Goodbye Station Road

You have been a happy home. I didn't want to say goodbye yet but as with all good things in life, you are transitory. You will become just another memory in my constant journey of life, in our dream for more and big. But you will always hold a special place in my heart because you adopted me right from the time I arrived and gave me such a full life filled with love and people. Like some people I am emotional about everything in life including moving houses. 

I am in the thick of packing now, it is like slipping into a memory, of the time I was saying goodbye to India to travel the miles. As I clear up and look at the empty spaces, I think I think I was filling up my life with as much as I could hold. In exactly three days, we change our address. I think I prefer a sweet goodbye hug to a goodbye forever to a past lived in love.

It is maddening – getting things organised from the removalists to carpet cleaners to chucking away old stuff which has been sitting in nooks and corners of the house. In some ways, it feels cathartic; in many ways there is a tinge of sadness, sadness of, say, leaving my neighbours who had become such close friends. Lynn for one would weed my garden when we were away, she would drive me to the station on days that poured, she would give me zucchinis from her garden and she would take my clothes from the hanging lines. Who would not fall in love with such a sweetheart? I don’t know who my new neighbour will be and whether he or she will have some semblance of Lynn.  This moving away from my familiar surrounds and the streets is a bit sad but I am leaving Lynn with promises of meeting over coffee and lunch.


So this is what my life is going to be for the next days, weeks or months. Pack, unpack, clean, unclean, arrange, rearrange, buying new furniture, de cluttering… urghhh!! I wish we could hire a decorator and build dream rooms in each but alas we have to bank on our not so aesthetic sensibilities and perhaps with some help from Home & Gardens we will be able to create something out of our fantasies. What you itch for is not always what you get though! Someone has already warned me ‘there are going to be some disagreements’. Of course yes! I don’t want a bigger TV and I don’t want a bigger fridge, we are not a family of five, so I would better invest in a good coffee table or a classy rug!  A home is what the people inside the house make of it, not because of the things you fill it up with, that’s true. But to be honest you can’t have an ugly chair sitting in the corner, I would be depressed looking at it. I will be using some house therapy for sure.

In my life of packing and unpacking, this one is an exciting phase knowing I’d lived in a two small room space back in Delhi where I literally operated out of my bed – eating, working on the laptop and even sleeping with my dog at one time. I remind myself how lucky I am to experience this new space – I will have my big wardrobe, I will have a yoga and reading space and an office which will be my hub of inspiration. I will also be able to do maintain my kitchen garden. I will be able to lead a nurturing lifestyle, until change strikes again!