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Childhood vanished like the bad man in a kid's film, leaving behind dissolving snapshots of the long bus-trip to the grandparents' home through a long empty road they called the Bypass. Then home changed, roads changed, people grew up, grew old, died.

I remember once going back to visit with my dad- that first tiny apartment where my earliest memories are. A big yellow front door and limewashed walls with blue pathes of damp making maps of countries yet undiscovered, a calling bell tune surely dreamt up by a tone-deaf person somewhere and the ceiling fans from a company called 'Ranjan' that I pronounced 'Ran-Jan'. I thought all of that was mine. That all of it was forever. And then one day a truck arrived and we folded our world in straw-lined packing boxes and home became a goodbye in a flurry of moments that slipped out of incomprehending hands. When I went back a few years later everything looked different, though they were there as they had always been- the same playground, the little cement pathway in front of our building, even a couple of old play-mates. I didn't even go up to check the apartment.

The world turns and changes everyday and we look at wall colours and that little black spot near the staircase and we think things are going to remain the same forever.

And sometimes I wonder if houses have memories. When the neighbours left and sold their their house and the new family moved in and broke down walls and repainted, did the fern tree in the garden that had come as a sapling remember the soil where it was born, or the hands that brought it here? And did the familiar chairs and tables in the new, unfamiliar flat remember the old house, and how the light fell across the room through that window when the afternoon cookery show came on?

Every morning I get stuck in the traffic on the E.M. Bypass and I don't even remember how this was once a road to far, far away. And there are bus numbers I have forgotten, and routes I have forgotten, but the most forgotten roads are the ones so familiar that they've lost the strangeness that they once had.

There are places I have lived in that I knew was never home, and goodbye was painless, even happy. But we all make mistakes. And you can't believe the change until its there and then you just get used to it.

I would just like to be able to

rest a little, that 's all.

(Image from Public Domain Search)