This place, just outside Bellingen, was once someone's home.
I don't know how long it's been since someone lived here, but there was a time when the residents of this house closed the door for the last time and said 'Goodbye'.
I wonder what feelings they experienced as they did that. What drove them to walk away? Age or infirmity? A death? The state of the house? A family move?
Why did they leave? And what did it do to them?
I've moved house a couple of times in the last few years, and my sense is that every time I move, I leave a piece of myself behind.
Perhaps you've experienced it - that when you drive past a house you used to live in, there's something inside you that yearns (or that churns!), or that just remembers. You stop and look at the house. Yes, that old tree is still there. Oh, they've painted the window frames. Ah, the letterbox has been kicked in again.
When you close the door for the last time, your heart seems to leave a window open somewhere. Funny how the familiarity of a particular 'pile' of bricks and mortar gets inside us.
2 comments:
When we were back in Sydney we did a drive by of Fleet St where we spent the first year of married life and it had been totally leveled. A very strange feeling. To have such an important part of life seemingly removed.
Oh no! I can't believe that house is gone! I don't understand the mentality that insists on flattening a perfectly useable old house - especially one which had so much love poured into its maintenance and presentation.
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