There’s a little old house at the main intersection out from our little side pocket of the hills, that I hadn’t realised I’d been watching till I’d been watching it for a decade or so, and only then because some sadnesses were being played out in vignettes of only seconds, each time I pulled up to turn right down the hill.
Nearly 30 years I’ve been watching. Half of those without consciously taking note but now looking back there’s a story.
I think of the couple that lived there as Italian – but I never met or spoke to them or knew anyone that knew them so that’s a guess, but if it helps you ‘see’ them…
There was this little elderly Italian couple that I’d often see working in their veggie garden to the side of their house. The house is old and white with a half enclosed cement floored verandah – kind of in the style of my own grandparents house. Maybe built in the 1920’s? That’s a total guess too.
There was a single line of string hung across the front verandah so that on winter days their washing could be hung under the tiled verandah roof. It made me smile to think of my mum who would always have hung her ‘smalls’ on the in-most line of the hills hoist – never on the front verandah in purview of a thousand passers-by on a main highway – but no such ettiquette was on that line… Not so small ‘smalls’ were on that line in winter alongside of aging brown pants and flanno shirts and dark cardigans and A line skirts.
Over time their postures stooped and the fellow needed a walking frame and she’d pick their tomatoes and the weeds grew up tall while he needed to sit on the verandah.
One day I saw the walking frame still in their front yard.
And another day, and another.
I realised I’d seen no people for a while and then one day the washing line was different.
A line of only black. Only womens. And only womens smalls.
From then on the line stayed that way and just the widow whose own frame seemed to smallen as she stooped – carried on.
She only wore black from that day forward. Well past a year. Except for the occaisional apron.
I think her tomatoes must have dwindled away as the summer sun scortched the tall autumn weeds that used to be their garden, rose and cracked and fell year by year.
But the washing hung, and sometimes I saw her coming out for the mail.
Then one day – a whipper snipper had won. And the washing was gone. And so had she.And a “For sale” sign appeared.And because of the boom – a ‘sold’ sticker quickly too.
I never saw children there. Never saw visitors of any kind and I wonder where they’d come from and if they’d had a family and if they were happy and who oversaw their last whiles?
And yesterday – the ‘sale’ sign long gone, where a walking frame once was – instead – in the morning sun – stood a pram. And off to the side, a young woman in black short overalls with arms reaching high – attaching a washing line? And another little story makes it’s “Once upon a time”…
All our lives tell a story made up of moments.
Visible.
Behind the doors.
Outer.
Inner.
There’s a flow.
he outer reveals the inner.
he inner might be unseen – yet it feeds whatever *is* seen.
When watchers watch their only visible moments of us – what story will be seen?
What inner is seen in the outer?
All our lives tell a story made up of moments.