Hiraeth (heer-eyeth) is a wonderfully evocative Welch word I recently learned. It's defined as a homesickness for a place to which you can never return; nostalgia or yearning for the lost places of your past.
The picture above, taken from Google Earth (2007), was the home of my maternal grandparents. The size of the yard is distorted -- it looks absolutely huge -- but in a way that's appropriate because in my earliest memories, it was huge -- a great, green grassy empire that was all mine.
When I was very young and my father was in that mysterious place known as ‘overseas,’ my mother and I lived for a time with my grandparents. And later, when my father came home from WWII, I continued to spend a great deal of time here. My family lived just around the corner but I spent a great deal of time at my grandparents' house -- I even had my own bedroom.
The new owners seem to have made very few changes -- at least as of seven years ago when this picture was taken. I can look at the picture and remember so many different times -- much like Miss Birdie's hall of doors I posted about on Christmas Eve. But here the memories are all good.
My earliest memory is of lying in a crib between the two big beds in the master bedroom upstairs while my grandfather in his bed held my left hand while my grandmother in hers held my right . . . and the fresh smell of pillows put to air in the sunny eastern windows . . . and later when my younger brother and I were both there for the night, how we would sit on little stools in the big bedroom and eat apples while we listened to the Lone Ranger on the radio . . .
Above the garage was a bare room, in the late Forties and early Fifties home to a ping pong table and my grandmother's treadle sewing machine -- remodeled in the early Sixties into an apartment where I lived while John was stationed in Japan a year after we were married.
I rode my bike along that sidewalk when I was a gawky pre-teen and later my grandfather took my older son for walks there. I looked out those windows to the right of the front door and saw John (only a classmate and acquaintance at the time (8th grade or thereabouts) driving his go-cart on the sidewalk across the street.
And from the breakfast room windows to the left of the garage, I would watch for John when he came in his Model A to pick me up during our senior year of high school. And our wedding reception was held here and we ran down the front steps in a flurry of rice in 1963 -- just as my parents had in 1941. . .
Of course the memories of this beloved place have crept into my writing. A Christmas post a few years back about an incident when I was young (HERE) surely contributed to Miss Birdie's Christmas memory (though without the bitter part.)
And while I do, indeed, have hiraeth for this lost paradise, I know that I'm where I belong and where I want to be. But I still love prowling that hall of memories. . .
