My mum has decided to move into the nearby town, closer to my youngest sister, closer to amenities. She had commited herself to a winter in the old house to see if she could make it. She spent two, but it’s a lot of house and a lot of work for one person.
So I’ve been helping out, running down on weekends to clean out the garage, fix things that need fixing, break things that need breaking. My biggest project was cleaning out the last repository of dad’s memory. The garage that he built from a torn down house across the road. When he built it I made sure there was a room for me in the upstairs. I blocked all the places light could sneak in and made window blinds from garbage bags. It was my darkroom and there I first learned to develop film and print. But it had been abandoned by me years ago, and had become a parking lot for boxes of things that were really garbage but hadn’t faced that reality yet.
Last weekend was the last time I would see the old house. After I finished cleaning out the garage I walked the logging roads I used to explore as a child. They were there, but changed. Other logging roads had cropped up and aged since my excursions years ago. It was the same and different, an alternate reality. Losing that didn’t really affect me. It was like forgetting a dream when you wake up.
The house, well, both parents smoked and I don’t. I grew up in the house but can’t spend a lot of time in it, I get squinty-eyed and raspy. No great loss there in my subconscious.
What struck me was the phone number. For over 30 years the same seven digits were my connection to home, to my parents, then to just my mum. Driving home I realised in another week those numbers, burned into my brain like the menu on an old bank-machine, wouldn’t work any more. There was a brief sense of panic, looming loss. Suddenly it came home to me. There is no going back.
Wide Awake 
Jul 14, 2006 @ 09:48:12
It’s amazing how a number can mean so much. We had to change our telephone number at home to be able to get broadband, which in itself was pretty silly. I was a bit sad to leave the old number behind though. Great picture by the way.
Jul 14, 2006 @ 12:23:37
Thanks Donal. It is odd the things you can get attached too.
The picture is the view from my mum’s front window, at least for a couple more days. That’s probably the bit she’ll miss the most.
Doug
Jul 14, 2006 @ 17:18:31
I totally and completely know what you mean. I will forever have my parents’ number (well, two numbers: the one I grew up with, and then the one they changed to after getting a bunch of harassing phone calls when I was at college) forever emblazoned in my brain as “home.”
I am also intensely invested in my childhood home. (I’ve written about it in my blog, under “Gone” and “Not Gone!” )We had to sell it two years ago when my mother moved in with us, and it just about broke my heart. I still harbor fantasies of purchasing it back and using it as a writing retreat.
Jul 15, 2006 @ 19:03:24
Thank you for this wonderful post — and the photograph. We moved around a lot when I was a child, but there is a house I remember well as a dreaming kind of place, the place we lived when I learned to read. The address of the house, 12 Cedar Drive, is a magical combination of words and numbers.
Jul 16, 2006 @ 04:37:29
Well expressed, and that photo’s great… There are places, and numbers, like that for me too.
Jul 18, 2006 @ 04:49:41
What a beautiful photo. Your post reminded me that the only constant in life is change, but your picture gave me a sense of hope. I hope your mum settles in happily to her new home.
I still remember the phone number of the house I lived in from age 9 to 15. We lived in a remote area so the phone number was very simple – 3 digits – 258.
Jul 26, 2006 @ 19:59:45
Enjoyed your site, the pictures and this blog. Wood roads were an important part of rural Nova Scotia. It is memorably captured in Ernest Buckler’s The Mountain and the Valley. We had to sell my mother’s house, but still have my wife’s parent’s home. Your telephone number reflections has triggered memories in us all.
I wonder if certain e-mail addresses will have the same meaning.
Cheers, N