Tuesday, August 5, 2014

I sometimes wish I could visit the house of my childhood.
To go back in time, open the door and see this house 
just as it was from 1944 to 1956 when I lived there on the farm on 
Matakawau Road.
The house has long gone
and the  farm is no longer an entity of its own but part of a much larger holding.
The sheltering pine trees from behind have gone too.
 
 I imagine I would be surprised at the simplicity of this house and it's contents.
Three small bedrooms, the living room with its fireplace, the tiny kitchen and the dining room and extra bedroom that Dad added for big sister Shirley.
Dad also added a bathroom and a back porch.  The 'lavatory' was outside behind the shed that housed the copper and concrete tubs for washing clothes.
I have no memory of it being wanting. Small children are more aware of love and happiness and security, or the lack of it, than of the absence of material things.
 I came across this image of a little girl scaling a doorway.
It could have been me in the house on Matakawau Road.
The door is exactly the kind of door I remember.
The activity is just the kind of thing I used to engage in.

I see myself running, crying to my mother, with a bleeding scratch that ran from below my tummy button up my chest.
I'd been riding on the top of the door, swinging too and fro.
Dismounting  by standing on the door handles and sliding down, I hadn't taken into 
consideration the sharp edge of the lock.
Needless to say,  the riding of doors was forbidden ever after.



4 comments:

  1. My sketch is very wobbly and inaccurate but quite suits my memories of a long ago dream place ..

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  2. My "lavatory" growing up was also a small "outhouse" at the end of a path beyond the clothesline. I never felt poor. More children should experience such luxury ....

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  3. Ouch. What a nasty injury, but it's good to be adventurous too. I love the drawing of your house. It looks so welcoming, almost as if it is about to give the visitor a hug.
    Sometimes the memories are better than the actual place, when it has changed a lot with time.

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  4. What a lovely post! We had an outhouse when first we built our house and my five year old, after returning from a moonlit visit to the outhouse, said, in a dreamy sort of a voice, "City kids don't get to hear the owls when they go to the outhouse."

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