thirty-two

It is not quite the same house we moved into thirty-two years and a month ago, but it's fairly close. I can just barely remember what the back was like before the extension was built, including the enormous sappy tree and the weird ding-dong door-knocker. Nowadays when I smell cement power I still think of the smell of the cement being used to build the extension. The windows were all different, but the squeak and grind of the metal-framed windows on my bedrooms is not easily forgotten. The old shed is surprisingly hard to picture, but then it was fairly dark inside and was so stuffed with leaning bicycles it wasn't really somewhere you went for a look around. The garage smells the same as it always did, despite the fairly recent new door. The kitchen used to have a window and the living room had the door, but they were swapped only a few years ago, so still seem new. The back door, whilst technically an impostor, has one of the most memorable sound-sensations of the whole building, with a particular squeaky suck as the draught excluder disengages. The garden has been gradually neatened, particularly since I moved out, but the oak tree at the bottom is still there even if the wild cherry next to the hole through to next door is gone, along with the giant Leylandii which was next to my later bedroom. The roof tiles may still be the same ones. The wee cupboard in the eaves next to my first bedroom still contains some of the same things in boxes that were there when I would drag my duvet behind them to lurk there, listening to the Philips alarm clock radio I still have in a box in Edinburgh. The children have at least all been to visit it, even if they'll only remember through pur telling them about it.