You Can’t Go Home Again
Rationally, we know it’s not the case, but the temptation is to assume that, when we leave a place, it’s in a time capsule, just waiting for us to return. Of course, that’s not the case, but it’s tempting…
Our first (rented) house in Perth looks identical to how we left it, about 15 years ago. We were casting around the streets we hadn’t seen for 11, trying to find it, and first found the park that we used to walk to with the girls when they were 1 and 4, and tracked back ‘home’ from there.
Then the house we built also looked very similar: the new owners have added some fences and gates, and a tree on the verge in front that we saw planted by the council as a sapling is now about 6 or 7 metres tall and very bushy. But the house – we chose the bricks and the paint colours and roof style and modified the plan – is just as it looked all those years ago. I posted a pic on Facebook, so check it out there if you’re interested.
But then, we went back to our old church, Fremantle, yesterday morning. It seemed like a pretty efficient way to catch up with a lot of old friends in a short space, and had a lot of good memories associated with it. When we arrived we were redirected from the church building to the hall – apparently the ceiling was falling in. It seems almost too much like a literary device, but it’s an appropriate symbol for the church community itself.
When we were there, it was a vibrant community of about 150 people or all ages, with a rocking worship band and a warm welcome for everyone. The warm welcome was still there, but perhaps there were 30 or 40 people in the hall, most of them well past retirement age (but still a couple of young families). Some ladies volunteered to lead the singing and did a great job, but it was old-school hymns from the hymn book with a piano. The sermon was great too, but all the worship-style progress we argued so much about 15 years ago is as though it never happened.
I had a long chat with an old friend about what had happened, and there were a variety of vicissitudes mentioned, but his take on the key issue was ‘We lost our vision’. Yep.
So, the world moves on when we go away (and there was a facetious (I hope) suggestion that our nicking off to Canada was the beginning of the end!) That ‘home’ isn’t there for us any more, even if we did come back to Perth. (More later about Perth and why that’d be tempting…)
But one other thing came out of this trip back: I thought to myself ‘Best years of our lives were here’. And in a way it’s true: in the 6 years we were here, Cassie and Alex grew from 4 and 1 to 10 and 7, and I completed my PhD, Sue completed her degree, and we had a lot of fun. Great years. But honestly, they’ve *all* – in Perth, Canada and Brisbane, and PNG before that – been the best years of our lives. And there are more to come.