It is time to go. Time to say goodbye to the house I have lived in for 37 years. Downsizing – that word implies a shrinking world. Getting older, needing smaller, family gone, not fit for steps, last stop pending.
I know I’m lucky to have come from a generation which planted a foot on the ladder of the housing market 55 years ago – that doesn’t make the leaving of this house any easier. With generational inequality constantly being pondered by us early boomers, it seems gratuitous to tell our struggle stories. But our homes were the nest where we raised our families. Now the nest is too big, empty. Its upkeep too demanding.
I look to my mother, the first of her working-class family to own a home. She worked up to three menial jobs at a time and used my father’s 1-2% interest war service loan to afford a block of land; then she built, sometimes by hand, the postwar dream – an L-shaped weatherboard cottage in what is now almost an inner suburb.
Home ownership was always the dream, a foothold on security where no landlord could yet again evict you although I do doubt any landlord had much chance of getting my nan and the rest of us out of our rent-controlled semi. Rent control was a useful housing tool in the postwar housing shortage; I wonder why it isn’t used now?
Anyway, property as salvation was a dominant theme of my childhood. It led me to seek and own three houses across my adult life, all within 5km of that first near city childhood home.
As a young bride in my early 20s, I found my first house in the for sale section of the real estate pages. How bad could it be? It was priced at only $13,000. I talked my husband into buying it. That charming, tiny, sandstone brick worker’s terrace had one bedroom. For a time we offered that one bedroom to an unhappy single pregnant girl fleeing her family. My then husband and I slept low to the floor in a hollowed-out basement space. House and garden pretensions weren’t on the agenda as the house was mostly a pit stop in the hectic work and play life of my early 20s.
Then, on the first day of spring, it was that house that welcomed home our first born. He slept in the tiny walk-through living room and life quietened down.
With growing affluence, we upscaled to a grand Californian bungalow in a leafy nearby suburb replete with a bell (no longer working) to summon the maid. With apologies again to those not able to get on the housing ladder now, it only cost about $35,000, then considered a huge amount. Young and slightly bohemian, I was out of step with this establishment neighbourhood. When I accepted an invitation via the letterbox to a morning tea across the road to meet the women of the area, I was greeted with surprise: “We thought you were the au pair,” one said.
There were great times in that house – two more babies, laughter, friends, parties and dinners; childhoods spent playing in the bush nearby and roaming safe streets. Then there were terrible times – a broken marriage and then buying out the other 50% share of the house. Back in those days my mortgage stood at 13%. There was no money for maintenance on my already stretched single salary and when I sensed the hot water heater was coming through the ceiling it was time to go, to get rid of the debt.
This house, the one I am leaving now, was the first I bought in my name only. When my children and I came here to this large Federation terrace, a reconverted boarding house, this was a neighbourhood of character, mostly a precinct of large lodging houses with a fascinating assortment of neighbours. I remember fondly the man who hopped up the hill with silver foil covering the colander on his head; I remember the armed hold-up squad surrounding the huge boarding house opposite. Slowly and sadly things changed over four decades. The cachet of the harbourside brought the gentrifiers. Now it’s an enclave of wealth.
Anyway, after 37 years it’s time to go; the lady who tizzied up the cushions and “dressed the beds” has done her thing; the pictures have been taken and, next week, potential buyers will come through appraising my exterior life.
I sit at the camphorwood kitchen table made for me by a Byron Bay craftsman. I sit and I think of all the cups of tea and coffee, all the shared meals, the glasses of wine. Mostly I think of all the laughter and all the tears.
I also think of the after-hours work I did at this table for more hours in the day than I should have. But the retirement years have been kinder.
I think of all the Xmas lunches segueing into dinners. All the birthday candles blown out right here.
I look down and see the scratches in the wood left by grandchildren drawing and playing, sometimes doing homework. I remember the two babies who were born from here and all the tiny babies who have been bathed on this kitchen table.
This house holds a thousand memories; my teenage daughters creeping up the stairs, past my bedroom knowing I am in bed awake waiting for them to let me know they’re safely home. In later years they tell me they climbed out the third-storey window on to the roof to smoke.
I see all the things about the house my adult son has fixed for me.
Memories tumble in; tears threaten again.
I remember the abandonment I felt when each child in turn left home and the joy when, as adults, they have come back to stay for short periods.
I know this rollercoaster of memories is a common experience for my age group in the 21st century. Unlike my mother who would not leave her forever home, her great achievement, until death took her out, my generation is more likely to experience this downsizing saga. This feeling of their impending world shrinking.
I give gratitude that in many ways mine was the lucky generation, not the least in our access to housing. As I look out on the Japanese maple in the courtyard that I will never see grow into its glory, I contemplate the turning of the wheel. Young, our world expands; we sally further forth and take up more space in our living. As we age, the space we occupy starts to shrink. It’s time to go, to leave this longtime home of mine – hopefully our memories have warmed the walls.
