As is so often the case, absence seems to be the catalyst for sudden change, as the return always gives things back anew, or altered at the very least. Sadly, so it seemed with this absence. On returning from our ten-day holiday we discovered that our neighbour Margaret had passed away.
A lovely woman, we had warmed to her, and she to us, immediately upon our moving into the house nearly twenty years ago. An expert exponent of the over-the-wall neighbourly natter, she would often pass the time with my wife Rachel and I discussing gardening, weather and a myriad other convivial topics of chit-chat. After the birth of our daughter, Margaret was always there with little cards and gifts for her special occasions.
I thought of these things, as well as the many jokes and gossip sessions, and how easily they’re taken for granted, as we greeted her final arrival in church with strains of Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer. I never was much of a singer, but I could at least manage this last little thing for her.
At the end of the hymn I flicked through the service booklet and my attention was arrested by a photo. Simple, black and white, and yet so full of energy. There they were – Margaret and her husband David, the bright young things, stripped of fifty years and a lifetime of cares, alive again and in each other’s arms. One hand was hooked around the small of the other’s back, the other hand clasped in mid dance as they leaned in smiling toward the camera – she beautiful and glamorous in pearls and a dark dress, he, every inch the dapper, handsome suitor, suited and Rat-pack smooth. I had never seen them like this; Margaret was already well into her sixties by the time we moved in and David passed away only a few years later, having never fully recovered from a stroke suffered before our arrival. How time catches up with us all, I thought quietly to myself.
But what about us? What changes had time wrought upon my family over the years since? Our daughter growing steadily through childhood and adolescence, the transition made from a weekend-oriented party lifestyle to a settled family existence; careers built and the expansion of my waistline keeping time with the recession of my hairline as I hurtled headlong toward the big four-o, a landmark now surpassed.
How she must have watched us, the bright young things, as we developed and matured, considering perhaps her own half-century in the street, the ways that time had tinted her days and ways and everything in between. Maybe, in those younger days captured by that photograph, our house had been occupied by an elderly neighbour who had watched on with fond amusement as Margaret and her family had navigated their way through life.
And so, the tides of our existences flow and ebb. I watched on as she was borne by her son Jeremy, and a small host of other relations, from the church at which she attended Mass for so many years, the church which I too had attended.
Jeremy is based in London now, his life built around work there, and I wonder now, as I wondered then, what will become of the house. Will he sell it? Rent it? Either way, it may well be time soon for new neighbours, perhaps a new family in the street or even a fresh-faced couple, bright young things, laying the first blocks of the long life that they will go on to build together.
