Day 30: The House Across the Street

With my birthday only 10 days away, I couldn’t have asked for a more fitting afternoon than seeing the house I was born in. I was born in London a year and five days after my older sister was born. My parents bought their first house on a quiet street in South Woodford and that was the first house I ever lived in. We only lived there a short while after I was born before we moved to America, but as it was the first house they ever had, it is still the house my parents have the fondest memories of. 

South Woodford Station

As I stood at South Woodford Station awaiting Caroline to pick me up, I tried to imagine what my parents were like when they lived here. I wondered what they did, where they went, what they looked like. Where did they shop? Which restaurants did they eat at? How many of these stores were still the same? How many of them had changed or were gone forever. I tried to imagine how many times my mother must have come to this tube station and where she would have gone and what she would have done. 

Did she go into London to do her shopping, to go to the museums or parks or to visit my dad at the hospital? Did she leave from here with only her purse and return with way more shopping bags than she could carry? What did she buy? What was she like? My mom was younger than I am now when she had me. It was funny imagining my mother, a younger woman than I am now, walking around these streets carrying me.

 

Mom outside the house w/ my sis (1973)

Our first house.

Caroline picked me up in her racy red mini-Copper and I met the Mr. Caroline to be, Dan. Dan and Caroline looked like they were meant for each other. It didn’t take more than a minute to see that. With their impending wedding only weeks away, I was beyond touched that they took the afternoon off to spend with me. As Caroline drove through the “scenic route” to Ashbourne Ave., to the street where my parents first house was perched directly across from the house Caroline grew up in, I tried to comb my memory for anything that looked familiar, none of it did. It wasn’t until we pulled up to the street and I saw the house did the memories start flooding back.

The white pole is our house, Caroline's is just across.

Looking at the house and the street now, everything seemed smaller. Walking across the street to Caroline’s house when we were kids seemed like a mile away, and now, only a few steps! The brown walled house with white trim, on the edge of the street was familiar to me, mostly because I remembered it from old photographs. The windows seemed newer, as did the front porch and the driveway.   Many of the original families who lived on the street, still lived there today as did Caroline’s parents. What a different life I would have had, a different person I would have become if my parents still lived here, if they never decided to move to the States. I sat there and wondered that for a moment how an entire life could change on a single decision.

Fish and Chips Sunday!

Caroline’s parents, Jean and Burt, are just about the most wonderful people you will ever meet. Unpretentious, warm, caring and hilarious to sit with. They made me feel so welcome immediately. It wasn’t more than a minute before the kettle was brewing and tea was being served. The conversation moved from the past to the present and back, from LA to London and back. We talked about so many good memories we had, and they talked about my parents. Hearing about my mom and dad as a young couple just starting off, made me realize just how much they had accomplished and how far they had come in their lives. What a journey they had made from the small villages they grew up in, to a little house on a quiet street in London, and then all the way to Los Angeles. It was heroic really when I thought about it.

The sweet shop is now a radiator store! What!

We drove up the street to where we were to have lunch. The little sweet shop that we used to walk to as kids to buy Smarties and toffees was now a radiator gallery. What a shame that was. I didn’t remember the street very well, but I did remember the turn up the street to get there, and at that time it seemed a million miles away, when it was in fact only one block. Funny how the world seems so large when you are little.

Fish and chips for lunch was the perfect meal for this day. Listening to the laughter around the table as I ate my first taste of mushy peas and munched on thick-sliced chips, I was so happy inside, so satisfied. I was nostalgic for a past I knew little about, but felt it deeply anyway. I wished my parents would have been here. They would have really enjoyed this. Overstuffed from a hearty lunch of fried cod, salt and vinegar chips and peas, we headed back home. And again, no sooner had we sat down, than the hospitality of this benevolent family came flowing again. Warm tea and tasty apricot tart for dessert. This was love thy neighbor at its finest.

The Almost Married

Dan and Caroline

Caroline’s father was still working at 71 years of age as a scaffolder, a young man’s job perhaps, but to hear him tell jokes and talk about John Wayne movies, made me certain he was young at heart. Caroline’s mother was a bubbly burst of endless energy and warmth. A grandmother now, she talked about her grandchildren with such loving tenderness you knew she was made to be one. I could see how my mom and her would have become instant friends, their effervescent personalities could keep the chill, and the silence, out of any room.

Waiting for tea and apricot tart

As I took some final shots on my departure, I knew this day was a special one, a very special one. Looking at their faces through my lens, I realized this wasn’t a moment that happened often, and who knew if it would ever happen again. This week the world was falling apart around us. Japan struggled to recover after ten days of a devastating tsunami and earthquake, fighter planes had gone into Libya, and here we were, all together, in a small town, in a single house, across the street from where my parents bought their first house decades ago, sharing a meal and laughter together. 

How was that for incredible? How was that for timelessness and resilience in a world of short sighted disposability and chaos? In a world as disheartening as ours has been in the last few weeks, I realized we are only as good as the relationships we have with one another. How we care for and love each other in a world that is falling apart, says everything about who we are.

Lovely ladies across the street

Tonight reminded me of that and gave me a hope I needed to feel again. Caroline’s mom told me my mother was the first person who spoke to her when they first moved into the house across the street. She had already had Caroline’s brother and was pregnant with Caroline at the time. 

Camillias

Two young moms met across the street and exchanged hellos for the first time and here we were, over thirty years later, daughters of these two young mothers, coming across the street to share hellos again. I was touched, I was moved and I was grateful to be there. I took a deep breath and inhaled the entire moment;  Jean’s laugh, Burt’s accent, Caroline’s witty retorts, Dan’s red hair, the warmth of the tea cup in my hand, the lingering taste of sugar and apricot on my lips, the color of the red couches we sat on, the plush of the carpet below my feet, the fading day outside the windows, all of it, and inhaled it deep into my lungs and kept it there. This was a moment I wanted to remember forever.

One BEAUTIFUL Family

As Jean and Burt dropped me off back to my place, I hugged them for as long as I could in my goodbye with a deep and hopeful wish that I would return to see them again. I could not help but tear up a little as I walked away, for the warmth of these two people who had cared so well for me today, who had showed me so much love.

You will be missed.

They had known my parents before I had even known them. They held parts of my history I would never know. The parts of a time long ago, when two young couples just starting out, lived across the street from each other and had the whole wide world ahead them.