Freedom

The day we picked up the keys for Northbrook was warm and fragrant. The council had mown the grass in the park across the road, and the cut-grass smell made me sneeze and smile. Lockdown was about to lift. On that very day day we would be allowed to meet friends indoors. It felt like a heady liberty.

Lockdown by this point had become physical and emotional. It had been so long, so dark, so cramped and so cold… what a winter! Wouldn’t you agree?

The children and I picked up the keys from the real estate agent and stepped inside that empty, echoing place. It just felt so… expansive. Journeying from lockdown to “covid-normal,” from our tiny halfway-house into Northbrook, from a corridor of packed boxes to a rediscovery of old treasures, and from winter into spring… and to make all of those journeys in one afternoon, it’s hard to explain what that felt like.

But I’ll try.

Maybe if you could imagine what it might be like to post yourself from one side of the world to another. To fold your whole body into a cardboard box, hugging your knees and bending your neck, shivering in the winter cold. To have the box sealed up over you and to be shunted like this, in the dark, onto the unheated hold of an aeroplane. And then, more than 24 hours later, to hear the sound of the box being torn open. Standing is painful after crouching so long - the agony of cramps! - but slowly you might stand, then stretch. Imagine how good it would feel to finally stretch! To step out of the box, squint in the sunlight, and feel the unexpected warmth of a summers’ day.

That’s what it felt like on the day we picked up the keys to our new house.

The children raced through the house, from one end to the other. They ran, and they ran, and they ran. Up and down steep stairs and along the higgeldy-piggeldy corridor (a funny old corridor, one that goes up, down, up again, and around). Down the long hallway with the tessellated tiles and the grape-vine chandelier. In and out of the oddly-built kitchen with the Z-shaped island bench and dark, towering, floor-to-ceiling cupboards and drawers, all made out of heavy, timber filing cabinets. And through the high-ceilinged, fussily-wallpapered reception rooms, where wedding-cake curtains draped and shadowed the old windows (those almost-ancient curtains, vinyl-backed and crumbling with age, dust and sunlight).

They ran through it all, ran for the joy of running and the freedom of space, and the fragrance of the cut grass that made everybody sneeze.

And all of a sudden it felt ok again, ok for the first time in two years, to think about the future. What would happen next?