My mum keeps sending me photos of my childhood but they’re all wrong.
In one of them, the angle I was sitting is not quite the one I remembered. The feeling associated with the moment does not seem to be represented this time. I start searching inside.
I do remember sitting on
the roadside, yes. Waiting for the bus, yes but I don’t remember my neighbour’s
little sister would be in the picture as she was too young yet to go to school.
Actually, when I think about it, I only ever remember that one time when I was
the only one in my group catching the bus home and the bus driver was decisive
enough not to bother driving me down my road to my bus stop. This time, I got
off.. and started shouting and swearing uncontrollably at him, for dissing me.
But really, it wasn’t such a long walk home and in my rage of entitlement,
considering I had access to international standard education in a 3rd
World Country, I should have really, just put my head down and just said:
“Thank you”.
My rose-tinted re-call
chambers recall a small playground where I only sometimes played as I made my
way down my familiar road where I knew all the best hiding spots to create
castles or hidden trenches on the way to bottom of the street. As I reached
half-way, there lay three identical asymmetrical white brick houses, parked
together in the centre point of the cul-de-sac. Ours was the middle one, 60’s
style with a closed in verandah on either side. The one on the right lead to
our unofficial front door, where friends and neighbours would enter from. To
get to it, you would open the wooden gate attached to the breeze block wall and
walk up a flight of three steps to a wooden patio (much like a stage). That
patio, I remember is where I sat with my dog, searching and picking ticks out
of his fur, just like the monkeys do. I would pull off the ticks and place them
in an upturned shell, used as an ashtray, which would already be stained and
stank of ash from butted out cigarettes. I loved to watch and hear the pop of
the tick burst sharing in a satisfied glee with my companion hound, Carlos.
Breeze blocks are
deliberately hollow to allow airflow, and in the tropics, you need that the
whole year round, so you could see through to the car parked beside our home.
On the house side of the verandah, I never noticed until inside, we had glass
louvres which would press against the dusty fly-wire when they opened.
The fly screen, I noticed
more so on the flip side of the house because it was directly off the living
room and I would look through it to see a tropical overgrown courtyard with
pebbles and puddles and moss, small plants and the croak of frogs when the rain
fell.
That’s what I long for,
in the heart of my place. Smelling the hot rain, falling on moss in the
stillness of my verandah, listening to the frogs call and the song of the
crickets. Watching the mosquitoes cling to the fly screen, wondering where they
could get their next feed from and when the heavy rains would stop. I wished
they never would.