'bye ...

How does one say Goodbye to a house that's been Home for 62 years?  That's both a practical question - how does one spend the last ten minutes or so there? - and an aesthetic one: how does one document it? (and let me say - this is just a selection of the many, many photos I took today, with a sense of Never Again).  Of course, there's something a bit arbitrary in this - I could, after all, go back there tomorrow morning, before my flight (but I won't); I may have to go back if, heaven forbid, the sale doesn't happen because probate drags on even further than it is doing (but I hope that's improbable).  In other words, I still own it - or my father's estate does, technically - for another month or so.  But so far as I'm concerned, today was the final day.

I'd only planned a couple of things - not least, I read quite recently that prehistoric Britains used to have a ceremony when a house had reached the end of its livable-in years, and so I left a little bouquet of rosemary and lavender on the inside threshold.  What I'd not anticipated at all was my last ten minutes or so there - I found myself going room by room - and of course into the garden - and thanking each room, aloud, for all it had given us, and reminding the house of my favorite memories in each of those places.  But other than that - after the final cleaning, and throwing away, and sweeping - it was melancholy in the extreme.  Of course so many of the pictures that I took are of shadows, and spaces, and emptiness (even though there's some furniture still to be retrieved by friends that's there) - or of the poignancy of things like all the taps and pipes that my father labeled in the airing cupboard.  His plumbing, perhaps I needn't add, worked, but is a mystery to me.

It's all poignant not just because this is, effectively, a Condemned House (and the more I emptied and cleaned it, the more it revealed itself to be held together with hope and a prayer), but because it wasn't just Home to me as a child, and while I was an undergrad, but - and perhaps especially - once I went to the US twenty two years ago: it was always where I returned to; where I felt grounded (not, of course, necessarily the same thing as happy) - it was my firm hold on my English self.  This was especially true this last year, since Ray died - I might have been permanently dismantling it, but I realised that I loved it now, and not because it was stuffed full of memories.  It's been a good, and wonderful, house.  Thank you, to 20 Hillside.