thirteen

Hello mister magpie, etc

A week today, all being well, I will move into my thirteenth different house in a decade. It will be the third place we have lived in as a family, and the sixth place my lover and I have lived together. We hope to be there for around three months but who knows?… I am learning, gratefully, how to be comfortable in the uncertainty that housing holds for us and so many others at this moment in time.

I turn forty next year and don’t own my own home. I never have. The house we are leaving belongs to my partner, and although I am secure in the knowledge that we always have and hopefully always will share everything we have between us, the fact of the matter is that I live here not as any legally bound occupant.

The next place after number thirteen this decade will likely change that for me: my name might appear on a sheet of paper that ties me in some way to the house into which we put down our roots.

As we pack up all our shared belongings and personal ones alike, I’ve been thinking a lot about objects — something that I spend an awful lot of time both thinking and writing about— and how they shape our relationship with and memory of a place. I look at this in Cacophony Of Bone, and gained much from that exploration.

One of the hardest moves for me of this decade was a move I was not expecting to have to make. I’d hoped I was ready to start this settled part of my life with my lover back then but circumstances were against us (or perhaps the skies knew the timing wasn’t right and kept us apart until it was)..

I had to leave the small attic flat in which I’d only just started to feel at home, and move back to Edinburgh; to try to nurse my broken heart and find a way through the breakdown that the following years held for me. For the first time in my life, I asked for help. I asked a friend if I could loan the money for the ferry; another if I could sleep on their floor; another if they would help me find a job. Every one of them offered this help with arms and hearts wide open. Another friend bought me coffee to keep til I found a new room to rent; one gave me a set of gorgeous old vintage crockery; another made me candles: the fact of being cared for in this way—more so than the objects themselves— was enough to make me already feel I’d found my place.

And so I moved, in my early thirties, back to a place and a life stage I thought I had long left behind. I learned, once more, that each day; each season; each year, must unfold in its own way. We cannot decide for our own selves how our lives will look from one day to the next; all we can do is navigate as best we can. Bring our authentic self to the table; no matter where that table may be. Lean back into the waters and trust that we will be kept afloat; kept safe—trust the body we are in—our first and forever home.

Before that particular move there had been an equally heart wrenching one: the one where I left Edinburgh for the first time thinking I was ready to live in Ireland; imagining my trauma to be healed. And after that move, there were other hard moves. Moves that, ultimately, were necessary and very important for my story. I realised the other day that it has been fourteen years this coming Brigid’s Day since I made what I view as my first proper move: my first time leaving Ireland. I moved to Edinburgh. Snow feel thick and fast. The ferry rocked; the waves crashed; I thought about Brigid and the oystercatchers giving her safe passage. In lots of spiritual circles, seven year cycles are full of deep meaning. Our bodies go through vast changes in that timeframe, and as such we have the ability to be changed by it all, right down deep.

My journals are all already packed away so I had a scroll through Instagram to see what I was doing seven Brigid’s Days ago, and most importantly— how— and where I was living.

I was not shocked to discover I was, once more, on the cusp of a period of vast transition. I was teaching at a Steiner School in Bristol, living in my third rented room in less than a year, and falling more deeply in love with the person I’d loved, silently and without being able to let it go, despite the distance, for well over a year. That person was due to visit me, from Ireland, to begin to repair the parts of our love that had been let go rusty. His passport didn’t arrive, so I ended up visiting him instead, and on that trip we decided we would finally move in together. This beautiful blue room pictured above was the last one I would live in before I lived with the person I would make a family with. And to be clear, this making of a family happened years before we even mentioned dogs or babies.

It has been so interesting to witness the ways in which we both have had to bend in order to make , and then share, a home together. We are similar in many ways but given our difference in age and experience, there are vast differences in our own personal taste. The things we have chosen to carry from place to place; the objects we wish to hold near; the shapes and colours that feel like home.

Looking back through old pictures of the rooms in which I have made home before now, I am struck by the small details to which I have always been drawn.

Paper stars reflected by winter sunlight,

creative work in process, musical instruments children’s toys and books,

colour, shadows, candles,

cosy corners; fiercely private spaces.

There have often been flowers, a messy, borrowed writing desk, and thrifted furniture that didn’t quite fit.

Now, moving out of an exceptionally small home that has housed three humans and a dog through varying levels of lockdown and more, I imagine what the next spaces might hold. What will be placed on display as a means of grounding us, of saying : we are safe, we are here , WE ARE HOME.

Last night, as my wee one tried to fall back to sleep after a scary nightmare, he rolled himself straight into my arms and buried his face in my hair. “ Handey, mama, handey”, and so I take both his hands in one of mine and, with the other, I stroke his wee hair til he makes his sleep noise. I think about how I have no real space that I can call my own in many respects but that this new role in which I have found myself has, in actual fact, made me into a home. No matter where we end up, how it looks, what the circumstances; I am what my son calls home right now. Wherever me and his dadda are (and Iveagh his doll, gnomie and ba-baa) is home.

What deep wisdom we hold when we are small; the things that we know about what matters; what we should keep close to us at times of need. I’m hoping to remember some of that, in these bright new days ahead.

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