Six years since I left my home and garden in Creswick to live in a campervan…

In 1999 I created a new file which I called ‘Project Home Base’.

I was tired of renting. And while I loved share-housing, I was by then forty, had an array of chemical and food sensitivities, and it was becoming harder and harder to find interesting people of a similar age who actually wanted to live in a share a house. And every time I fixed things up or dug a veggie patch, the house was sold or we had to move on. I was tired of the drama.

So I created the file, and even though it seemed impossible, decided that somehow, somewhere, I was going to find myself a home that I could call my own, put down some roots, and nest.

And miraculously, at the end of that year I signed a contracts with a bank and with the previous owner of an old run-down weatherboard in a little town called Creswick, about 90 mins drive from Melbourne, just north of Ballarat, and was given the keys to my first ‘own home’.

This week marks six years since I turned the key on the lock of the door of that house for the last time, having handed it over to a new owner, and bought myself a camper van.

The story of this became my verse-memoir Vagabondage: about a year in which I lived in a toyota hiace camper van, parking in people’s driveways, out the front of their houses or in truck stops, on a search for a home within myself.

I loved my house and garden in Creswick, into which I poured ten years of work and creativity. And yes, I did a Ph.D while there, and wrote articles and pieces for radio, and produced a CD/Cd-rom set and a few other things… But when I think back to that ten years, it’s my relationship with that house and garden (rundown and overgrown when I first met it) — and all that I experienced within its walls and fences — that marks that time for me.

As my garden grew, so did I.

So in memory of that time, here’s one of the poems from Vagbondage. And if you’d like more photos of the house and garden at Creswick, here’s the blog I created back when I came to sell it.

Leaving this house

Leaving
is like breaking something

not a single crash smash on the floor
but a long drawn out rugged
exhausting
tearing asunder

God is in the details
as I pick them apart

The fine bones
The hush

I remember that first time
    unbidden
I heard it,
as I was outside walking
with my cup of tea
   singing
‘I love my house and garden’
(a frequent refrain)
and there it was

   and it loves you

And I felt the pulse of it all,
strong and steady.