Meditations on home

There's no place like home 
-The Wizard of Oz

 I have lived in many houses, but only a few homes. I still refer to my childhood house as home, talking about going to Warrnambool as 'going home'. For that house, I know the way the carpet feels on my feet as I pad down the hallway to the bathroom in the middle of the night. I know the sound of the sea rolling in the distance on a clear night, or the crisp whistle of the train on an early morning. I know the history of the town, the shipwrecks that occurred on the rocky coastline, the story of a ship that could be seen from the top of Tower Hill passed down through our family. This is the home that shaped me, my identity punctuated by moments from that house and our family.

In the first house Rohan and I owned together, we found our life punctuated by two sets of blasting. One at 6.45 in the morning and the other at 6.45 at night, as the goldmine beneath us set off their blasts. History lay under and around us, from the weathered old tree stump supporting the front corner of the house, to the shingles tucked in under the tin roof, to the street that we lived on and which was part of the rich goldfields history.

When we bought this new house, I set about creating an assemblage of home in my head. Drawing on the homes I'd lived in before, the magazines I'd bought and flicked through, the descriptions of homes in countless novels, all of this went into the melting pot as I imagined and visualised what this home might be. I know fragments of the land's history around here, of the timeline of Irish settlement, of the owners of our house and our land, but there are gaps I still need to investigate. Who was it that first planted the pines which grow large and tall around the border of the land? What echo can be heard in the paddocks of the traditional owners of the this land, the Wutherong people?

As I wandered in the shops the other day I came across Great Ocean Quarterly, and in sitting down to read the editorial today over breakfast, I fell totally and completely in love with it.
 If you can read sideways, you might find the line that is one of my favourites 'But something's really happening when we're supposedly doing nothing - we're flat out building memories'. I love this line and it speaks to me of what's been happening here at Innisfree over the last couple of weeks. While we haven't exactly been lying around doing nothing, what we have been doing is building memories and putting the assemblage from our heads into a concrete, tactile form. Suddenly, this house begins to feel like home. It fills with family and friends who drop in for a visit, with our dinner conversations each night, with moments of laugher and discovery as we get our head around this new home. Yesterday the house was filled as we had some of Rohan's family here to celebrate Mabel's 92nd birthday. 

Today, we returned to the old house to grab last bits of shelving, cupboards and odd boxes. We're ready for painting now and this part of the journey is coming to a close. We came home this afternoon and decided it was time to pay homage to the Italians who had owned the house before us - it was time for pasta making! We dragged out our pasta machine that I don't think we had used since we lived in Melbourne. Soon we were kneading and rolling and fluttery strings of pasta lay over the clothes horse waiting for their dip in the water. 

I'd roasted beetroot from the organic farm across the street for a salad yesterday and decided that I'd use the leftover in a sauce for the pasta, mixing it with  walnuts, and then topping the lot with goats cheese (the most amazing Chèvre cheese from the Meredith dairy), and rocket. The pasta was silken and light and fantastic. I declared that I would 'never eat bought pasta again'. Rohan laughed, having heard this about 11 years ago when we lived in Melbourne. Still, the road to hell is paved with good intentions and homemade pasta isn't a bad one to have on the list!