An Ode to Moving

I don’t know how the nomads did it. The regular uproot of livelihood, the transitional home. I’m not a mover, I tend to lay down roots quick and let them grow deep, until the worms fester and I’m as much a part of the ecosystem as the house I’m living in. It wasn’t always this way – growing up, we moved around a lot. My Dad at the time had a game show that travelled Europe, so my Mum, my sister and I, and later my baby brother, would be whisked around from set to set, from Spain to Holland to Italy, clambering over props and sitting in a studio audience. Our home base at the time was a big, retired farm house in a little village in England called Ravensden, and as my sister and I both started school, it became more a permanent placement. My Dad would start travelling on his own, and we’d follow only in the breaks between school terms.

House Ravensden became a total playground for my sister and I. An acre wide, with a wall of cows surrounding us, we’d make forts in the front yard out of old sheets and explore the abandoned apple orchard in the neighbour’s property by clambering through the untamed blackberry bush that existed in lieu of a fence. We’d play Xena with sticks for swords and a Frisbee as her chakram. We had rabbits at the time too, that we’d let escape and play chase with. I have intensely fond memories of the house, even though I know it was far from perfect. It was understood to be haunted by old witches by a lot of the villagers, and had a pretty bad spider problem. The driveway was long and rambling, and our old dog, an Irish wolfhound named Callan, would limp up and down it and scare all the mailmen off by sheer size alone.

When I was eleven though, we moved back to Australia, back to Brisbane, sacrificing easy travel for the stifling heat of a continent separated by state instead of country, by dialect instead of language. We moved to a sweet old suburban house with a swimming pool and a conservatory, and our rabbits, who’d been left with friends, were swapped for a bitter blue tongue lizard and an aviary full of tiny, buzzing finches.  Jalanga Street wasn’t Ravensden, but it was special in its own way. It was a home defined by proximity to family, by highschool and by birthplace.

A year and a half ago, timed with my parents separation, I moved out of home with my best friend, Emma, into a dinky little house on Brenda Street. Brenda Street is a funny place, a street full of quirk, but the house itself is shambolic, built by Emma’s grandfather who was never a builder. It’s patchwork, complete with grey walls and pink and purple lino, mould on the ceilings and an odd, concrete attachment as a laundry. We live on top of each other, with two cats that love to destroy furniture, carpet and flyscreens, which has added to the demise of the property.

About six months ago, we decided a move was basically overdue. Like I said, I’m not the best mover, but I was keen for this, excited, and spent hours talking about the home that I was going to have a say in, be able to choose. I had an image in my head of my new kitchen, bedroom, layout. A small, manageable yard, a warm interior that would be filled with the odds and ends I’d collected throughout my life, from Kuzco the African-inspired Giraffe statue to my ridiculous collection of teapots and geisha inspired tea tins. Of course, this isn’t a reality in house hunting. Dream boating quickly became guess the murder that happened in the rental. My housemate and I work on a shoestring budget as is, but it meant having to up our stakes in a competitive market. It was hard, and the thought of ending up somewhere that was awful terrified me. There was a light though, and my dreamboat proved a reality with a house at Martha Street. Spacious, sweet and old, I fell in love with the thing, and an application later it was ours.

The last two weeks have been a fun time for Emma and I. We’ve been packing boxes giddily, clearing out old linen and generally being excited for our new home. Of course, our slow packing meant that we ran out of time, and the move went from a calm, ordered thing to a mad panic, wondering why the fuck I have so many books and culminating in me throwing shoes in cooler bags and hoping they’d survive the trip.

We did the full move last night, and I’m writing this with stupid, aching arms and shoulders from hauling furniture and boxes, and I’m oddly nostalgic for Brenda Street, like the house wasn’t out to get us. It’s like suddenly all the things that used to make me grimace or groan are things I can laugh about. Like the time our neighbour cornered me when I was more than a little inebriated to give me a twenty-minute history of the mower owned by the man across the road from us, or the million times I got locked out because the house has too many security doors or the unstoppable colonies of ants that occupy every nook and cranny, to the point where I opened my Chupa Chup limited edition pop art jar (shut up, it’s cool) to have a settlement of the fuckers swarm out and up my arm.

I’m sure I’ll grow irks and groans about Martha Street too (apparently I’m destined to live on streets named after elderly women), but right now I just want to lie on the grass in the modest back yard and become a part of the land, and maybe I would, if there weren’t so many bindies.