Sunday Blog 5 – 26 September 2021
Cobb St is my family home built in the 1960s. The photo above is how it looked in 1963 when my father was just getting started on six decades of home handyman projects.
I found a journal entry from this time last year, dated 26 Sep 2020:
“It’s the last days of Cobb Street and I stand in the driveway waiting for the slow steps of my mother, wheeling along behind the safety of her walker. I watch the sweet bobbing of a pair of birds, a species I don’t recognise. One is noisy, expressive, the other silent and focused on finding food. It’s like the noisy one fears it is missing out on the best morsels and protesting loudly while the quiet one gets on with the business of eating eating. The noisy one gulps down an indigestibly large nut of dubious calorific content. The quiet one flies away, the noisy one lingers.
In this space of inaction while waiting for my mother I loop back five plus decades and I’m ten again, a hostage to the dullness of childhood in this very same home my mother still inhabits.”
I have clearly gotten ahead of myself as Cobb Street is still going strong(ish) in 2021. In fact I have not long gotten back to my own home and unpacked after staying at Cobb St a week or so while we organised a new live-in companion for Mum. And it wasn’t even that dull.
I have been doing a bit of tidying hoping it may make it a little easier for an outsider navigate its eccentricities and execrescences of six decades of clutter. In doing I have sorted through documents that have flipped me back and forward between decades with that dizzying vortex feeling when I recognise that essential part of who I am never changes, but everything external does.