Have you ever?
// October 27th, 2009 // No Comments » // awesomeness, rambling
been to a place for the first time and it seems really familiar? What about if you go to that place and feel more at ease there than just about anywhere else? What if that’s not even in the same country you live in?
A long time ago when I was a kid I heard a song by John Denver (hey, don’t blame me, my parents were the ones playing it!) which had a line something like “he was born in the summer of his 27th year, coming home to a place he’d never been before”. The second part of that line has always intrigued me. I think I truly understood it for myself the first time I went to Ireland in 1996. And I’ve understood it afresh every time I’ve been there since.
I was born in Ireland but we moved as a family to Australia when I was four. I can remember landing in Singapore on the way here and seeing people who looked really different to people I knew out the window. I also remember how taking off and landing hurt my ears so badly I thought my head would burst. And I remember my dad chuckling as we looked out the window to see the tin sheds which made up the airport.
And while I have vague, random memories of things like snow (it was cold and hard, not soft and fuzzy like I thought it should be) and the flowers on Grannie D’s back porch (to this day I still love Jasmine). There’s also a discrete memory of the blackberries and raspberries at my other nanna’s house, as well as fighting dragons with my imaginary sword, but there was a lot I didn’t remember.
