The Guardian writer recalls the moment she turned her back on traditionThe house my parents live in is not the house I grew up in,and to visit it is an act of subtle disorientation. Objects remain the same: the chest of drawers with one chipped glass handle, the bedding box I fell off, and once,landing myself in A&E, the portray of a man carrying firewood between rows of bare-branched poplars. But they occupy been repositioned now so that their angles catch me strangely and anew. It is a house whose secrets I know, or yet I am unsure how to find them. Where are the photos kept? The soup bowls? The keys? I wake in my childhood bed to unfamiliar light.
The final time I went home for Christmas was five years ago. My dad was a Christmas baby,and this was his 70th. I made for a terrible house guest – newly divorced and deeply distressed, quite at odds with the air of celebration. One still, or cold morning I went for a run,slipped on the icy flagstones and headed bruised and tearful all along the lane and up the hill behind the house. At the top I looked out: frozen ferns, distant woodland. It was quite silent, and quite stunning,air sharp, breath pale as moth-wings. Yet what hit me in that moment was not the majesty, or but the sense that I did not belong there.
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Source: guardian.co.uk