Houses and homes

I have been wandering about our house for the past few days trying to cement it in my memory. I have been touching the walls (damp; cold), wiggling my toes into the carpet and standing in strange places and positions, trying to get a different perspective. Despite living here for three years and cleaning it top-to-bottom weekly, I really don't think I know this house all that well. You know a place so much better when you're little. You know what the undersides of tables look like. You know where the ants' nests are. You know where the funny-shaped damp patch is on the bathroom wall, where the biggest cobweb is, what the carpet smells like at close range, where the dust bunnies live and multiply. I don't know any of that.

I wrote a piece for the lovely La Belette Rouge last year which encapsulated some of my feelings about leaving Zimbabwe (the whole piece is here).

We left in 2002. Not only did we leave behind the intangible things (‘home’, that strange and inescapable true north; history; pride): we left behind a rubbish tip of Stuff. All the toys I lost in the garden over the years. The bobby pins I dropped behind the dressing table. Cat hair in the carpet. My mother’s jewellery. The dead bodies of my grandparents, crumbled into ashes at their old church. The treehouse. The rifles and bayonets my stepfather threw down the borehole and concreted over (just in case). The books. The furniture. The cat, the chickens, the lovebirds, the guinea fowl, the whole menagerie that lived with us. The endless memorabilia and detritus of three lives lived in one house. We left fingerprints on the walls and footprints on the wooden floor. The ghosts, however, came with us.

Many of my dreams are still set in that house. Sometimes all our furniture is still there, and sometimes it is empty. I think you can tell a lot about someone from their dream landscape - quite often they will have one particular setting that repeats and repeats. I suppose, if we're getting all psychological here (for which I am stupendously unqualified), it represents the fabric of their subconscious. Wow, took a big leap into Arts Student there. But it's true, I think. I have a friend whose dreams are always set in the same fictional city, which I find fascinating. Mine are always in our Zimbabwean house. I wonder if I haunt it in my sleep? It would be pretty cool if some travelling aspect of my mind turned up in the house as a ghost without me realising it. Although probably not so much fun for the new inhabitants.

I did not love the house unreservedly - it scared me, too. Strange noises at night; snakes in the compost heap; ghosts in the long corridor. But I feel more connected to that place than I have (or will) to any other. Some part of me will always be there, I think. I know that sounds cheesy, but it's true.I know that leaving New Zealand will not be the same. We are going TO somewhere, not running FROM somewhere. That is probably the biggest difference. Also, I am an adult now, and (relatively) in control of my own destiny. As much as anyone can be. I am really looking forward to the move. At the same time, though, it does bring back memories of the last time I moved continents, for better or worse.