Belly of the Whale

Well, it came as a bit of a shock, but we’ve sold very quickly and now we have to look for a house to buy with some urgency.  I’m sure that neither of us thought that it would happen this soon and we are only just beginning to compute the implications.  We have, I think, viewed eight properties over the last couple of days – they have been too expensive, too big, too small, too rundown and too much of a home for wallaby-sized rats – but we are left with one or two ‘contenders’ – nothing is perfect is it?  Oddly the pressure I have started to feel is more in terms of getting ready to move out of this house than where we’re going to go to when we’ve done it.

We’ve lived here for forty three years.  We bought it when we really couldn’t afford it, but we were young enough (and just the right side of stupid) to take on ‘a project’.  At times I thought that the bloody thing was going to kill me, but we slowly got it together.  We raised our children here and I think that almost everyone we have ever known has visited it at some time or another.  Now we think that the time is right for it to shelter somebody else’s growing tribe.  Our buyers (fingers crossed that they remain our buyers) are such; a young family whom I hope will be very happy here – as we have been.

So we have to start sorting through forty three years of assembled ‘stuff’.  Mementoes of pre-parenting life; of the blissful days of early-parenthood; the more difficult, but ultimately rewarding days of parenting young adults; of letting them go; of welcoming them back; of greeting new family members and, eventually, our precious grandchildren – all of these have to be sifted through and either saved or abandoned.  We are downsizing so the abandoned pile has to be the bigger, we both agree on that… until we get the bin bags out..

Our children are startlingly non-nostalgic and did not want to keep much of what we had kept from their childhoods when they left home, so they are even less likely to want it now.  I wonder if this knowledge will make it any less of a wrench when we haul it all down from the attic and tip it into a skip?  Probably not.

I’m not at all certain how we will feel going forward: our lives are woven into this house: we built this nest around us like little birds.  It will, when the time comes, be difficult to leave, but hopefully we will walk into a new chapter… whilst we are still able to walk.

It’s hard to avoid thinking about mortality at times like this – if I’m honest, it is something you can never successfully turn your back on at my age – because if we live as long in our new home (wherever that may be) as we have here, I will be 109 years old and almost certainly not able to climb trees with the great-grandkids without the assistance of a block and tackle.  Unless we get it very wrong – or decrepitude forces arthritic hands – this will be our last home: only the third we have ever shared.  And all that we have to do is find it…

That house broke my back
That house I built skinned my knuckles
That house I built picked my pockets
And buckled every joint
It pointed me from youth and any truth I knew
Towards a painted sundown on a break your nose horizon… Belly of the Whale – Guy Garvey

I’m sorry if the title of this piece led you away from where it was actually going, but the song was in my head before I even started to write…