This House Was For Joy

Today I paid a man to take my lights down but I couldn’t watch it happen.

Department store chandeliers were disconnected and lowered into bubble wrap and cardboard boxes, the glass beads tinkling in protest as they sank out of sight, like a ballerina into a stage trapdoor. A heavy pink marble mirror was scooped off the wall - revealing hideous screw holes - then sat sulking on the floor waiting for the removal men. I filled the gaps, just proud of the surface, like I had learned from a hardback manual in 2003, and waited for the filler to dry. Soon I will sand it and then I will repaint the wall in the same delicious deep green, dreamy blue or delicate pink. We will leave this house as we would wish to find it, I suppose.

I couldn’t watch the lights coming down because I have become ridiculously sentimental about the small things. It would be like watching the sails being lowered on a voyage that had been cut short. Yes, we are drifting towards another destination and that is precious and wonderful. But my goodness, leaving a house that you have poured all your suppressed love into in less than two years is surprisingly affecting. I lived in a sterile home for seven years - the walls had to be white and clear of shelves and photos. It was like rattling around in a bleached box with no anchor and no heart. We became ghosts there. So within three weeks of moving in to this house, the painting had begun. And it continued for the next eighteen months. My daughter scrawled “this house is for joy” on the windows with markers; the garden was dug up and turfed and paved and replanted, bouffant with hydrangeas; no wall was left to stare at me with a stern white face.

After the boxes were gone and the painting was mostly done, we relaxed into our new home – adjusting to the colour and the light and the space and the hope. Everything became easy; we learned a new language. Is this paint colour getting us down? Change it. Is this light not right for the room? Swap it. Is this piece of furniture blocking something? Move it. What magic was this. We slowly understood what a home could be. It’s the crusty corners of cottage pie; it’s porridge sticking to the pot like glue; it’s the hum of the washing-machine; it’s cartwheels on the grass and listening to music on the radio in the sunshine. It’s knowing that none of that has to end or be limited; that clouds will never gather again.

Here are the moments that I will pack up with me:

Sitting at the kitchen table at dusk - watching the pink, turquoise and gold lanterns threaded onto green twine at the end of the garden light up for barely fifteen minutes - five little lighthouses signalling to me that another day was done; that I was finally home; that this space would always be shhh shhh so calm and always, always ours.

Lying in bed and seeing everything at once: the cornflower blue walls bleeding into the pale pink hall then into the grey-green bathroom – the perfect alchemy of colour.

Walking into the kitchen in the morning with a worry about something and letting it tumble out of my brain as flouncy flower upon flouncy flower winked at me from the garden – the ridiculous hydrangeas, the devastating peonies, the prim camelias and the wild and heedless lavatera.

We sank into this house; it settled into our bones. We wrapped ourselves round each other needily and something quietly and slowly healed us – like good chicken soup or the love of your mother.

People talk about fixing a house up – but maybe, just maybe, a house can fix us.