Memories are housed here
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday November 10, 2012
Section: Opinion

I am having a housemourning.

With a sold sticker out the front, and the frenzy of home-open’s behind us, we are moving on – our Federation cottage outgrown by a long- legged tween and a couple of smaller racket-makers.  As settlement approaches, I have been reflecting on the meaning of nostalgia, and whether I suffer from it. You have to be a certain age to be nostalgic don’t you? Nothing specific – just old enough to have lived enough to look back and feel sentimental. Or wistful. Or grateful.   

I feel I ought to pay my respects to this house that has shepherded twelve years of my life and sheltered a new generation of my family – because I now know it as well as it knows me. How many times have I walked  the jarrah boards of this hallway, the same boards that have echoed similar footsteps since 1907? I can tell you which boards still creak loud enough to scare the dead, though time and familiarity have softened the sudden heart thump I get when the floor cracks like a whip in the middle of the night. It’s always my eldest padding to the loo.

I can share with you the history of a house built when cars were a novelty in Perth, when the city’s population hit the magic mark of 30-thousand, and when tuckpointing and sash windows were coveted by those who could afford bricks and mortar over weatherboard.  I know these rooms later harboured a brothel – the West Leederville train stopped at the bottom of the street and those in the know would wander up past houses with dinner smells wafting in the air to score dessert with a one night wife. (A hundred years later, this house is so disorderly most days it could still pass as a brothel.)

I can talk you through the life cycle of the elm tree in the backyard, having watched this very week the first two leaves spring to life off a skeleton of bare branches.  The tree the kids went wild over last Christmas when Uncle Andy strung it with fairy lights. The summer canopy that cools off the back deck by 3pm but drives us nuts in autumn when it blankets the lawn with fallen leaves – we draw straws to see who lands the seemingly endless task of raking them up.

I can also bring to mind that afternoon two years ago when a massive storm sent a lightning bolt down the trunk of the gum tree out front, shorting the whole street and exploding branches all over the verge. I thanked the house that night when the rain fell so hard I was sure the gutters would give up, but didn’t. The night we couldn’t hear ourselves speak from the deafening torrent on the tin roof. The one we still laugh about as the only night our new baby daughter slept through.

My house has carried me through the tumultuous years of pregnancy and small babies, first steps and first days at school. I have finger smeared photos on the fridge of little boys in new uniforms sitting expectantly on the verandah steps. I can remember their excitement at having scrawled their initials in the soft cement out the front as the council laid a new footpath. (The workmen kindly turned a blind eye.) Or living through the chaos of month after month of renovations, then panicking when the painters were all set and I still couldn’t decide which tester pot I liked best.

As far as I can tell, nostalgia does not like remorse for company, or shame, or bitterness – the unfortunate but sometimes unavoidable downtimes of a human existence – low points strung randomly between the day-to-day loops of life. Those things are best tucked away and revisited as little as possible. Regret is not for sentimental retrieval.

Why do we feel nostalgic? What is the evolutionary point of the recollection of powerful emotions? Is it so we can regret those feelings that are no longer with us? So we can mark  the passage of ‘time lived’? What about painful memory? Can we still call it nostalgia if we reminisce about the traumas of past illness, the pain of lost love?

I hope I will retain the mental agility to look back on 80, if I’m lucky, 90 years on this planet as well lived. Will I still be able to recall, and, more importantly, draw pleasure from, the faint memories of childhood, blurry chapters of another life, a smaller one – the new car smell of the red upholstery in my grandmother’s Morris  1100. Or remembering the feel of her as I gave her a tight hug and felt stiff bones – not hers – the Playtex girdle’s.

Strangely, I cannot recall her voice, or her laugh. She must have taken them with her. But I know smell is a potent reviver of memory. I can recall in a flash the perfume of her bright pink lipstick in its gold case, or the powdery scent of her makeup. Can we really memorise smells? In 2009, scientists discovered that childhood smells have ‘privileged’ position in our memories, that they bypass the usual sensory processing stations in the brain to be stored deep as primary impulses. That might explain why memories triggered by smells are more vivid and emotional than those triggered by words, sounds or pictures.

What will my children remember of this house? What deep seated impressions will it leave on their memories? I hope it’s the smell of their birthday cakes in the oven, or the scent of the jasmine in flower as they brush past it on the narrow path around the back. Or the sun-baked joy of the first summer we spent in our new pool, bypassing the beach for an inflatable shark.

Home is primal : somewhere we feel safe, and familiar, and in control. No wonder moving house is a stressful life event – I already feel uncomfortable, bereft even,  knowing I am about to lose my sense of ‘belonging’ – a decade of knowing most people in our street by name, my childrens’ favorite playmates across the road, our houses interchangeable on any given day, each almost as familiar as their own.

I wonder when we’re old, if we tell our life stories realistically or nostalgically, if we embellish them to make them more interesting, or censor our misdemeanours to save our pride? My mother’s stories from her childhood have the glow of halcyon days – I know the stories I tell my children of high school have the rough edges smoothed over. How do we present our history to others? How will I set the bones of this house for re-telling to others?

My youngest won’t remember her first home – it’ll be up to her dad and me, and her big brothers, to regale her with all the funny stories we collected here. Instead, the memories of her childhood will be laid down, year by year, in another century-old home in another suburb not far from here, a house (with stairs!) preparing itself for the onslaught of our family.

And what of this old Federation dame left behind, who has looked after us so well? I’m delighted to tell you we’ve sold to a couple with a toddler and a baby on the way, a young family whom I hope will revel in a new chapter in the history of Number 38 – a new cycle of ‘belonging’. May they create for themselves a houseful of lovely memories.  Just as we have, to be packed up and taken with us for the sake of nostalgia.