The kids are playing outside in the mud and traipsing it through the house now and again. The sun is shining and it's a beautiful autumn day. Car is packed for the trip to Cheltenham to visit the parents who recently moved into my great grandmother's house. There are photographs of my mother there as a child, when there were still orchards and possibly a fox. My mother relates a story of being taken to feed the chickens and her grandmother shooing her away because there was a small viper.
As a child we lived in a lot of houses in a lot of towns and cities in Zimbabwe and South Africa. My grandmother's house in Borrowdale, Harare, was a home when we were growing up as we stayed there so often as children. When they left and moved into a townhouse some of my roots were pulled up and maybe some tendrils were left in the soil. When we left my last home in Zimbabwe, it was as if I buried my heart in the garden. It took me at least two years to summon it back as I mourned and mourned for house and land and country.
I moved to London at seventeen and lived in posh houses, squats and flats. My firstborn and I lived for sixteen years in a flat in central London where he still is and I am some of the time. We now have a family home in Wales, a small bungalow stuffed with memories and photographs in the loft: this is my husband's grandmother's house.
Thank you God; for grandmothers, for continuity and for life that goes on. As believers our home is always elsewhere, but tracing history, and memories, and a sense of coming home, will always be.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vrEljMfXYo
