My Room...

We are moving in 3 sleeps. That's actually just 2 days of packing left & I've just run out of boxes. It is amazing how many one needs for a move...

It has been a long time since I lived in my parent's house... I went to boarding school from age 14.5 which was my first big "solo" move - back and forth from Espin House with my big blue trunk. I still have dreams about packing my trunk - it would disappear to who-knows-where once unpacked at the beginning of term...and reappear magically at the entrance to the dorm room at the end of term - (or was it year end?) to prepare for home-going. Thinking back, it seems a bit like the Harry Potter arriving and leaving Hogwarts... how easy it is to  romanticise experiences when looking back!!

I went through so much in that room in my parents house. I fell in love for the first time... read letters from and wrote letters to my crushes... agonised about life, love and everything else with my best friend. I escaped here when I was feeling sad... read scary novels on my bed... cut out photographs and stuck them in my scrap book... recorded late night music on my tape recorder & listened to my collections until the tapes stretched...

I liked to move my room around once in a while - this mostly involved moving my bed to a different location within the room. I remember making changes late at night a few times when not being able to sleep. (I don't think that mom approved - especially when coming to wake me in the morning & things being different to how they were when she said good-night!) It was important for me that I could change things - make them my own in this small way. I must remember to allow my daughter to move her room around as she pleases one day too. ..and also remember that even though I am her mother, I will not always know what's best for her.

My parents have decided to make a move from life in our family home, and so they have put their house of 20+years on the market. Because I have not lived there for so long, I am not overly concerned about being sentimental that it won't be our family home any more. Our family home will be wherever my parents are - which, for the next chapter, will be their newly renovated lock-up-and-go flat in Mosselbay where we spent Summer holidays swimming in the sea, tanning on the beaches & walking through the streets on hot Summer nights (dodging cockroaches) with after-sun on our skin, the smell of the sea in our hair & ice-creams in our hands.

Romeo & Juliette?

Someone I'm following in Pinterest posted this image:

Skeletons locked in eternal embrace. It could be humanity's oldest story of doomed love. Archaeologists have unearthed two skeletons from the Neolithic period locked in an eternal embrace and buried outside Mantua, Italy, just 25 miles south of Verona, the city where Shakespeare set the star-crossed tale of Romeo and Juliet. After being found at the site where a factory is planned, people worldwide have speculated on the circumstances surrounding the couple's deaths. They are thought to have died young because they both had all their teeth intact. But beyond that, the skeletons are a mystery. Archaeologists announced Monday that they will move the entire block of earth the skeletons are resting in for further study and eventual display in a museum. source

This image touches my heart & makes me want to have a really good sob...It is incredible that there is the skeletal evidence of these two people who tenderly faced each other, entwined in embrace at the moment of death & so far beyond.

I look at this image & try and imagine what is most moving about it...
It could be that it is so obvious that they loved or were infatuated with one another - whatever the circumstances around their death...
...or that it is so beautiful that two people who adored one another, have their remains on this earth - that they have not been separated after death...
...or that I see myself lying in a similar posture with my love - close to him each precious night & I feel so blessed to have him - knowing we have a limited time on this planet together in human form: it makes my heart ache to think of it ever ending.