and good films and good food. You wove our lives into each other’s, interweaving a fabric that could hold us together, that reached outward across generations to keep the structure intact. We grew into the gaps like Ivy, and you used the bouse as the framework. Its bricks and mortar gave us something from which to build. We could be safe here. We could hide, shut the world out, and spring forth from it when ready. Home is outside of time. It’s on a different plane.
I imagine every version of ourselves playing over the walls forever. Soon, the layers of these twenty years will only be spotted playing underneath the layers of the next family. And the next family. And the next.
In the quiet transience of the dark hall, I think that despite the sadness of our arrival, our tenure here has been a happy one. When we leave the keys on Thursday we leave a happy house behind us. A happy home. Built for the quiet monotony of being human; of growing up, growing old, and moving on.
I wonder if you worry that moving the Ivy from home will disturb it. Bring it crashing in on itself.
But it’s not really the house we grew around. It’s you. You who built us a home here. You who filled in all the gaps. You who steered us into the harbour when all was lost.
When we go this time we’re not clinging on to bits of driftwood for dear life. We’re packing up all the pieces of the life you quietly built here onto a new boat, untying the line, and casting off into calm waters. The water like glass, disturbed only by the motion of the boat. Safe passage to new harbours. You carry it all with you.
It was never the house that built the home.
It was you.
Goose FM 