(or: a farewell letter to our first home)
Every time I know I’m about to leave a place I call home, it feels new again. It’s different to the newness of arriving for the first time. It feels like a hunger for the kind of memory retention that my brain just doesn’t have; a flailing (and failing) attempt to take mental notes and file them away for later.
I think I used the phrase “drinking it in” (or something like it) when I wrote about leaving San Francisco, and lately it’s on repeat in my head, every day, like a mantra:
Drinking it in.
Out here, we discovered what it felt like to live in an exposed, windy place: wild, never boring, occasionally scary. Our dog, who grew up sleeping through earthquakes, house parties, and ear-piercing sirens in California, cowers when wind and rain slap the house.
The camping and hiking gear we enthusiastically accumulated in North America started gathering dust, only getting used for music festivals. When home becomes the most peaceful place on earth, the motivation to escape for calm and quiet evaporates.
When we bought this place, we didn’t know if we’d be here 2 years or 50 years, and we were okay with that – but leaving is still a kind of heartbreak. We did things to the house and the land to make it ours. We planted trees that are still in their relative infancy.
In a world where home ownership is an extreme privilege, we owned this, and it was our first. I think that means something.
Having ME/CFS was when I learned to take pleasure in the small things.
Living on this property was when I realized that the small things aren’t really small at all.
With that in mind, here’s a non-exhaustive list of small things (that aren’t really small) that I love about this place:
- The dining room flooding with light on summer evenings.
- Incense filling our freshly vacuumed home on Saturday mornings.
- The sound of people in the house. Friends laughing in the kitchen, playing video games in the living room, dancing on the deck.
- A new sunset every night.
- Our huge bedroom bay window, filled with plants.
- Jesse in the garden. Jesse baking bread. Music pouring out of his office. His footsteps approaching, bringing fresh coffee back to bed in the morning.
- Cats galloping up and down the hallways so loudly we could hear them from outside the house.
- Waking up to thick fog.
- The fireplace in winter.
- Long, hot baths in the huge bathtub.
- Craters and (mostly dormant) volcanoes.
- Endless chatter about the weather.
- Lying on the deck in my underwear on my lunch break.
- Local gossip.
- Wiping bird shit off the side mirrors of our car because a sassy blue fairy wren liked using them as a perch.
- Looking down at 100 year old hardwood floors.
- Looking up at ornate ceilings.
- Looking up at the sky. When we moved out here, I yearned for trees until I fell in love with the sky. Day or night, it dominates out here. Stars, clouds, shades of blue. The big sky changed me.
- The people. Neighbors who became friends: appearing on our doorstep with food when tragedy struck, taking care of our animals when we were away, bringing us into their family with open arms.
- Long train rides into Melbourne.
- Mowing, digging, planting, watering. Watching some things grow, and watching other things die.
- Calling something our own.
