Just the other day I wrote a letter to an old address, to who ever is living there now, with memories of the place where I grew up. Most likely I will never send it but for some reason, I don’t know why, I wanted to do it and it started me thinking.....

 
I have often wondered when we leave a house we have lived in for many years...do we leave a part of us behind in that property?
 
Just recently I have been looking at maps on line of where I grew up on the other side of the world in London. The streets, roads and avenues have housed generation after generation of families. Each with their very own stories..challenges and triumphs. The many happy memories and the many sad times. The births deaths and marriages have come and gone in those many houses, flats and tiny bed sits over the years.
 
The roads with such familiar names to so many families have no idea who previously lived at that address and it’s history. People and shops come and go but street names remain the same. The hills and bends we travelled as a child are still there. The corner where I remembered how to tie a shoe lace on the way to school...to find a short cut...where I fell over... or to maybe steal an apple from that overhanging tree branch we knew at the time was wrong but it tasted so good anyway. To avoid someone we didn’t want to see or for them to see us. The park where I used to go when older and the shops I used to visit when I should have been at school and thought no one would ever see me...but they did...oh they did. The house where a friend of mine lived and was so different to the flat three floors up where we lived. But I knew no better...some people had nice houses and we had a flat with a balcony when all I really wished for at the time was for a garden to run and play in and most of all to have a dog; alas which the rent rules didn’t allow.
 
The bitterly cold winters...I even had ice on the inside of my bedroom windows in winter can you even imagine? Numerous animals...no dog but everything else! You name it I had it from snakes...mice..hamsters..guinea pigs even a pet white pigeon named Demetrious...yes true! Well I was only around 11 maybe 12 years of age.  I trained the said Demetrious to fly down to me from the roof tops and often timed it as a bus stopped nearby and people would point and look in amazement. Funny now looking back. Quite the showman...where did it all go so wrong   : )
 
People leave their marks..scratches on door posts of children's heights long grown and with families now of their own. We left dates and hand drawn pictures and scribbles on bare plaster walls many years ago which were covered with wallpaper and most likely those pencil drawings and dates so many years on are still there. Still there for someone to come across and discover when they re-decorate. To lay hidden as some forgotten time capsule of memories.
 
Memories of a home filled with love, laughter and maybe some tears.
 
Looking back at street names has uncovered so many memories for me. Not that I’m homesick or anything like that but if I went back for a visit I think I may feel somewhat frightened. Not of being there that's silly I know but not to have my Mother looking out of the window as I ran home down the hill from school in the afternoon. Not to have relatives living in the houses that I knew and the apple tree I bought from the school garden and planted in my Aunts garden not being there so many years on. It can just be sad I think rather than nostalgic. Maybe I just haven’t been that brave! I will go back one day and visit those familiar places again even though I know it will be difficult to see strangers looking out of those very windows I once looked out of.
 
We, my Parents and I like so many other families, left for a better life and that has certainly been achieved. My Parents have since passed on. Maybe that’s why I’m thinking of where I grew up and the many memories.
 
So do we leave a part of us behind when we move? No matter how much the house is renovated and walls knocked down does the memory of a struggling family still linger in the existing structure of the house? The joys and the heartaches? I think we do leave a part of us behind...I really think we do. How can we possibly not...

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