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Noticing that I have neglected this blog. I resurrect it today with something I wrote quite some time ago. Being that I was just thinking of this house, and I can picture it so clearly from the height I was at four years old, or three, whenever it might have been, I share my remembrance. 

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This is a house faded into memories. It is the house of my childhood, The house where I first noticed myself.

I do not know if this house still stands. solidly halfway up and half way down the hill we lived on. It is real enough to me, in a dreamlike way.

1983. a cement path. Stairs with flaking paint. Iron railings, curliqued.
The front door is green, two doors, but we only open one. It is flat with nothing to hold onto and the lock way up high. A girl of 3years perched at the top of the stairs. I hold on to my mother where I can while she flips the key out of her leather key wallet and we fall into the coolness of the house.

Built for Queensland heat. The sunroom verandah is enclosed and runs around the front and side of the house, the inner doors open onto it in such a way that I wonder If the enclosing came later, as an after thought, or if it has always been this way.

My parents room is first to the left. A room built to surround the big wooden bed. A Bed that can be a ship upon the sea, a sanctuary for a tired child, a place to laugh and learn how to chew gum.

My room. A room to play dress ups, dolls houses in cardboard boxes. A room to watch the primary coloured curtains flutter from my bed. The room I lie in wait for my parents in the darkness, yellow light pooling at the door ajar, babysitter a muffled noise to my ears. The room I am taken to when I insist I am not tired, only to find it warm and cosy under the quilt my mother made.

The hall is dark and cool. It opens archways into the centre of the house.
The living room, a cavern of dark and silent, only at nights, my father, huge as a tree, and adorned with guitar, fills this room. Like a secret I spy the adults, loud with music and laughter, a comforting raucousness that warms me like a hug.
In the daytime it is my domain. Dark, dark and cool, with squatting piano against the wall, my friend watching over me. I lie on the floor. In the sweep of shadow I lose myself in records flowing through generous headphones.


The kitchen is bright, blue and white. Golden milk bottle caps strung atop the windows. I admire the view from under the table.
In this room we catch a mouse in the humane trap and feed him bits of our Vegemite toast. We find a nest of baby mice in the draw of the hutch. Newborn, like pink jelly beans, with a smell like popcorn.

The bathroom is a room of toothpaste and soap.
There is a red light up high just outside the kitchen when the downstairs light is on. This is for our toilet. Out the backdoor, down the stairs, follow the path to the dunny, tucked away behind the clump of ferns, the cement step always cold. Pull the chain if you can reach it.

And spread out like a lady’s skirts, the crunchy grass of the yard.
A child’s paradise of make believe adventures, Playing with chooks, Climbing up the frangipani tree's fragile branches.
The swing my dad built me swings right up to the top of the world.

The house of my childhood, the home of my heart.