 |
| Molly walking in Tim's footsteps, to save energy. |
What a blizzard it was, snow beating against the windows, roaring wind, cold biting at your bones if you ventured outside! And how beautiful afterwards, walking through the fields, blankets of snow, sculptures of snow which are really trees underneath, deep drifts which swallow your legs up to your knees, and freeze Molly's tummy.
Tim said that he could see that all I wanted to do was run, but it was hard enough trying to walk through those drifts, let alone run! I did though, every now and then I would run in his footprints, to catch up to him.
Bill Bryson has written a new book on the Home, a kind of history of each room, as I understand it. I was lying in bed earlier this morning, the blizzard still raging about us, thinking of all the bedrooms I have had in my life.
My first bedroom was probably a pram. It was one of those very substantial prams with big wheels in which little babies slept as they were proudly walked along the sidewalk to Granny's house, or to the shops, stopping to speak to every acquaintance and show off the bouncing occupant.
When my mother was cleaning the house, she would park the pram outside in the back garden, under the abundant fig tree, which produced literally hundreds of figs each year, in the temperate Cape Town weather. If I woke up I would watch the ballet of light and leaves and be quite content for ages, apparently.
One day the elderly neighbour knocked on her front door with a horrified expression to inform her that she had forgotten "the baby outside in the rain!". She smiled at him and told him that I was fine, and to ease his troubled mind she took him to have a look at me, and there I was, wide awake and talking to the tree, some kind of waterproof covering keeping me dry and warm!
Which might account for the fact that always, on waking, I must be able to see a tree, and have always positioned my beds so that that would be the case.
My first little bedroom was painted "sunshine yellow" by my dad, especially for me, apparently that is the colour I chose and named, although I have no recollection of that.
When my big sister moved out I graduated to her larger bedroom, which had always been filled with dainty things, and had two windows!
The same thing happened when my brother left for Edinburgh, when I was a teenager, and I inherited his huge room, with the stains on the ceiling from botched chemistry experiments, and the rifle hidden under the floorboards which my friend and I discovered one horrifying afternoon, and the balcony to which you could gain access by climbing out of the window, which was so private that you could sunbathe naked.
So I was the child who had the most intimate knowledge of that house, being the only member of the family to have lived in three different rooms during her childhood, the one who could hide in cupboards and could have told you which person it belonged to with her eyes shut, as I knew what each person smelled like. I was the one who liked to climb out of the window of the little sunshine yellow room, and to sit on the comfortable roof over the back-door stoep, and who learned how to shimmy down it when necessary. Likewise the balcony, as a teenager.
At university I had to share a room in a student residence with a strange girl who had scars on her wrists and who was pernickety about neatness, which I wasn't. I was expelled from this residence after about eight months, to my parents' chagrin, for not fitting in, and for not being present when I should have been.
I then moved in with my boyfriend, where he lived in "the stables" which were actually that, converted stables, with a fig tree outside our stable door, which was perfect, and very soon after that we rented this beautiful old spacious house in Fitzroy Street, with a wonderful upstairs bedroom with a view of a big Yellow-wood tree and a huge field next door.
There have been several bedrooms since, in King William's Town, in Nahoon and Bonza Bay, and my beloved 16 Cross Street, and the yellow house on the hill in Winthrop, and the little poky house on the knoll, and now this house in the woods, and isn't it amazing, how we can "walk" through a house after twenty, thirty, forty years, and still see it all in our mind's eye, every little detail, how it felt, how it smelled, what we did there.
A bedroom is your personal space, your own private spot, when you are little, if you are lucky enough to have one of your own. It is where you think, where you grow into the person you will become.
Later it is the place where you make love, a space still your own, but shared, so compromises as to decoration and whatnot have to be made.
And later still it is the place you share with your husband and your new baby, or babies, full of baby clothes and nappies and creams for baby's bottoms and all the frightening trappings of newborns.
It is the room where you share your most intimate moments, where you breastfeed your babies at night, when you are so exhausted you just want to weep, where you wake up in the morning to find you have lost one of the babies, he is nowhere to be seen, and after much panic and confusion, you find him safely swaddled right at the bottom of the bed, fast asleep. It is the place where you cuddle your children woken by nightmares, where you go to cry when something bad has happened, where you retire when you are sick, where you experience passion, ecstasy, and the most wondrous connection with another human being.
It is the place where you look out of the window at the snow swirling around the trees and snuggle down into the warmth of your husband's back for a few more minutes.
No comments:
Post a Comment