“Don’t look back, never look back. How often do people tell themselves that after an experience that is exceptionally good (or exceptionally bad?)? Often, I suppose. And the advice usually goes unheeded. Humans were built to look back; that’s why we have that swivel joint in our necks.” ~ Stephen King
I don’t really take the time to walk my neighbourhood often enough. It wasn’t until Amras was here and I had someone to show the area off to that I realized I really do take it for granted. I don’t get out much, this has becomes obvious to me…a habit I’ve developed on the ships I suspect, where there isn’t much in the way of places to go “out” to unless it’s an overnight port.
But it’s July, and it’s been so long since I’ve been home in the summer months that I’d forgotten what it felt like sometimes.
Freya but it’s beautiful here.
So this afternoon I shouldered my purse and I just kind of…started walking. I had intended to just walk to the edge of the golf course and back, just to stretch my legs…but instead I just kept walking. Made some phone calls I’ve been long meaning to make, set up a few coffee dates, and ran into one of my old profs from my university days – who shockingly enough remembered me by name (when I have only the haziest memory of him) and was apparently talking about me to one of my other profs just a few days ago. Apparently my gypsy/waterlogged lifestyle is a fascination to many of the people I knew when I was decidedly shy and land-bound. This is also something I often forget.
Eventually I found I had wound my way clear past the (haunted, like everything else in town) , and figured that since I had nothing else really in the cards as far as plans go, I may as well just continue. Since it was rather boiling hot today, I had a vague goal of reaching the coffee shop that is just over a mile from the house. It should have felt like a long walk, but it didn’t, probably because I wasn’t exactly walking quickly, I was more…ambling. Pausing along the way to watch people congratulating each other on a golf swing well done, or to observe a lone golden lab resting by the edge of the water on one of the beaches by the harbour, children clambering over rocks calling to their mothers to “look what they can do”, remembering old local legends about why some rocks look like people, and casting the obligotary glare towards the ‘new’ heritage style hotel (monstrously horrid that thing, the neighbourhood is so angry about it we kind of pretend it doesn’t exist)…until eventually I pushed open the door to the coffee shop, ordered my iced chai, and settled myself on one of the park benches that everyone always forgets about.
On a day like this that little tiny park is one of the only patches of shade available.
I could have turned back the way I came, but there’s not really a lot of shade along the waterfront, and it was awfully hot, so I went the back way, taking the loop around the park that leads back to my street. As my footsteps crunched along the summer-wet grass, remembering summer camp, and spiders and the scent of the rose garden, and never being able to figure out the rules to cricket…I realized I was kind of doing an impromptu survey of the neighbourhood…
I was walking backwards in my own metaphorical footsteps.
And so it was that I found myself, coffee long finished, standing at the mouth of the alleyway that leads behind the house that was once my Gran’s.
We don’t take that alley, not ever. I think I’m the only one in the family who ever sets foot in it now that Gran is gone, but oddly enough, sometimes I feel I need to.
It’s changed of course, time changes everything, the fences are higher and the blackberry bushes I used to forage in as a kid are long torn out, but in some ways it still looks exactly the same. With every step I took the gravel crunched, and it seemed like time moved backward.
The house looks different of course. But some things never change, the garage – rickety as ever – still sports the same black roof that I used to perch on with a book and several stolen apples, and the massive apple tree I used to steal those apples from still stands. There’s a new fence now, the rickety old white picket fence that had stood there for years must have finally decayed beyond the point of repair, and in its place is a high lattice-topped affair that’s made to keep children and pets safely inside. So I stand on my tip toes and look in on the remnants of my childhood , of family croquet tournaments, stolen raspberries and sneaking up to the top of apple trees – through somebody else’s latticework. The yard obviously looks very different now. Except one thing, you see – we almost kept the house after Gran passed, but necessity clashed with family interest and the place ended up on the market – when the new family made the offer we accepted, but we asked them a favour, something we probably had no right to ask really because the place wasn’t ours anymore,
Please, could you leave the apple tree, and could you leave the swing
A new ‘kit-built’ swing set stands in the shade of the old apple tree now, but if you turn your eyes to the lowest branch, you can see that they have – even after all this time – kept their word, because the old swing – nothing more than a board on a pair of now-ancient ropes really – sits atop that branch. Still attached.
Would she be proud of me? I like to think so. I’m somewhat (one of) the black sheep of the family; I left home, I’m not married (heck, I’m not even in a relationship!), I ran away to the ocean and I stubbornly refuse to let the world dictate what I want to do with my life…I sometimes wonder if she would just shake her head. And then I remember…Gran always did have a fondness for black sheep so to speak…
That made me smile…
Before I turned my steps back to the future….
Say goodbye to yesterday, those are words I’ll never say… ~ This Used To Be My Playground