Pinky Crosses that Bridge.

Hanging in a kind of limbo as I wait to go to my call back appointment at the Breastscreen clinic tomorrow must be making me a bit nostalgic because instead of taking my usual circuit around the river this afternoon, I strolled across the footbridge and walked through the streets finding myself heading towards the house I grew up in for seventeen years or so.

Walking along the street towards the old house was a strange mix of familiarity and reminiscence. I must have walked that street thousands of times after catching the bus home from school, staring at the ground, counting my dreary steps in boredom. It seems so small now; such a short street of only about a dozen houses.

I wanted a photo of the house and fortunately when I arrived at the front there were two teenage girls playing Frisbee out the front.

They stared at the weirdly gawping woman as their Boxer hurled itself against the fence barking menacingly.

“I used to live here when I was a little girl,” I croaked, possibly coming across as the type of suspicious, peculiar old hag whose presence they should immediately alert their mother to… which of course they did.

I apologetically repeated my mantra to the mother when she came out to the gate. I’d clearly interrupted her dinner preparations.

“Were you from the Poinker family?” she enquired pleasantly.

“Yes! I was a Poinker!” I replied, happy that she knew the name of the very first owners of this house and that even though she may have lived here for twenty years it was really still OUR house.

“I dream about this house all the time!” I rabbited on. “That was my bedroom when I was a little girl.”

If some wild-eyed stranger rocked up to my front door and told me they’d once lived in my house I’d probably smile, say ‘That must have been nice for you!’ and close the door in their face; especially if I was in the middle of cooking dinner. 

But fortunately for Pinky not everyone is that grumpy and the affable Sue, invited me in to have a sticky beak around.

Everything inside the shell of the house has been completely renovated, retiled and remodelled. There was no trace of anything familiar; even Dad’s masterpiece of a pool had been renovated.

But that bedroom window I sat at staring out of hour upon hour, hoping to catch my boyfriend doing a drive-by, was still in the same spot. 

The bedroom window my sister Sam and I precariously hung out of while smoking Benson and Hedges and trying not to get caught was still in situ. 

It was the very same window sill I sat on when I was seven, waiting for my father to pull up in his work utility every night so that I’d be the first one to greet him. 

The same windows all my Daryl Braithwaite and Sherbet posters were sticky taped onto.

Then I saw another forgotten window which brought a deeply buried memory flooding back. 

                              There was no screen back in the day!

When I was about twenty years old, I arrived home after having been out partying all night. I was a horrible, selfishly thoughtless young lady and my parents, fed up with my inconsiderate ways had deliberately locked me out and gone shopping. 

My jittery hangover didn’t stop me shimmying up the drain pipe though. Hoisting myself onto the roof and squeezing my body through Mum’s bathroom window like a cockroach I managed to infiltrate the lockout.

Mum hit the roof when she arrived home and found me lying on the couch lethargically eating coffee ice cream out of the tub. 

Then, after she discovered how I’d broken in, she was incredulous.

“It’s a wonder you didn’t kill yourself, Pinky Poinker!” she fumed, with a badly disguised undercurrent of disappointment in her voice.

Hagar has broken into our house many times in a similar way over the years. Now I understand in hindsight, where he inherited his break and enter tendencies from.

So thank you to Sue for welcoming a Nosey Parker she didn't know from squat into her house and for not thinking I was casing the joint when I took photos of her bathroom window with the easy access. 

It brought back some precious memories.

Do you ever dream about the house you grew up in?