Homes and their people

Home. 

A bedroom on our travels.

 I am so lucky in that I have always had one.  (Well, there was a period of 18 months when we didn't have one at all, but still we always knew we could find shelter in many different places, so yes, still fortunate.  It amazes me how many people, besides your own family, will just take you in with open arms!)

My very young mum and dad, long
before I arrived.

My very old mum and dad, when they came to 
visit us in Boston, a few years before they died.

I also had really loving parents until I was 50 (my mum died) and 52 (my dad died).  More blessings.

Home for me is synonymous with family.  It takes up an important place in your mind when you are away from it, because it is your nest, your constant.  It has your own people, your own colours, your own bed, your own bathroom.  It is where you think and make and eat and talk and grow children.  A home keeps you warm and safe in the midst of thunder and lightning. 

When people travel they usually leave home to go somewhere else for a while.  Usually quite a short while, and then they return home again, glad to be back.  But when we traveled for nearly one and a half years we had sold our house and only had our suitcases and backpacks.  And after about a month we both really longed for home, a place which was no longer there.  

All the items I deemed necessary for our long long voyage.

We were going to travel for two years to find a new forever-home, but we realised that we needed one sooner than that, and, after searching quite a lot, we finally found one here in the warm Algarve, in Portugal, which reminds us very much of South Africa.  

This is my dream for our garden.  The house is
perfect right now but the garden is a large project.

Now I have a home again I barely want to leave it.  My face is full of smiles every time I enter the gate, walk up to the house, and come through the front door to all our colours, our beloved books and paintings, our place.

My first home was 10 Forest Drive, Pinelands.  Pinelands was created based on a "garden city" design, with five or six houses all backing on to a kind of spare plot that remained empty.  Our "field" was a wide meadow, to my small child's perception, with grass and wild flowers and tall tall pines.  We didn't have a fence so it seemed like a continuation of our garden.  I knew it so well, as only children can know a place, the shadows and sunshine, the trees' ancient presences, their bark, the caterpillars, and all the small creatures who lived there. 

My parents had been suddenly shocked by my mum's pregnancy with me, as she was quite old for those times to have a baby, (34, imagine!) and they had thought their family complete, a gorgeous girl and a beautiful boy.   So when they discovered another baby was about to join them, they knew they would never all fit in the little house they were in and decided to make a brave leap to a larger grander house with four bedrooms, which they moved into just before I was born.  My mum and dad lived there until I was 34, so they (and I as a child) had the same home telephone number until they died in their retirement home, having kept that number, which I phoned every Sunday after I moved out, until their deaths.    

10 Forest Drive from an applique wall hanging I 
made for my parents' 55th anniversary.

10 Forest Drive had a thatched roof and those strange faux-Tudor leaded-paned windows.  There were enormous prolific fruit trees, fig and guava, lemon, loquat, and mulberry (the bane of my mother's life as the starlings loved to eat the mulberries and then defecate purple inky stains on to her lovely white clean sheets hanging on the washing line drying in the sunshine!). My dad always had a little vegetable garden too, and we proudly ate his produce of mainly beans and potatoes.  There was a tall Silver-Oak, which was my friend, and I learned to climb this tree and sit reading or drawing for hours, high up.  I have always loved to be high up when something is not going so well, maybe I was once a bird.  

I went back about 20 years after I had left home and my parents no longer lived there, and the people who lived there kindly showed me around "their" house.  What had been a home with enormous rooms and space and light now seemed much smaller and more crowded.  And there was a house in our field!  And high walls with locked gates everywhere, which had been fences or nothing.  So no more dappled meadow.

My Lemon Tree painting in Casa Aveleira.

My Lemon Tree painting in 
90 Southern Ave.

When people move into a house or an apartment we move in all our "stuff", we put up pictures, our books line the bookshelves, our comfy sofas slot into their places, our beds are under the window so that the light plays on the wall as we wake to the dawn.  We make it ours.  But I always wonder who was there before me, because you hardly ever know, everything with the sale or rental of the property is done by intermediaries.  But does the home miss its people, is it happy to have new ones laughing, weeping, having sex, arguing, creating, washing, cleaning, eating?

Our apartment in Mexico City.

Moving around so much during our travels,  I always tried to make the impersonal apartments home-like, with one of my colourful sarongs as a cover at the end of the uncomfortable bed or sofa, or a little prism my granddaughter had given me, hanging up at each new window.  

We make maps in our heads, all through our lives.  I can walk through all the houses I have lived in, know what is under the desk in the ironing room where my brother used to do his homework, know the specific light reflected off our garden into the window of the kitchen in 16 Cross Street.   We have maps of all our towns, all the places we love, the rooms we stay in.  (Although the city maps may well become a lost knowledge to the new generations, the street maps indelibly etched in the brains of only earlier generations, because now there is GPS?)  

In Santerem, traveling.

You have so many maps in your head, and sometimes still you wake in the night and have no idea where you are.  You have to climb up with effort, from a very deep dark to know who you are, before you even have time to re-orient yourself, because you go on such faraway journeys in your dreams, don't you?  And gradually you find yourself, that Anne, the one who carries all her selves of 69 years in her head, in her heart.  And you are in your own bed, in your new country, where the sky is a dim line along the side of the darker window-blind, and the indistinct shapes of familiar furniture are all sleeping around you.  And your dear husband of 40 years is warmly and easily lining your body with his, his heavy arm softly across you.