Places we call home (1)

Sometimes I find myself walking to places I used to live. Places where there are a whole bunch of memories ready to be stirred by familiar surroundings. The other weekend, I took a walk on the canal and walked around my town. I found myself walking to the house where my ex wife and my children used to live, at least for the first twelve months that I lived in Kidderminster. It is always a bit odd, and a bit sad; remembering the things you did. The way things were. Those reminiscences – it’s always the same. The way I was walking, you come up the back – by where the bins are left and the garages exit. You can see the windows of the house – the attic windows which were the children’s’ bedrooms, the window of the master bedroom, the shed and summer house, the plants and trees. Everything being still pretty much the same way as it was when they lived there.

This is one of the houses that K---- used to get scared in at night. She was convinced that there were monsters lurking in the shadows in the night. I don’t know why. I don’t know if anyone knew why.

This is the house that I spent the first few months sleeping on the floor in, while I waited for my house purchase to complete; something which seemed to take forever while I waited for the seller to find some document or other to say work had been done adequately. (I did offer to pay to have a structural engineer go around and produce a report to say that it had been, but was told that the seller had the papers and it would all be okay; three months later they let me send an surveyor around to inspect and we completed shortly afterwards)

This was the house that had my ex-wife re-marrying and starting her life with her, then, third husband. This was the house that I spent my first Christmas in as a divorced man.

This is the house my children had Tara the dog (I forget the breed, but small – the sort used in duck hunting?). A really sweet dog, an excitable puppy (as I found out every morning when she would be let out to go toilet, but as I was between the garden and the kitchen she would run up and bounce onto me and lick my face). But in the end they had to pass her onto some people who actually worked the dogs, and she was trained to retrieve ducks (and as far as I can remember, was really quite good at it); they had to get rid of her because of allergies; like me, K---- suffers with them, and in this case it was leading to a build up in her ears that was slowly making her deaf.

This is the house where they kept the mice; the mice that kept escaping from the “mouse suitable” cage they’d been sold at the pet shop. (There is something about scampering mice running all over the place – you do find yourself jumping; even though you know there’s nothing to be worried about and that you’re just being silly.

I spent three months in this house, getting up early, coming in late. The Autumn months of 2003 (if my memory serves me); having spent Halloween in the Coventry house with my girls, then all of my stuff being taken and being put into storage “for a couple of weeks” through to the early months of 2004. I know it was only a short time, but, it holds lots of memories.

Blogged with the Flock Browser