The House, Part Two.

Continued from yesterday. Come on in... this place is eerie.

Enter the house and it's almost enough to jarr your brain. One room is newspapers, stacks and stacks of them piled neatly and orderly– or once, they were, before the weather and the rats and time itself took to them.

Weather, and rats, and time. There is no graffiti on the walls, no fires set, no coke cans and chip packets to give squatters away. It feels as if no one has breathed the air of this house in, quite literally, years.

The newspapers go back for years. I find one dated 1940.

In the front hall is a drift of unopened mail– five hundred letters, maybe more. I open one and the date is 1971 and I feel like an intruder for the first time, a thief of memories and a breaker of sealed tombs.

This house is unsettling, strange and quite crew and so fascinating. The light is fading, but that is not the source of my frustration– I wish my eyes were bigger, to take more in.

The kitchens still holds a refrigerator, a stove, pots and pans and cooking utensils on the walls. There are jars with labels still attached, and I want one to take home with me but the roof has fallen in across the entry to the kitchen, long splintered wooden boards creating a huge diagonal gate across the doorway.

Another room is art supplies. There are shelves all around the walls, stacked with canvases and paint and brushes and palettes and easels. The floor is knee deep in paper– journals and diaries and notebooks with nothing special in them I can see, just names and dates and the occasional phone number. There is paperwork here of all kinds– loan statements with tiny paper stubs filled in by hand when a payment was made, letters to and from various organizations, dockets and shopping lists. A calendar on the wall has been frozen still in the 1960's. The only thing I don't see is artwork.

*Ahem* Obviously, the yellow is added by me.

In fact, the only artwork in the house I miss entirely the first time I am there– is it too dark to see the room, once, I think, a living room, that he stands in.

It's when I come back a second time I discover him, and then only by the flash of my camera, the day is so overcast. He stands in the lounge room, along with a piano that was literally terrifying when I tried it, the sound of untuned keys that hadn't been touched in years echoing in this strange house.

This house– that standing statue man in particular– are all kinds of weird and, to be honest, so fucking strange.

Clothes seem out of date with utensils, which seem out of date with all that paperwork, which is out of date to the letters in the hallway. It's as if some massive, silent clock has stopped ticking... But in different rooms, at different times.

Yesterdays orb, close up... quite possibly a raindrop. And not nearly as impressive as the last orb.

I went back only once, to take photos, and felt unsafe without my dog. In fact, I felt damn unwelcome... call me all the crazy you want, but that house has a very stale, very bad vibe.

And I know where I'm not wanted. I try not to tempt fate, when it's already bitten me once.

The House, Part One.

A photo heavy post, which is why it's in two halves....

The very last time I take my dog Scarlette for a walk was the first- and, if I'm honest, only- time I've taken a proper, long walk around the TinyTrainTown. No particular reason why I haven't walked more... time constraints, I suppose, and the general unpleasantness of it- while the scenery is bushland and muted green scrub and entirely beautiful, the cars screaming past at a hundred clicks an hour are not.

But the first time, optimist that I am, Scarlette and I walked for a good two kilometers down the road from the TinyTrainHouse, and we walked it quickly, given that my children were in the safe hands of my mother and there was no toddler-paced dawdling to slow us down. We walked past a church, the train lines, a row of rotting, disused telegraph poles with porcelain caps still attached to the top. We walked past houses, mostly newer and brick or clad, some older and wooden and mysterious.

Front yards are varied- large and small, some have fences, some not; some are overgrown and snarled with brackenfern and spiky blackberry bush, grevillea and small eucalyptus. Very few are manicured, but most are neat and somewhat tidy, the debris of busy lives poking through- a bike dropped there (at least it's safe enough here, still, for children to drop their bikes on the front lawn and lope freely through their front door without even the thought that it may be gone when they return for it); a pile of timber destined for the council pick up here, toys and tools and the junk that makes up people's lives settled comfortably around garden beds that are occasionally, maybe even lovingly, tended to.

That is why I pay no particular attention to the block of land I am approaching. It's a large block, obviously, the overgrown tendrils of it's suburban–ish jungle poking out and falling over themselves to get past a structure of rotted wood and rusty wire that I think was once a fence.

It's when I get to what used to be a letterbox that I actually look, see beyond three feet in front of me.

Standing there, set back from the road and covered in what looks to be fifty years worth of overgrowth– is a house.

I'm thrilled. Urban decay... I love this shit.

If you're a suspicious, hopeful skeptic like me... you'll be wanting a close up of those orbs. Tomorrow, I promise.

This house has boards of wood missing and it's paint faded long ago. The miniature jungle around it has taken over, not only covering the house and, on closer inspection, the handful of outbuildings; but growing into it and through it, clutching at windowpanes and forcing itself into cracks in the floor.

One of the outbuildings is–was– a laundry. It still has a massive old fashioned wringer machine tub, and a fireplace to boil water for washing. There is a cracked and greed mirror still hanging on one wall.

There are still clothes here. Women's clothes, which may have been quite nice or quite cheap in their day, I can't tell. Some are crumpled on the floor, dusty piles that I can only imagine have nests of tiny rats in them; but some are still hanging oh the bamboo rod where they have been for... I don't know. Thirty years, forty? Maybe longer.

This house is so strange, it makes me catch my breath. Piled on what I'm guessing was the front verandah are boxes and baskets and old steam trunks. There are bags and shoes, hundreds of balls of wall and jumpers that look hand knitted. There are tools and art supplies rusting in amongst broken boards and an array of farcically miscellaneous objects, some women's things, some men's.

 To be continued....

The Catalogue of Loss

A whole year in, and things shift and change and slide into perspective.

I begin to catalogue my losses, all the things I am grieving for. I tally up what this has cost me. Because now, twelve months on, and I can let go of any lingering hope that things will change, that things will revert to normal, that the people who no longer love me will forgive me.

It takes a long time for shock like that to dissipate. A year, it seems, before you start to see things clearly.

It hurts to think of what I've lost, and it's natural to shy away from it. But there comes a point where you have to look it in the face... letting go, so you can move on.

I am not the person I used to be, and some people seem to love me less for it... but it's not something that can be helped. I miss the Purple Lori as much as they do. Occasionally, people mention that they'd like me 'how I used to be'. And that hurts too... because the Purple Lori is gone, for good now, and if I could I'd bring her back. But that's the equivalent of raising the dead, and that's impossible.

I miss the friends I used to have. All my friendships are different now, and few of them feel genuine. Two of my closest girlfriends, my bridesmaids, friends of mine for over ten years... I've lost them both. One hasn't spoken to me for eight months. No reason, no argument, no fall out... she just stopped calling, and I was still too far in a fog of grief of pain to make the effort. Charlie the shrink tells me it's easier for people to avoid me. Dealing with me, seeing me, talking to me... it hurts because they can see my pain. Having no contact with me at all, they still deal with their guilt... but that's much easier to ignore, much easier to turn away from completely if I'm not there, reminding them all the time.

And that other girlfriend I spoke of...? It happens with all friendships, most friendships, eventually, and it may have happened anyway. But she has drifted away from me, not nearly as enamored in this new Lori as she was in the Lori Before- I'm different, I've changed, she is busy... these things happen. Again, I understand that... I don't like me much either.

Two friendships, that maybe I didn't really need, that maybe I'm better off without... I know all the platitudes; I know that it's them, not me with the problem.... so save the niceties for some other blogger, please.

Two of my own friendships, added to all those other things... the extended network of Tony's friends; my Purple house and Purple life; my vision of the future, my five year plan; my sense of stability, safety and trust.

It just keeps adding up. The cost of it, the toll of that one moment of madness... the longer things linger, the more that choking dust of confusion settles... that first loss just keeps compounding. And the catalogue of loss, it just grows and grows and grows.

The World's Fussiest Eater... At A Top Seafood Reaturant

As we know from my Internet dating fail, I am a very picky eater. So dining at the Flying Fish in Pyrmont- apparently that's a very big deal- was totally wasted on me. Enjoy.




I think I mentioned a giveaway, right...? This one is a super special one, open only to jellybeans who subscribe to the RRSAHM fortnightly newsletter- all the best stuff, guaranteed spam free. Next issue goes out Friday February 3rd- giveaway included.