Stories of a house
Do you remember the house in the Pixar movie Up? And the way love and happiness and big dreams (and sometimes even sorrow) filled that house for many, many years, soaked into its walls, and made it a home, so profoundly so that the old man refused to give it up, no matter the personal cost?
My house looks a little bit like that house: it’s more than 100 years old with a big sash-window at the front resting on a bluestone sill, patterned bricks, a shingle roof, and a sweet chimney right in the middle. There’s a coloured window over the front door - a door we painted bright red because the colour brings us joy - iron lacework over the verandah, and a chair that we like to sit on in the evenings to watch the goings-on in our pretty street*.
After 12 years, two babies and a lot of laughter, my house feels a bit like the Up-house, too.
But now we are leaving it. It’s time for our family to move on to new places - up, up and away, just like the movie, except that unlike the grumpy old man in Up, we can’t bring our beloved house with us. And even though I know it is the right decision for my family, it is still breaking my heart a little bit.
Don’t be fooled by the white paint: the walls of this house are thick with stories, like layer upon layer of beautiful wallpaper. A hundred years of families have lived and loved in here, and I think you can feel them.
We read a story on the internet once - I wish I could find it to link to it now - of two sons who once lived in this house, leaving it to join the fight in the Great War. We imagined them opening the front gate (the very same front gate that we still walk through now - did it creak then, too, I wonder?) and striding down Canning Street - even back then a beautiful boulevard with Victorian-era palm trees - and out into the terrible turmoil of war. We imagined their mother, lump in throat, waving from the window of the same sunny front bedroom that I now use as my office and art studio.
Only one son returned.
Here’s another story of the house:
Once upon a time a man and a woman fell in love from opposite sides of the world. The woman lived in New York while the man lived in Australia, and together, they decided to buy a house. The man found somewhere suitable in Melbourne, a city the woman had only ever visited twice, and only briefly. The woman agreed to give all the money she had inherited from her grandmother to her new boyfriend, to pay the deposit on a house she’d never seen, in a city she barely knew.
It was crazy and all her friends told her it was crazy and you know who I’m talking about, don’t you.
I still remember the auction to buy that house. It was Saturday morning in Melbourne, which meant it was Friday night in New York, humid and just growing dark. I’d been out at a wine bar with a friend but I jumped in a taxi and raced home early so I could listen to the action on my ‘phone. My stomach was churning with nerves and excitement. That was all my savings. The money I’d planned to use to buy a studio apartment in New York, and I was trusting it to someone I’d known for the shortest of times, tying me back to Australia.
The auction was a moment of profound trust - trust in the man I’d so quickly fallen in love with, and trust in my own instincts (which, thankfully, proved well-founded). So the house became a symbol of our love, and my faith in our love.
This was the house where we finally created a home, after six international and interstate moves in 18 months.
It was the home we brought baby Ralph into, and Scout was so small when we came here that she doesn’t remember anywhere else. We gave them the sunniest bedroom just off the master, with city views over rooftops, that - in our pre-kid days - we had imagined would become a reading-and-painting room.
The dining table beside the big, arched window has hosted countless meals with beloved friends, lunches that have turned into dinners and the roar of laughter that has echoed late into the night.
We’ve had rousing sing-alongs around the piano in the family room, camped out on blow-up mattresses in front of the open fire in the lounge room, started a book club, run a small business, managed to blow up the microwave on Christmas Eve one year, then managed to blow up the oven on Christmas Eve on another year (whoever moves here next will be the happy recipient of my new, self-cleaning oven, lucky them!), and no matter how hard life has been from time to time, I don’t think a day has gone by without laughter.
The garden (sleeping now for winter but always bountiful in spring and summer) became a loving respite during lockdown last year, a secret, walled garden filled with roses, apple trees, Japanese maples, hydrangeas, and a pomegranate - as well as foxgloves, cosmos, gaura, poppies, clematis and nigella in summer; where we could lie in the sun and feel part of the earth outside. On sunny, pre-covid days, the garden was the scene of spring parties, impromptu picnics, and one time, a fully-fledged Christmas concert.
And now we are saying goodbye to this house, where we have been so very happy. I truly believe that the next people who live here will feel a little something of that happiness, because we all know bricks retain heat, and I hope that joy will filter into their own lives, too. It will be a happy place for them to live, don’t you think?
So the stories of this house will continue and even though they won’t be our stories to tell, any more, our family still has a place somewhere in the fabric that tale. Or at least I hope so.
* Canning Street is divided by a big median-strip of grass through the middle, dotted with palm and poplar trees that were planted almost a hundred years ago. It’s the most wonderful place for community to happen. Here are some of the things we’ve watched, while sitting on the bench on our front verandah:
- picnics
- yard sales
- formal dinner parties
- an inflatable swimming pool
- a man practising how to cast a fishing line
- movie nights (with bedsheets for screens)
- table tennis
- and even once, a big brass band
ps. The photographs on this blog post (other than the summer garden and Scout floating up and away) are from the official listing for our house, which you can see here if you’re curious like me and like to sticky-beak into other people’s houses (or if you happen to know someone LOVELY who wants to buy a much-loved house on Canning Street).
