I just returned home after spending time in a house in an impossibly picturesque location. The return to ‘normal’ life can sometimes be tricky to navigate. But here we are, sun shining, music playing, doors wide open. And the gate. The gate that holds so much for me is wide open and my son just disappeared through it to start a ‘harvest’. Let me tell you something about the gate and about home….
There is a gate at the bottom of my garden. A small, unobtrusive wrought iron gate that has lost its latch. A rusty bicycle D-lock has been used to keep it closed since before we moved here. The gate is closed now, but from this angle all I can see is the narrow opening between zesty Japanese spindle and the virginia creeper that envelopes the shed.
I can walk from the house through the centre of our lawn, unhook the bike lock, and make my way up this steep little grassy bank, taking care not to get caught in the sticky weed [goose grass]. In two steps I am out into the open spread of allotments. Beyond the allotments there is an athletics ground and beyond that a tree line that hugs the river and then only sky.
It was the gate that sold us the house. Well, the allotments too, with its patchwork of plots and rickety little sheds. Sometimes it is as if our garden is as vast as the panoramic skies that surround us. I like to watch people coming and going, their activity a marker of the seasons. It is busy now, humming with activity - human and animal. Sometimes it seems as if everyone is a gardener now. But, as much as I love to push my fingers into soil, I feel like more of a gentle steward to the plants we inherited and the wild flowers we’ve let grow in the gaps. It’s one area in my life where I am happy to give up control and the garden rewards me tenfold.
But it was mostly it was the gate that sold me the house. It didn’t necessarily matter where it led. The reason I loved it and still do is that is symbolises possibility, a porous border between our land and the rest of the world. This feels a little subversive here in a world of high fences, Ring doorbells and ‘suspicious sightings’ reported on neighbourhood Facebook groups.
The gate feels like an invitation.
We made friends with Mario, who tends to his tomatoes with almost religious devotion, his Italian accent still thick despite forty years of living here. We sit and chat, and my child marvels at the height of his autumnal bonfires. When he’s not there, we trespass on the edge of his allotment, watching the large skies turn gold and pink, waiting for the foxes.
We’d moved here from a city, where we studiously avoided eye contact with our neighbours when standing mere feet away at our respective kitchen sinks. If I stood in our tiny garden with my arms outstretched, my fingertips touched the fence on each side. Although we were so very grateful to have it. It was a struggle sometimes, with a small baby, to accept the inevitable intrusions into our homes that comes with living in a densely packed city.
We were all in each others’ homes, but it rarely felt like we had been invited.
Before that I had lived in Cambodia, where climate as much as culture dictates that much of life is lived outside. For a time, when I lived rurally, the dark interior of the home was where you slept. Everything else happened outside. But even when it wasn’t necessary to conduct life out in the open, so much of life did take place outdoors and communally.
And before Cambodia, I spent my 20s living in Victorian back-to-back terrace housing in Leeds, surrounded on three sides by strangers with our front doors opening straight out onto the pavement. Life also spread out onto the streets. Laundry hung across the houses, kids set up paddling pools on the streets during heatwaves, student parties spilled out onto the pavement and moved between houses. I know I’m romanticising all of this now, but that is only because these places were home and not being able to be in all my possible homes at once tugs at my heart in such a way to make that everything becomes nostalgically rose-tinted.
I suppose I mean that I never expected or intended to end up where I am, and I sometimes find myself pining for elsewhere. But I’m happy we are here. There is possibility.
The skies are huge beyond that gate. There could be anything there.
Thank you for reading x