Grandma's House

We've been living in my grandmother's house for the last five months since she died and it's been a great opportunity for me to try to understand a little more about her and her side of the family from which I come.

Being such a reserved, even reclusive person, it was very difficult to get to know her while she was alive, so I've enjoyed the chance to get to know her via her neighbours, remaining siblings and posessions. Of course, it's only a sliver of a perspective. Who can truly know anyone, anyway, be they alive or dead? I believe it is hard enough for us, the living, to truly understand the depths of our own psyches, to try to understand what makes another person tick.

The fact that she was so reserved and so reclusive, has made it even more interesting, to try to reveal a picture of my grandmother.

Starting with her posessions, a picture quickly emerges of a frugal, hard-working, simple-living person. She would have made a great monk. Her phone bills rarely exceeded $30 a month, her electricity bills were similarly small. She used a bucket in her kitchen sink to capture water which she would pour on her plants. She was a great gardener, having cultivated beautiful flowers, shrubs and trees at different times. Now the garden is very simple, with hardy plants that have continued to thrive since her death, with very little care from me.

She was a great record-keeper. Old calendars and an address book show her interest in observing important family dates. Birth dates and birth weights of all the great grandbabies born in recent years were carefully recorded and the birthdays of all her children and grandchildren were also carefully noted.

She spent hardly any money on upgrading or updating furnishings. Aside from two antique peices of furniture, everything else is circa 1965, with the exception of the couch which was recovered, perhaps in the last 10 years.

Stepping into the outback dunny and laundry is like stepping back in time, except that the old boiler washing machine with mangle was replaced about 10 years ago, or so.

There's something beautiful about the rust stain in the handbasin of the old outside toilet. Equally beautiful is the texture of peeling paint on a window frame, thick with years of added layers, or the presence of flowers growing up through the cracks in the concrete, free to grow without grandma to pluck them from their untidy ramblings.

My favourite place is the old vegetable patch which I've slowly been weeding and cultivating. There are peas and lettuces and broccoli and tomatoes growing well, now that I have made the garden possum-proof. The poor peas struggled for weeks, being nibbled off down to the stalks, each time there was a possum raid. The animals must be visiting the patch now with hunger pangs and salivating jaws. Too bad! Grandma would not have had to bother with possums when she tended her vegetable patch. Their numbers in the suburbs have only grown in recent years.

We cannot stay here forever. The family wants to sell the house. Greedy uncles and aunts want their inheritance now, not later.

This house has stood here for over 60 years, a gift to my grandparents, from my grandfather's parents, who had it trucked from the other side of town, so that my grandparents would have somewhere suitable to live. The laundry and outside toilet were the original buildings on the land, built by my grandfather, a romantic little shack for the newlyweds. He was building it in secret, far from his parent's watchful eyes, because he wanted to start married life independently of his family. When they discovered what he was toiling away at, they quickly told him it was unsuitable for habitation and sent the house from their own farm for him to live in.

It's small, wooden, with no insulation and I can feel the cold wind blowing in from under the front door frame. It's got asbestos walls and ceilings and little narrow windows which barely let enough light in to see inside in the middle of the day.

If developers buy it, they will undoubtedly knock down the house, split the enormous block in two and put up cheaply-made town houses.

My elderly neighbours, who have also lived here for over 60 years will have tall, looming houses suddenly appear within a metre or so of their boundary. They will probably be multi-story buildings, blocking out breeze and light. Why don't developers consider the fact that in every community, there is a small number of elderly people who have lived there an incredibly long time, whose quality of life is just as important as anyone else's and who don't adjust well to their environment being so drastically altered?

The photos below show:

1. Me as a toddler in Grandma's garden. I loved taking care of it even then!
2. Soph, Sage, Grandma and I on her back porch early last year.
3. The peeling paint in the bathroom makes such a pretty pattern.
4. The old laundry sink with extendable taps.
5. The old dunny wall with pretty purple flowers.