volume one hundred and thirty
used to be young
📍Written partly on the first day back to school after summer holidays — and in one case, the first-ever day of school — as excited chatter from my favourite children made its way in through my open window. The rest was written from Jinibara country (Maleny) with soft rain falling on the surrounding green canopy.
My beautiful cousin, just months separating us in age — meaning we have a lifelong bond over the Spice Girls — was the involuntary ear of my commentary as we drove around.
A trip to the grocery store, to pick up wanted stationary, to treat ourselves to an ice cream or meet up with others for lunch was an opportunity for me to see this place in all the ways I remember it. Ghosts of childhood, demons of young adulthood, memories I can laugh off to cover the pain and laugh off because they are genuinely ridiculous.
Some, I merely thought and didn’t say aloud because I was already talking too much.
“Oh, that little corner shop was one of the last stops before we were then venturing out of town and towards home! Last stop! Mum would grab last-minute things there, while I waited in our van. James Davidson walked out of there once when I was waiting, and I climbed the top half of my body out the window to ask him — well yell at him across the street — if I would see him at The Hot House Party, the underage dance parties that happened once a month. He said yes. I was thrilled. I was maybe thirteen.”
“Wow, my primary school looks so small. That hall felt so big when we held school dances in it. I think it is the same size as a house and I never realised. It was the biggest room I had ever been in back then. The classrooms are tiny, yet the group of children that filled them were the largest crowds I had ever been a part of, so they felt gigantic. These are the rooms I had the fear of God put in me, and where I first learned to break rules. Over the road is the hall where I went to Girl Guides! I think my first girl crush happened in that hall.”
“In Year 6, we would go to that basketball hall for sport and one day when we were all leaving my friend asked me if I dared her to pinch her boyfriend’s bum as he came out. I don’t remember my answer, but she did it and I was mortified. I think he was too.”
“That’s your old house! The one I lay in bed while everyone played at your birthday party because I was in so much pain and despite the doctor repeatedly telling her it was for attention she knew no small child would miss the fun of a birthday party. So off my Mum took me to another doctor who immediately found the source.”
“Oh, the real estate is gone! Where are the brothers now? I was always in love with the older one who would dance with me whenever we were at parties and nightclubs. He would spin me around and dip me. He was such a good dancer. We never kissed but the younger one kissed me a few times, only and always when he had a girlfriend.”
“This car park used to be a bookshop. Remember they wanted to extend the carpark, and the bookshop wouldn’t sell? Then it mysteriously burnt down and they got their carpark extension? I miss that bookshop.”
“Thank you for slowing down as we pass the butcher. As a vegetarian, it might be weird, but as someone who has been in love with Mr Lewis since a small child, it makes perfect sense. Thank you for getting it. I can see his dimples from the street.”
“This feels so strange, pulling up at this service station while the attendant chats with my cousin and pumps the fuel for her. This is the gas station where Josh Thompson’s dad worked. He used to do the same for my Mum. I was probably six years old. Every time he would ask me “How is my future daughter-in-law today?” then playfully put the air in my face before fixing Mum’s tires. Josh was my CRRRR-USSSSSSH in kindy and year one. If his Dad knew it, why didn’t he pass that along to his son? Huh? The weird part was my cousin getting back in the car and saying how they never do that for her there, that was the first time. I was supposed to be reminded of that moment.”
“That’s the house I was in one New Year’s Eve! It was the same night my sister started dating her forever love, now husband and father to their children. It was the same night that was the last night I saw my beloved dog before my first-ever-boyfriend broke into my house and stole him.”
“That is the first beach I was allowed to go on an outing without parents. My friend and I spent the day walking around town and then to here, but we never swam because she had her period and didn’t want to get attacked by a shark.”
“There is the apartment where I caught my first-ever-boyfriend cheating on me.”
“There is the next apartment he lived in, where I caught him cheating again… and took him back again. Thank god for my self-esteem being found eventually.”
“That art gallery used to be a community hall you could rent out really cheap and there were live bands there nearly every weekend until I think we all trashed it one too many times and new rules were put in place about who could rent it. I entered that place once hand-in-hand with my first-ever-boyfriend — my first-ever public display of affection — I wanted to disappear (but still wanted everyone to know).”
“Do they still have the all-you-can-eat buffet? We went there for dinner the night of the day that I got my tongue pierced and Mum paid $30 for me to eat a bowl of melted ice cream.”
“These houses overlooking the ocean were the ones I was always very jealous of. They look old and grimy now. I am still jealous.”
“This row of big houses was somewhere I thought millionaires lived. Then Emily Azzopardi moved to our school from the city and when we all got invited to her house she lived in one of them. My jaw hit the ground. Our girl band used to rehearse in her basement on weekends. I wrote the lyrics and sang. We were called Bluke and the Poison Apple and I have no idea why.”
“That is where the hot guy who worked at our uncle’s furniture shop lived. I know because I would leave there doing the walk of shame. Mum would have liked me to marry him, and that’s exactly why I didn’t… I mean, there were other reasons, of course.”
“Oh, my first-ever job doesn’t exist anymore! My second job finally completed the renovations they had slated to complete after the 2008 Olympics.”
“That’s the Chinese restaurant we celebrated one of our oldest cousin’s 21st birthdays. I remember it because I hated it. I hated it because I screamed at Mum all week to let me stay home so I wouldn’t miss Sabrina The Teenage Witch. Back in the days when TV ads would tease us between episodes, I distinctly hear little me telling Mum “But Mum! Sabrina messes with Libby’s mind!” as if that would make her say of course I could stay home.”
“That used to be a dollar shop, I think. It was the glass shop front I was shoved against by a drunk man who overheard a friend asking me about me being vegetarian. He called me a “hero”. Well, he accused me of being one, really. I ended up with one shoe and my bag in the bushes, a bruised chin, and a friend worse off after he stepped in to defend me. I still went to my destination, which was the nightclub upstairs and stayed out all night.”
“Below that nightclub used to be a tattoo parlour. I puked up in the garden out the front one morning because I was hungover but didn’t want to lose my deposit. My body was hurting from my belly to the skin behind both of my ears which had bled ink onto the collar of my poorly-chosen white shirt. A lady came to talk to me and told me to get some deep-fried prawns from the takeaway next door: “The best hangover cure”. I did not because a boy that was in love with me showed up with Powerade. Plus I am a vegetarian.”
Lovely reader, head into the comments and tell me one thing that happened where you grew up?
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here are three things I struggled with this week:
🪑 Same old stuff, just a different chair to agonize over it in.
🎚️ I already know the answer, so I need to start putting it into action.
🍞 I am allergic to gluten. Add it to the list of new allergies and note it as a devastating blow. I will move through this dark time.
here are three blessings from this week:
🐦⬛ New housesit has magpies that arrive at 6am for breakfast. I am already making friends.
📚 New housesit means a new book collection to peruse.
📴 New housesit is high up in the mountains which means I have no cell service when I leave the house.
here are three goals for the coming week:
💤 Naps.
😌 Breaks.
🌱 Invite the universe into my plan.
pics or it didn’t happen:
I love you. Now I am off to spend the weekend eating at every market possible, weather permitting.
A boyfriend and I lived on the same street, about a quarter of a mile apart. When he walked me home from his house late at night (and sometimes early in the morning) his cat would accompany us to escort him home.
*a lifelong bond over the Spice Girls"
I didn't have anyone to bond with, but I loved The Spice Girls. My excellent taste in women is proven yet again by my Mel C crush - she's never been anything but amazing. I read her memoir a few months ago, and it merely showed me how right I've always been 😁
Something that happened when I was a kid... Something that I actually want to remember... These things are not as many as I'd like, there's a reason I never go back there.
But I was always an explorer. I liked to just go out and wander. And every day I did a paper round, I'd walk oast this battered, rusted, set of old gates, the mud and dirt so ingrained and tick at the bottom that they couldn't open. There was a waist-high wall on one side, with a couple of feet of grace before the ground dropped off to the small river which ran under the road/bridge.
So one day I went out and hopped the wall. Then I walked up what must have been gorgeous driveway. The river burbling away to my left. Trees on either side. Mulched leaves and mud over the ground.
There was one spot in particular which, for some reason, resonates still with my brain. Just a thick canopy, light fomtering down through the leaves, one gnarled tree sat right at the edge, so you could sit at the roots and see the river. I loved that spot.
(I found out later that another obscure gate down on of the roads I did my paper round on would lead me around the vack of one kf the farms, and to the aanr place in the middle, just a thinner path and much less pretty.)
There was a very much neglected attempt at a small wire fence, which I stepped over with ease and carried on.
Eventually the treeline ended and opened into a huge field, with a steep hill up to the main road. But at the bottom, right in front of me, there was a crumbled ruin of stone. Some of it still stood - giant windows and doors. Some of it was mere stumps. Stone was scattered everywhere. And in one spot, though it'd have needed digging out to actually enter, was the entrance to a cellar.
I used to go to that tree when I wanted to sit and be alone where nobody else would come - because nobody ever did.
And I'd wander to that ruin and imagine what it had been like. The house had been owned by the family who owned all the land nearby - including the streets I grew up with. They were all named after which bits of farmland they'd been.
I trot out the memory of the place sometimes, when I need that peace and quiet in my head. I long ago excised some other memories around it, which involve someone else I have no wish to remember, and I just go to my tree.