A moving experience

Moving house is a life-changing experience. I’ll be doing that at the end of this month. When I told my kids this weekend they were totally thrilled. Some children spend their entire childhoods in the same family home, while others move as much as every year. We’re somewhere in between.

We spent Sunday going through some crates where they keep their toys. Things got serious. I don’t want to have to schlepp unnecessary box-loads of toys across town, especially when quite a few of those toys are in various states of amputation. So they went through each one, pausing to recall the good times and telling each other about games long forgotten. We managed to weed out lots of undesirables and rekindle some relationships with remembered treasures.

I will miss the place we’re in, but I guess in years to come the memories will become part of our family legend. We’ll take a drive down memory lane and cruise past the little cottage which has been home for a couple of years. The weight of the recollections we’ll feel would be enough to write our own version of the Beatle’s song, “Penny Lane”; some happy, some sad memories. A house furnished with emotions.

I can remember the excitement of moving house as a child. Exploring new rooms, unpacking and settling in. Forming alliances with the neighbourhood kids. We’d roam in packs on our bicycles and map perilous paths through the treetops with our ropes and hands. Then my family would move again, and we’d repeat the process.

I’ve had great fun with Google Maps Streetview, checking out the now-ordinary seeming places where I’d marked out my height on the door frames in pencil and marvelled at the way the fields I’d once dashed across in search of rabbits and cows had become rows of houses, all full of children the age I’d been then.

There in the houses of my youth are the happy giggles of a young boy trying to use a tray to skid down the stairs and the warm, comforting smells of my Mum boiling up a huge batch of jam from the raspberries we’d picked.

If you dug up the gardens, you’d probably find lost marbles with twists of colour and plastic soldiers abandoned in the camouflage of the shrubs. 

You can’t really take childhood with you as you grow up. Much of it stays behind as a patchwork of memories in the places you occupied.

My kids can’t wait to move on to the next house of their childhood: the storage room for memories to come.