I watch the bees hover gently over the lavender. Pausing on each teeny flower, gathering pollen so small I can hardly see it, and again off, moving on to the next tiny flower. Their pattern of flight seemingly haphazard. Yet I study them, knowing that there is a sense to their movements even if it makes no sense to me.
And I think that this is like me, moving across my mothers’ house, her garden, the kitchen, the bedroom that now doubles up as my office, and back to the garden. I move both distracted, focused, and in spurts of energy.
I spend an hour weeding, carefully extracting barbed bramble and wild roses grown up amongst the hydrangea, amongst the flowering begonia. I chase down the vine, that every year grows metres, reaching across trees and bushes and up into the shutters. Every year we say we must get rid of it. Every year it beats us to it, and has grown into reaches that will take us weeks to cut back.
I carry my spoils to the growing mountain of cast-off vegetation that lies under the yew tree. I wonder how much higher it can go. How we’ll get it out to the dump. I never expected it to get so big.
Then, feeling overwhelmed by the heat I retreat to the cool of the house, and the stacks of photos strewn across the dining room table. Photos that we have carefully rescued from their random locations across the house as we cleared and tidied over the past two years. Now I go through them, scanning them all with the printer I have set up. Or rather, I nudge, and Ziggy scans, switching tabs between his minecraft adventures with friends. He sighs, I sigh, the printer takes ages. I find photos of me as a baby, my hair like a punk, beaming, happy, 50 odd years ago in Italy. My parents so very young. I stare at ancient photos, some from the trenches, 1919 in Zeebrugge, Ostende. My grandfather? My great aunt’s husband? We peer at the grainy black and white images. We find images of my mother’s cousins who had emigrated to what was then Southern Rhodesia on her wedding day. We google images in what is now Harare, then colonial Sailsbury, and by detective work on the stone work behind her wedding snaps find the self same church is still standing, and the hotel in which they had their reception back in 1947 now a 5 star luxury venue.
I scan 50 more pictures, and need to stretch, my back sore, I need a break and Ziggy is fed up of switching tabs when all he wants to do is play with friends.
I move on to tackle the washing. There is something so simple and pleasing about hanging clothes up to dry in the hot summer sunshine. The blue of the sky, the light breeze, the welcome coolness of damp clothes, the fresh smell and bright colour against the intense blue of a hot summer sky. The washing line is in the wrong place. Jury rigged across the terrace. I know my father would never have approved. But then he hasn’t seen the state of the garden. There is nowhere else to hang the clothes.
I make lunch. We sit, share a salad and leftovers. The heat making us torpid. Ziggy tells us about his latest coding, shares some memes. We talk politics and the decay of the house. Sunset Boulevard my brother says. And tells us about the film, a Wilder masterpiece, and a film with haunting echoes of where we are now. Ancient grandeur, lofty promises, nostalgia and things that were never to be.
I retreat to the bedroom and the cool of air behind closed shutters. My laptop on a Sunday, peace to do some work, focus to catch up on running a business before a busy Monday ahead.
The room is in subdued light, filled with chirping sparrows just outside the window, the gentle rushing of the river as it cascades over the weir at the bottom of the garden, and from there the sounds of murmuring of voices of visitors to the neighboring mill and the odd squawk of duck, and honk of the lone goose who lives in their midsts, and who over the years has become more and more duck like, his behaviour and habits a mirror of those around him. I wonder if any of them know that he is a different species.
Even this room, these shutters, the remnants of furniture that have survived our clear out purge, ooze memories. This moment is like but a layer of time that has been a thousand times before. A thousand memories, a thousand voices, the shafts of light with flickering dust, the background sounds always the same. It is I who is different. The house is different too, but the very air feels like a warm stillness made of layers of moments in time. Moments that you could nearly cut through with a knife, so close it all feels.
The house is so much emptier now. The last two summers have been spent on this huge task, so large and so big, that it sometimes felt impossible. The house, devoid of my mother, my sister, was filled to the brim under layers of thick, sticky dust. Hundreds of everythings. Thousands of books, clothes, cloth and more layers of dust. Wine corks and ancient coins, Egyptian pounds, rupees, and every denomination from where we have lived, and through each devaluation, currency change, mutation in history. Books and more books. Empty boxes. Two accordians. Possibly 12 coffee machines. Each in various states of repair. Crumpled notes of money at the back of drawers had long stopped being legal tender, saved for a rainy day, like everything in this house. My grandad’s war medals and half used packs of nappy wipes, tampax from various ages in various languages. A load of ancient wrist watches. My christening candle, just slightly used, the soft wax smeared all over a drawer of thirty year old hosiery. Every school report. But not together. Each in a different corner of the house, in amongst draws and random boxes of stuff, amongst nests of mice. So many things that were always far too precious to touch and now in ruins, shredded by time and neglect and rodent habitats. Ribbons, and forgotten handles to furniture we no longer own. More old tissues, buttons. Bears. Many dusty teddy bears. All my mothers’ kitchenware, her aunt’s egg slicer, whisks, an electric tin opener that was maybe used once, forty years ago, the plug too dangerous to touch. Ice cube bags and all manner of corkscrews. Glass decorations, cupbordfulls of china, that somehow my mother was custodian of. She kept it all, each trinket, each broken lamp, each dusty book and piles of shoes, everyone that we have memory of, every item going back to the time that formed us. The stuff also exists in the photos I’m sorting. There it all is, tidier and cleaner, in their flat in Paris, my brother a smiling toddler, it must be 1964. And again, there it all is in their flat in Milan, now it is me the baby with the punk hair, and in a house in London, with my sister chubby cheeked in pram. Then there it is back in Milan, in Varese, until finally, 30 years ago, they moved all the stuff here. And in photos from the 40’s we find the same chair, the same ornament. Yes, that was from Great Aunt Ilby And here it has been, until recently, guarded by an army of mice and an infestation of fleas.
Like Miss Havisham’s house, the spiders too had made their home here. The cobwebs decorating the old and broken chandeliers. I sweep them down, off walls and out of corners. And they come back as if trying to trap me too, cobwebs reappearing overnight across a doorway, on the staircase. And every night when I brush my teeth I watch a bathroom spider dance across his web on the ceiling, alive with teeny tiny insects that are drawn to the light, I see a little beetle caught and I watch a ladybird fly free.
From sitting at my desk, one task finished I wander out again. Between running a business, every moment I am not working I’m trying to do something, to do anything, to tackle another bit of this huge house, this monument of a task.
I walk into the library. The books are the hardest thing for us to touch. As if all the words between their pages can see the guilt we feel in dismantling this. This beautiful room. It’s been neglected for years, more and more stacks of books were added until there was no room to even enter. Just dust, and the cats who used part of it as a toilet. Last summer we emptied hundreds of books, bags and boxes to the local charity shop, which must now be dominated by English language novels. In this house books were everywhere. On the stairs, on every surface, mountains and castles. My mothers bed was encased in a forest, a fortress of books. Yet, those that were lying around were the easier ones to get rid of. They held no memories for us. But by unearthing the library beyond we reached into something else. A room beautiful with shelves groaning. And amongst the shelves are books that are true gems, but to find them we will have to be swallowed into journeys and memories that we know will be brutal and ruthless.
These books travelled with us, like the furniture and the teddy bears. Nothing was ever given away or left behind, only more and more books were added. In a childhood that had no TV and no smart phones, it was the books that spoke in English, in Polish to my father, a kind of other ‘home’ in a world around us that was Italian. They held that repository of our ‘otherness’. In these books we were to find our friends, our stories, our moral compass. My brother found a love of history. Myself? I think this is where I found my rebelliousness, my courage. My sister… who knows. An excuse maybe… For now this dusty library is all that is left. The remnants of our parents, of our lives. Our childhood, and their childhoods. And of others lives, for there are books in there that are over two hundred years old.
It is as if this library holds what is left of the soul of this house. I walk in, drawn in, like into the grips of a powerful being, and I walk out again. Today it is too much, I don’t have energy enough for this.
I head back to scan a few more photos. Then to find some tape to fix up a socket that is dangling precariously off the wall. Whilst I’m in the kitchen I do the washing up and it feels like I’m copping out, that’s the easy task.
I head down to the river with Ziggy. We contemplate the trees that grow out of the wall in the river. The trees that will pull the wall down if left to it. The trees that are now three or more meters high. I felled one yesterday. Today I contemplate it. Today it is too hot.
And today is Sunday. I had promised myself some time with Ziggy, the teenager. No longer the child, my companion of river adventures. But the teen who has to be dragged away. So we take the paddle board. We leave the bees buzzing, the spiders spinning, the dust gathering, and we head up river.
This time is so very precious. These days, the bees buzzing and me, like them, busy, hot, aimless. In a world where time stays still, yet like the moving water, forever travelling past the house, it will not stop. Time will race on, and these moments will be gone, but for now, like the cobwebs, like veils in our lives, we are held.
Precious times.
I move on to tackle the washing. There is something so simple and pleasing about hanging clothes up to dry in the hot summer sunshine. The blue of the sky, the light breeze, the welcome coolness of damp clothes, the fresh smell and bright colour against the intense blue of a hot summer sky. The washing line is in the wrong place. Jury rigged across the terrace. I know my father would never have approved. But then he hasn’t seen the state of the garden. There is nowhere else to hang the clothes.
I make lunch. We sit, share a salad and leftovers. The heat making us torpid. Ziggy tells us about his latest coding, shares some memes. We talk politics and the decay of the house. Sunset Boulevard my brother says. And tells us about the film, a Wilder masterpiece, and a film with haunting echoes of where we are now. Ancient grandeur, lofty promises, nostalgia and things that were never to be.
I retreat to the bedroom and the cool of air behind closed shutters. My laptop on a Sunday, peace to do some work, focus to catch up on running a business before a busy Monday ahead.
The room is in subdued light, filled with chirping sparrows just outside the window, the gentle rushing of the river as it cascades over the weir at the bottom of the garden, and from there the sounds of murmuring of voices of visitors to the neighboring mill and the odd squawk of duck, and honk of the lone goose who lives in their midsts, and who over the years has become more and more duck like, his behaviour and habits a mirror of those around him. I wonder if any of them know that he is a different species.
Even this room, these shutters, the remnants of furniture that have survived our clear out purge, ooze memories. This moment is like but a layer of time that has been a thousand times before. A thousand memories, a thousand voices, the shafts of light with flickering dust, the background sounds always the same. It is I who is different. The house is different too, but the very air feels like a warm stillness made of layers of moments in time. Moments that you could nearly cut through with a knife, so close it all feels.
The house is so much emptier now. The last two summers have been spent on this huge task, so large and so big, that it sometimes felt impossible. The house, devoid of my mother, my sister, was filled to the brim under layers of thick, sticky dust. Hundreds of everythings. Thousands of books, clothes, cloth and more layers of dust. Wine corks and ancient coins, Egyptian pounds, rupees, and every denomination from where we have lived, and through each devaluation, currency change, mutation in history. Books and more books. Empty boxes. Two accordians. Possibly 12 coffee machines. Each in various states of repair. Crumpled notes of money at the back of drawers had long stopped being legal tender, saved for a rainy day, like everything in this house. My grandad’s war medals and half used packs of nappy wipes, tampax from various ages in various languages. A load of ancient wrist watches. My christening candle, just slightly used, the soft wax smeared all over a drawer of thirty year old hosiery. Every school report. But not together. Each in a different corner of the house, in amongst draws and random boxes of stuff, amongst nests of mice. So many things that were always far too precious to touch and now in ruins, shredded by time and neglect and rodent habitats. Ribbons, and forgotten handles to furniture we no longer own. More old tissues, buttons. Bears. Many dusty teddy bears. All my mothers’ kitchenware, her aunt’s egg slicer, whisks, an electric tin opener that was maybe used once, forty years ago, the plug too dangerous to touch. Ice cube bags and all manner of corkscrews. Glass decorations, cupbordfulls of china, that somehow my mother was custodian of. She kept it all, each trinket, each broken lamp, each dusty book and piles of shoes, everyone that we have memory of, every item going back to the time that formed us. The stuff also exists in the photos I’m sorting. There it all is, tidier and cleaner, in their flat in Paris, my brother a smiling toddler, it must be 1964. And again, there it all is in their flat in Milan, now it is me the baby with the punk hair, and in a house in London, with my sister chubby cheeked in pram. Then there it is back in Milan, in Varese, until finally, 30 years ago, they moved all the stuff here. And in photos from the 40’s we find the same chair, the same ornament. Yes, that was from Great Aunt Ilby And here it has been, until recently, guarded by an army of mice and an infestation of fleas.
Like Miss Havisham’s house, the spiders too had made their home here. The cobwebs decorating the old and broken chandeliers. I sweep them down, off walls and out of corners. And they come back as if trying to trap me too, cobwebs reappearing overnight across a doorway, on the staircase. And every night when I brush my teeth I watch a bathroom spider dance across his web on the ceiling, alive with teeny tiny insects that are drawn to the light, I see a little beetle caught and I watch a ladybird fly free.
From sitting at my desk, one task finished I wander out again. Between running a business, every moment I am not working I’m trying to do something, to do anything, to tackle another bit of this huge house, this monument of a task.
I walk into the library. The books are the hardest thing for us to touch. As if all the words between their pages can see the guilt we feel in dismantling this. This beautiful room. It’s been neglected for years, more and more stacks of books were added until there was no room to even enter. Just dust, and the cats who used part of it as a toilet. Last summer we emptied hundreds of books, bags and boxes to the local charity shop, which must now be dominated by English language novels. In this house books were everywhere. On the stairs, on every surface, mountains and castles. My mothers bed was encased in a forest, a fortress of books. Yet, those that were lying around were the easier ones to get rid of. They held no memories for us. But by unearthing the library beyond we reached into something else. A room beautiful with shelves groaning. And amongst the shelves are books that are true gems, but to find them we will have to be swallowed into journeys and memories that we know will be brutal and ruthless.
These books travelled with us, like the furniture and the teddy bears. Nothing was ever given away or left behind, only more and more books were added. In a childhood that had no TV and no smart phones, it was the books that spoke in English, in Polish to my father, a kind of other ‘home’ in a world around us that was Italian. They held that repository of our ‘otherness’. In these books we were to find our friends, our stories, our moral compass. My brother found a love of history. Myself? I think this is where I found my rebelliousness, my courage. My sister… who knows. An excuse maybe… For now this dusty library is all that is left. The remnants of our parents, of our lives. Our childhood, and their childhoods. And of others lives, for there are books in there that are over two hundred years old.
It is as if this library holds what is left of the soul of this house. I walk in, drawn in, like into the grips of a powerful being, and I walk out again. Today it is too much, I don’t have energy enough for this.
I head back to scan a few more photos. Then to find some tape to fix up a socket that is dangling precariously off the wall. Whilst I’m in the kitchen I do the washing up and it feels like I’m copping out, that’s the easy task.
I head down to the river with Ziggy. We contemplate the trees that grow out of the wall in the river. The trees that will pull the wall down if left to it. The trees that are now three or more meters high. I felled one yesterday. Today I contemplate it. Today it is too hot.
And today is Sunday. I had promised myself some time with Ziggy, the teenager. No longer the child, my companion of river adventures. But the teen who has to be dragged away. So we take the paddle board. We leave the bees buzzing, the spiders spinning, the dust gathering, and we head up river.
This time is so very precious. These days, the bees buzzing and me, like them, busy, hot, aimless. In a world where time stays still, yet like the moving water, forever travelling past the house, it will not stop. Time will race on, and these moments will be gone, but for now, like the cobwebs, like veils in our lives, we are held.
Precious times.