Our family home – now someone else’s – was available for rent on Mother’s Day. I might never see it like this again. I had to park in the driveway as though I was visiting Mum and Dad. That was kind of cool. Their foolish son who likes foreign cars had another Peugeot parked there forty years ago, usually on the front lawn when there was still the space to do so.
It was a little sad, because the place has become dilapidated on the outside. The beautiful buffalo lawn, meticulously verdant front and back, has gone. In fact, it went in my early teens, replaced by more drought-resistant cooch grass. But the place still spoke to me. I let it soak in, and took my time. So much of us remains there. Fran remembers the day the cubby house arrived. I can still see the precise path I rode my Malvern Star when Dad pressed the shutter on his AGFA. Paul remembers making the fishing tackle box in the garage. Dad’s army chest is still mounted on the garage wall, as is a little pastel painting of a SAAB being driven at speed on a gravel road I drew from a WHEELS magazine when I was probably 15. How Dad’s shovel remained, I’ll never know. That, at least, has come home.
