Little girls playing on the back yard!
Fall ten years ago my sister and I started looking at our childhood home with different eyes, knowing it wouldn’t be there that much longer. The summer after it was all empty and we locked the front door one last time.
Our parents passed away only five months apart from each other. Winter 2005 my sister and I emptied the red brick house our dad built behind the elementary school 1961, 44 years of life put into boxes, shared with family and friends, transported to antique stores and second hand, or simply dumped in the garbage.
The house wasn’t charming but functional and nice, no, it was the garden which made the place special. Both our parents were interested in gardening, but it was our father’s lifeblood. Most of his afternoons and evenings were spent working in the garden and my sister and I had lovely lawns for badminton, cart wheeling, somersaults, high jumping, tanning and running around with our friends.
The old couple which bought the house didn’t agree with the three big linden our dad planted at the front yard in the sixties. The trees that made the place look special although the red brick house looked like nothing really. They cut down the lindens, and we felt that’s when our parents souls left the house.
Every first weekend in September my choir Kammarkören Sångkraft (Sångkraft Chamber Choir) does a full weekend rehearsing the fall concert program. This year the weekend happened in Nordmaling 45 minutes south of Umeå, the small town where I grew up. Riding down there yesterday I knew we would be rehearsing at the school and I was slightly prepared for a trip down memory lane. I wasn’t prepared though for having my childhood home as a view above the Rachmaninoff sheet music in my hands.
Yesterday was a beautiful sunny and warm day, summer came back for a surprise visit this week. The room where we were rehearsing was as sunny and warm as the day, the choir in a good and joyful mood. A full day of sitting singing is way too much for my body, but my soul and my brain really needed it.
To give it a chance I brought a special chair and a folding bed where I could lie down if necessary. And thanks to all my good friends and colleagues in the choir helping me out with driving me, carrying all my stuff, unfolding and folding chair and music-stand, putting all the pillows where I needed them, helping me to the bath room, finding the elevator, and simply being there for me I could actually do it. And oh how I enjoyed it!
Looking up from Rachmaninoff I am watching my childhood home through the window right in front of me. The lindens and the picket fence gone. I know the old couple isn’t there any more but I don’t know who lives there now. There is a car in front of the garage though. And a bicycle parked next to it. The front door is open. And is that a swing at the back yard? I am not sure, it might be at the neighbors.
And that’s when I see them. Only partly, but they are definitely there. Children playing at the back yard! I think they are girls, there are little girls jumping on my dads lawn, on me and my sister’s green somersault lawn!
In the process of cleaning out our childhood and putting it to rest we were wishing for new children moving in. The red brick house was a good place for a family, a good place for children. We later grieved the cut down linden and were grateful our parents didn’t have to experience that transformation.
My parents married September 4 1954. 60 years later there are little girls playing in the garden they made for themselves and their daughters. It makes me very happy.
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