There's no place like Home

Doing a puzzle with my daughter this morning (meaning she dumped it out and I finished it), I had one of those homesick moments. The puzzle was a deteriorating wooden picture of an African elephant amongst thorny scrub land - one my little sister did when she was young. In the background, Phil Collins sang, "Take me home, cause I don't remember..." - a song I listened to as a teenager. It was a concerted attack on my defenses.

I never know what will trigger these moments - a song, a smell, a book, a picture - small things maybe, but piercing. Once inside, the memories of 'home' are insidious, a kind of masochistic torture. I know it is pointless to dwell on them: that home is gone.

I left home in 1991. I went to University in the USA and missed Malawi every day. I lived for the months I could go back. The first few years, I went back every year. I easily slipped back into old routine - play with my dogs, go out with friends, travel with my parents, visit favourite haunts, pop by school and talk to various acquaintances. All too soon years passed between visits. I didn't know as many people, places were transformed: life there moved on without me.

Before my parents left Malawi in 2004, I went to visit them one last time. They lived in the same house and, in some ways, much was the same. The dogs greeting me were the same, though grey-muzzled and slow-moving. The scraggly hedge still made an attempt to hide us from the road. I still woke to the raucous teasing of crows and the mournful crooning of morning doves. Mum still flip-flapped down the hall in her slippers early every morning. Dad still spent a couple of hours eating his breakfast then went out all day to visit his churches. But the servant quarters were empty, the swing set gone, high walls closed out most of our neighbours, the little dirt road outside was nicely paved, the words, "Long Live Kamuzu" no longer spanned the hill across the valley from our house. The changes weren't all bad, just shocking because I didn't see the years of small steps in between.

In 2007, mission friends from Antigua visited Malawi and stayed in our old house. Pictures of the house showed big burglar bars on all the windows, 7-foot high brick walls with razor wire replacing the hedge, metal gates, a re-arranged garden and an unrecognizable interior. I felt like crying. It looked fine, but it wasn't home - not mine anyway.

The house is gone. My parents are gone. Stella is dead. Our dogs are dead. I am grown up.

My childhood home is gone. And yet the memories persist. This must be what it is like to grow old.

Right>View from the house in the 1970s. Soche and "Long Live Kamuzu."