I didn’t get much good writing done but I lived in ways that I’m still writing about
- Diane Seuss, via Alina Stefanescu
My favourite spot at my grandmother Joanie’s house is by the window in the upstairs bedroom. The window looks out to this year’s barley field, and to the train line beyond. Dinky two-car commuter services, long strings of carriages from London, and the occasional rusty-barrelled freight train all skelter past the window, by distance made miniature. Before trains it was boats that ferried folk from Montrose port down to Leith and into Edinburgh. Spit boys and chamber girls, new-rich merchant-enslavers, Jacobites plotting behind green doors. Now new-hope wind turbines dot this home-of-mine coast, Scotland’s bread basket and Britain’s oil-wrung afterthought.
This time back home (home?) I caught a great many trains. Each trip within the trip was a private achievement, for I am still in burnout and still experiencing cognitive soup. I tried and failed to organise to see everyone I wanted to see, but made a good go of it. I met a longed-for baby. I reunited with a dear primary school pal. I found a lockdown friend come to life. Ryan and I re-visited our favourite haunts from our pandemic years here. We were proud of the coffee shops that made it through the quarantines, amazed by the quiet evening parks that once held no-other-option outdoor gatherings. We sat in pub gardens that we had previously only walked past. The virus was still on my mind, as it is still in the air, but there was goodness in the air, too. My sister theorises that adult life is defined by a search for familiarity, a crave for a return. To be here again feels like a windfall of familiarity coins, weighty and golden.
I collected my soul somewhere above Heathrow at the end of July. Well, less collected it than felt it thunk back into my body with an aggrieved kind of predetermination.
There you are, said soul, I’ve been waiting. Being back has felt like a reunion with my other-than-human friends, too. Squirrel and fox and blue-black magpie. Beech and birch and rosebay willowherb, backlit with halos of tufted seed. It is hard to let go of a place that allowed me to look at it with such close focus, and allowed me to make some sense to myself as the self that started life here. Feeling alive here makes me see how much of my life has been not-here, lived but also not lived — a pain of recognition for the parallel life, the one where I stayed.
My parents and siblings all came back to be here together at the house in the fields with Joanie, the central reason to make this indulgent long journey at such a question-mark time. Ryan and I slept in a tent to make room inside, and we heard strange-bellied calls from the animal night. By day we made little pilgrimages to our childhood spots, and we were all inside the life where we stayed. Place names played like songs: Corrie Fee, Auchenblae, Firth of Forth, Esk and Tay. New moments crystallising already into future lore: swimming in tributaries turned amber with peat. Salmon leaping, failing and leaping once more for their spawn. The riffing of siblings. Repetition, always repetition. Keeping a good thing going long after the bit loses its bite, our laughter like wind through blades, round and around, to sing and to soar.
My dad was the first to leave the family reunion at the house in the fields, and on the drive down to drop him at the airport we passed a sign for the village that had hosted a big car boot sale in the 2000s. It was there that we had signed up to sell our possessions so as to be lighter for the move from Scotland to New Zealand. I remembered impassively putting prices on my toys — a stoic eldest child, or maybe just a pre-teen all too glad to shed childlike things. In the car I asked my dad about what went in to the decision to move and he found it hard to talk about. We entered a staticky silence and I wondered if he was thinking about the same thing I was thinking about — the parallel life, the one where we stayed.
There is no easy integration of before and after. There will be no one redeeming move or resettlement that will make me or my siblings or either place whole again. No seamless mend to the rend of colonialism — its violent intended consequences, and its unintended ones, too. Colonialism destroys so many ways of life that settlers often don’t even see the need to grieve or retrieve our ways, places, words lost to the continuing interlocking projects of Indigenous dispossession and settler state-making. Colonialism is a parasite that uses gullible settler hosts to secure capital and sovereignty. There is no easy integration of before and after, but better stories are available — meaning-making apparatuses without extraction, displacement and scapegoating. Stories of loss (which are stories of love); stories of shared insistence on the unwrittenness of the future. It’s not too late, it’s not too late.
*
I will remember always the night this month that Ryan and I played Bananagrams with Joanie at her kitchen table while we shared a bag of Revels, Joanie angling for the orange-centred ones but coming up again and again with Malteasers (a fate worse for her than drawing constant Z’s and X’s). When I was present I was really, really present this August. I had the sense of the present being the only thing, with the past and the future imagined realms not needed to count the moment whole. I experienced skin-tingling alivenesses, the likes of which help me know the definition of rude health. I let the peaty water rush over my ringed fingers, felt the spirit clean my bones and bless my treasures, kept my soul inside my body while I found myself at home.
Until next time may you know the word sibling, however you define it. We are all responsible for each other. Now sing and soar.
Hannah x
I returned to England in May and June too. What you write really resonates with my delight in hedgerow flowers, the memories that make landscapes feel like an embrace. And with that feeling of here and there, the dislocation that makes ‘home’ sound like a question.
‘Home’… a question and a statement all at once… ‘turangawaewae’ feels more of a statement… where my soul-being is grounded… Best shared with siblings and childhood friends and lovers… Thanks, Hannah - yes… 💕