The World And Its Full Circle
I spent many summer afternoons beneath the corrugated iron pergola in the backyard of my Italian grandparent’s home, that irrefutable Goliath of the outdoors which collected and channelled the rain, brought the tears to our eyes and the stuffiness to our noses by springtime in collecting wanderlust wisteria and on occasions, sheltering the troubled faces and hushed conversations of clusters of Freemasons with their clandestine operations. It had seen many gatherings of the young and the ageing to celebrate existence up to that point, it respected Christmas banquets of sumptuous delight and most importantly, it gave no harsh resistance to the hands that sought to tear it down.
There was a great sorrow that welled in my heart to see the eternity of life that had twined itself upon those steadfast poles in the way of tendrils and stalks, shoots, flowers and leaves, each climbing higher toward the collective goal of reaching heavenward. I never sought to interrupt the immensity of bloom in the changing of seasons nor to disrupt the etchings of our former selves into the delicate paintwork that I promised to pay homage to in an older form. Today I remember. Such memories are lucid as those of the outstretched and sunken arms of the clothes line that endlessly bore the burden of sodden clothes from hose fights and surprise-dropped buckets of water…
There is no doubt in my mind that the sweet citrus and jagged thorn of the lemon and grapefruit trees made a perfect excuse for climbing - no matter the consequence of grazed knees or scolding - for the higher the branch one reached, the stronger and the more nostalgic the air of the southern ocean breeze would caress your brow and cheek. Although I spent my childhood an urban dweller, there remained the unfaltering and shrill call of the sea upon every breath of wind with promises of the lavishness of sea jewels and banks of waterlogged sand not yet formed to stone by the forthcoming of time.
In the dank and chilling air, where the spectres of the past emerge from each long-forgotten crevice, I choose to remember. When I steal a few moments from a troubled mind by hour-to-hour, I seek the bottom of that matron home where the old beams stand still, forgotten, stoic. Those splintered, blackish beams of hardwood impart a kind of musty odor, faintly chiselled away by termites and bogomoths whose garrish wings are snared in the deft preciseness of a thread of web. Relics of the old world are here, with floppy disks and neon signs and plasterboard with love odes that never suspected to be revived some twenty years later. On hands and knees, being dirtied by the chalk and sand and dirt acting as a carpet to the intrepid adventurer, I scout the loose brickwork I could once pry my way through and hear the echoes of natural gas, people traffic and footsteps above in a beautiful, cachophonic, interplay of sound. Meditiative, seductive. To share in the untold tales of such a place is almost to much to bare if only held together by the tenuous threads of bravery and the fierce defiance of inquisitiveness. I enact the role of the family historian.
Several nights a week are spent in discordant dreaming, with visions of ambitions and plans for the future as well as fragments of memories of the past, including that vast tapestry of lucid and emotive dreaming during childhood. In these dreams the wallpaper throughout the hallway reverberates in a methodic hum and thud, like a heartbeat slightly irregular. The cold coffee-stain-coloured tiles lead unassumingly into the closed-off bedrooms and swivel into the master guestroom where a grandfather clock chimes at the strike of midnight. It has never sounded since.
My dreams also connect me, in some fantastical way, to the history of the building of that hallowed place - where my consciousness might dig details of the immigrants who laboured upon the finest details of the estate, who buried their lunch in the very foundations of the place to be surfaced some many years later, whose eagerness to begin life anew became emedded in the motto of that matron estate and all its splendour.
The ‘disaster area’ of that gallant but largely disorganised garage and workshop are an imprint in my mind and in my dreaming imagination. Three unobstrusive windows, barred and sealed shut, never saw a cleaning since 1945 and knew the name of grime until one fateful afternoon when a lemon was used as a cricket ball to form a hairline crack from the top to the bottom of the glass pane. These three windows were useless for serving their purpose - they permitted the barest minimum of light, were almost opaque and were an eyesaw to the feature of the gardenscape.
The true source of light in that dungeon of a place was again the corrugated iron sheets of roofing, many of which rusted through and were replaced with courrugated plastic instead. These plastic sheets permit a stunningly poetic piercing of light - a bejewelled, iridescent and almost mellow-fluroescent green light came through and warmed the workshop throughout the seasons, warded off the sheets of downpouring rain and kept my mind company with the tatt-tatt to counter my grandfather’s grind-grind. One corner segmented was a leadlighting desk with a grinder, oil glass-cutting pencil and bronze stenciling on an office table, sitting beneath a plethora of parts of lead piping and argon gas tubes. A miniscule ’serving’ window gave the only lease of light and of progress of the outside world and was frequently used for calling to lunch when the phone was tied up. For the most part, I remember, like the fragments of my dreams in their eerie propensity to adhese like a montage of emotions, cuttings of glass in a raging kaelidoscope of colours, shades and hues - from smoky turquoise to bitter orange yellow and myriad misshapen reds, greens and blues.
Nowadays, when I visit these relics of the past and seek solace to the memories that have plagued me ever since, I see that there is very little for me to confide in, nobody left to share these memories with who would truly sympathise and have partaken in them and none other but the sea breeze to pull me back into the past.
As I have mentioned earlier, in the places we revisit for the solace of the memories, we are merely dwelling in the spectre of the past and have attuned ourselves to forget the here-and-now and to instead focus upon the time that has past and surrender our ambitions to move forward, for a dip into the pools of recrudescence.
I would like to take this time to welcome you to comment on any memory or memories which you recall as vividly as this, which pulls your mind into a vortex of time that seems as apparently real as the reality of the present moment. In taking a stroll down memory lane as I have in this post, we can observe just how the world has truly come full circle as what begins from the soil inevitably returns to it.
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