As I re-read last year’s Spring Equinox thoughts, I realise just how many seeds planted back then are now growing strong. Beginnings have become the reality of life. My mother and her helpers are now a part of Team Banksfoot. We have found wonderful people to rent her house who get on with other pre-existing tenants. They love the place and are part of the workforce that maintains Mum’s estate. They are perfect.
Bad rice!
Dismantling her house has been without a doubt the most existentially challenging experience I have handled to date. I know in order for rebirth, for resurrection to happen, an ending is as important as a beginning. Without an ending there can be no rebirth.
The timelessness of parenting brings with it memories of one’s youth. Through raising children, one can revisit and heal pain from childhood. It can be an emotional roller coaster ride but in the end, the job well done in our children brings all the reward necessary to know that it is indeed fighting the good fight!
Taking my mother’s house, previously my grandmother’s house, down to ground zero, erasing over 50 years of our family’s lives there, without my mother’s guidance, can only be likened to six month of intensive deconstruction therapy. My sister, my daughter and I all began our lives there. Our first impressions of the world are from there. It has been a constant in a world of changing cultures. At the end, there was no celebration of a job well done just a blank canvas for someone else’s new start. The end of an era.
Banks House is dead. Long Live Banks House!