A not-so-maudlin trip down memory lane ….
I’m in my 70’s now. I
am retired tho’ Rhonda still works – curse of the new world economics, I s’pose
– Kat is all grown up and has two sons of her own.
Today, Sunday, I was
awake early – sleeping late is not my ‘thing’ these days as I prefer an
afternoon nap of an hour or so.
While the house was still quiet I got to thinking on days gone bye. I tend to lean towards being a ‘melancholic’, being fundamentally introverted and deep thinking. I worry about things like not being on time for an event and I get preoccupied with being the perfectionist (I hate typos and fret if I find I have introduced one lol!), so much so that I do tend to become so involved in what I am doing I lose all contact with the surrounding world and forget to consider others. Often I have been doing something while I wait for Rhonda, for example, to start the washing up only to come out and find she’s already done it, or, while waiting for her to prepare a shopping list before we go shopping to discover her having been sitting at the table for fifteen minutes waiting for me.
While the house was still quiet I got to thinking on days gone bye. I tend to lean towards being a ‘melancholic’, being fundamentally introverted and deep thinking. I worry about things like not being on time for an event and I get preoccupied with being the perfectionist (I hate typos and fret if I find I have introduced one lol!), so much so that I do tend to become so involved in what I am doing I lose all contact with the surrounding world and forget to consider others. Often I have been doing something while I wait for Rhonda, for example, to start the washing up only to come out and find she’s already done it, or, while waiting for her to prepare a shopping list before we go shopping to discover her having been sitting at the table for fifteen minutes waiting for me.
Any-hoo-dee-doo-dee,
that’s all off the point. I was thinking back to the days just after we were
married. We had arrived in Canberra in the early 1970’s and life was full of so
much promise. Accommodation was very hard to find in the town of that time and
what was available was very expensive but the hospital I was to work for were
desperate to engage me. Rhonda was pregnant with Kat and had stopped nursing.
The hospital medical
superintendent at my new hospital offered us a year’s lease on a married quarters apartment on the
proviso we purchased a government block of housing land and began to build
ourselves our own home – which we did - a "win-win" situation for both he and myself. The nursing administration found Rhonda
a temporary position as a receptionist in the hospital School of Nursing. Things
were looking good but times were also tough. Australia had just come out of
recession and the economy was starting to blossom again. We divested ourselves
of our second car – Rhonda’s ‘little baby’, her first new car – and sold off a lot of our excess
furniture, pouring all our income into the home we were building.
Our new home was
(then) way out on the southern periphery of Canberra in the Tuggeranong Valley –
a place where no-one yet resided – and people questioned us to why we were
moving “…. So far out of town, in ‘the sticks’…”? But to us it was a dream, the
opportunity to build and own a new home, something we would have found
impossible to do if we had stayed in Sydney and we would have probably remained in
a rental apartment block if we had stayed in Sydney.
We had our ups and
downs, of, course. Kat was born – the first child born from among that hospital's residential area. My mum died, which really cut me up, and my father was also
to die not long after (I lost my best ‘mate’ when he died.) We did get into
our new home – the first occupants of a new urban development area - and we spent years fitting it out, carpeting,
curtains, furnishing, landscaping, manicuring gardens, putting in a portable pool
and a ‘play gym’ set for Kat, watching her grow and go to school nearby. We socialised with neighbours (who were, in the
main, young family couples like ourselves) and enjoyed our breaks away to the
south coast beaches whenever the opportunity presented.
They were ‘halcyon
days’. Those were the days of learning to be a parent and a family and doing parenting and family things. A
couple of my friends had also moved down from Sydney so we formed a little
group of Sydney expatriates and did things together like weekend barbecues and
picnics out along the Murrumbidgee River or the Cotter Reserve. We made lots of
friends at a time when Canberra was a very ‘family-focused’ city.
Times changed. Kat
grew up and fled the nest. I took on a brief career change into teaching.
Rhonda had returned to nursing. We became “DINKS” – Dual Income, No Kids! – and
were moderately well off.
We sold our home and
bought and moved into a townhouse which, coincidentally, had been built in a
new sub-division in one of the localities we used to picnic with friends.
Trees, creeks and paddocks were now roadways, concrete and brick homes and
macadam carparks. We purchased a holiday cabin at the coast and thought that
one day we would move to the coast in preparation for our retired years – a venture
we later reneged on owing to the social dynamics of growing older in a coastal
region deplete of the necessary ‘caring resources'. We were able to weather the worsening financial
situations of the late 1990’s, early 2000’s.
I went back to
nursing, in a round-about way, working in Injury Management and Occupational
Health Services (I later became the Safety Officer for several local government
councils). Rhonda kept on soldiering on at nursing as her career. Eventually, we found
our way back up ‘over the mountain’ and living once more on the southern slopes
and tablelands, ‘God’s country’ for us!
Those halcyon days
were long gone, a thing of our past, and there was no going back. We accepted what
we had as our lot, a thing of maturity I suppose, and always now to look forward
and rarely back and to think of what always would be 'best for us'. We learnt that we could indulge ourselves and enjoy life's finer offerings without feeling any 'guilt'.
Still, every now and
again it is good to sit and reminisce of those seemingly warm spring and summer
seasons, the colours of autumn and the warmth of a log fire in winter. Those days were the days of ‘wine and roses’, when your world was wide, life was good
and you thought you had it all.
Do I regret it? Not at all! Would I do it over again? Most definitely! Would I change anything? With the benefit of hind-sight, 'Yes', there are a few things I would undo, mostly mistakes I made that complicated what was otherwise a good life!
Do I regret it? Not at all! Would I do it over again? Most definitely! Would I change anything? With the benefit of hind-sight, 'Yes', there are a few things I would undo, mostly mistakes I made that complicated what was otherwise a good life!
5 comments:
What a beautiful and touching reminiscence. You had me smiling and remembering my own walk into maturity. Lovely post John.
Thank you!
When my mother first came to Australia from the UK she went into Government Housing - in Yarralumla. Everyone said she was mad, living so far out. One bus into town in the morning, another out at night. 1952. She stayed in that house. Was widowed. Remarried and had me. Widowed again. And yes, by the time she died Yarralumla was certainly not 'so far out'.
Yarralumla, today, is prime lakeside residential estate! Properties there are rarely advertised 'cos agents have a list of 'would be' buyers.
Thank you for sharing that part of yourself, John. I do so admire you and Rhonda, have I ever said?
"Just Me" xx
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