I am about to experience a different sort of “leaving home” situation. This time it’s us (me!) leaving our (my) home. What do you do? What do you feel? I’ve wished so hard to sell our house and wished so hard to be able to move away and be close to family, but now I realise that leaving a home, as opposed to “leaving home” can be both different and the same thing.
I have searched my memoir to find the part of a chapter where I write of having to leave a much loved family home when I was a child.
Here it is:
"And so it was that we began the awful task of selling and moving away from the much loved family home.
The leaving of our Celia Street home was a sad time; heart-breaking, almost.
It was no doubt an extremely difficult move for our parents, but it was hard for us children as well.
We loved our house and loved our neighbourhood friends. We had experienced a happy relationship with most of the kids in the street. The freedom that was afforded to big sis and me was a blessing that could not be measured and we both knew that perhaps this was the end of “life as we knew it”.
How true.
The day the furniture van came and removed our goods and chattels from the house, I walked through the empty rooms, one at a time. I said goodbye to each room in turn and, when I came to our bedroom, I stepped inside the inbuilt wardrobe and closed the door. Sitting on the floor of the cupboard, I said a goodbye prayer as tears rolled down my cheeks.
I count that day as the end of my childhood. I was 11".
And now, as a (very!) mature woman I find the pull of emotional attachment to this home of ours that we built 30 years ago to be almost frightening at times, while at the same time I am experiencing a sort of relief that the decision has been made and is now out of our hands, so to speak, as we search for our new home.
I have searched my memoir to find the part of a chapter where I write of having to leave a much loved family home when I was a child.
Here it is:
"And so it was that we began the awful task of selling and moving away from the much loved family home.
The leaving of our Celia Street home was a sad time; heart-breaking, almost.
It was no doubt an extremely difficult move for our parents, but it was hard for us children as well.
We loved our house and loved our neighbourhood friends. We had experienced a happy relationship with most of the kids in the street. The freedom that was afforded to big sis and me was a blessing that could not be measured and we both knew that perhaps this was the end of “life as we knew it”.
How true.
The day the furniture van came and removed our goods and chattels from the house, I walked through the empty rooms, one at a time. I said goodbye to each room in turn and, when I came to our bedroom, I stepped inside the inbuilt wardrobe and closed the door. Sitting on the floor of the cupboard, I said a goodbye prayer as tears rolled down my cheeks.
I count that day as the end of my childhood. I was 11".
And now, as a (very!) mature woman I find the pull of emotional attachment to this home of ours that we built 30 years ago to be almost frightening at times, while at the same time I am experiencing a sort of relief that the decision has been made and is now out of our hands, so to speak, as we search for our new home.