Home Town

by Lori Dwyer on March 12, 2011 · 29 comments

This place is so tiny. It seemed so much bigger, growing up here, when I was a kid.

I took my shoes off before I turned in the main road into town, and i haven’t had need to put on them again since.

It took me just a few hours to start talking ‘local’ again. HomeTown (read betweeen the lines here, people) is just ‘Home’, kangaroos are roo’s, the (insert name here) Lake is just the lake.

Places are known by their broadest definition- pub, real estate, supermarket, beach- because their is no need to for any more detail than that. Streets are known by one name, Tradewinds or Sandpiper or River, and so are locals. Mostly, it’s their last. People, nice people with no agenda but friendliness and quiet curiousity, they ask me what I’m doing here, and I answer with my family name. That’s all that’s needed for me to be accepted, taken in. As much family as anyone else who lives here.

It’s slow and comfortable here. I know where I’m going without having to think about it, I know this place like the back of my hand.

Mostly. Things jump out and surprise me. A new street here, a much bigger house here. The house I grew up almost completley hidden by a massive pine that I used to shimmy up and down with my brother. I thought it was so very high, as a seven year old…. it mustn’t have been. It’s been twenty years and it’s only just the size of the two story house it hides.

A tiny reserve, a clearing with a rotting log that I played in as a little girl is completley gone, grown so far over I can’t even see where it once was. (The fairies who lived there are fine, I tell my five year old self, just fine.)

The perfect place to wait, I think. To be quiet and think and heal and write and give my children, especially my Chop, a chance to begin to heal too.

A few months, here. Back home. And we’ll see where we go, from then. What pans out. What fate has to throw at me this time.

I’m hoping for the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. The broken part of me thinks it’s not even possible, not even real. I had been happy for so long, four really good years…. maybe I’ve used up my allotment.

Happiness… it never lasts long. How many times do I have to learn that?

Whatever. We’ll see. I feel like I’m running, madly, and getting nowhere.

I pulled up in front of what used to be my primary school this morning. It’s gone… to drive past there, if you didn’t know, you would never know that anything had been there at all.

Further in, there’s a concrete slab. And not much else. And my perpsective is so skewed, by how tiny this place actually is, by how tiny I must have been, back then; that I couldn’t pick what it once might have.

Time moves on, you see. Trees, they grow, and burn, and grow again. Big places get smaller, further away.

To the point where they exist, where they’re real, only in the minds of people who remember them.

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