In the dream house

A love letter to all the untouched places

My childhood home is gone.

This is not a figurative declaration. The house I grew up in has been painted, renovated, reconfigured and blasted into modernity beyond all conceivable recognition. Whenever I’m feeling sentimental enough for a drive-by, I barely recognise the indigo blue Victorian weatherboard that housed my growing body for so many years.

I know nostalgia sweetens, but when I think of my time in that house, it’s like one long summer day. Ice creams melt over chubby fists, friends stay over for sleepovers on a weekly basis and the school holidays stretch out before us like a racetrack. The most stressful thing on my mind is making sure I fill out my reader with the latest chapter of Deltora Quest.

Life was sweet, simple, and my home was the centre of it all.

In memories, I pace creaky polished floorboards, open stained glass windows draped in trailing wisteria vines, stir milky Milos in a kitchen warped becomingly by age and play with Bratz dolls on a bright green carpet that never quite looked clean. I pick tiny sour cumquats from the tree in the front garden, build cubby houses in the towering pine on the nature strip with the neighbourhood kids and search for fairies among the wild rose bushes that grow unpruned by the window of my parent’s bedroom.

Now, bought by investors and given a facelift, the house is mushy pea green with a monstrous industrial kitchen and no wisteria in sight. Gone is the pine tree, the crumbling fence, even the ratty carpet that my mother swore she would replace when we learned to stop dropping food on it (we never did). It used to upset me; another vestige of childhood lost to the hungry beast of time. But what those eager investors didn’t realise as they slapped a coat of paint on the house and called it a bed and breakfast is that no amount of renovation can stop me from visiting the space as it was.

My childhood home might be gone, but in my dreams, it is untouched.

Every night I return to the bedroom I shared with my sister, full of treasures long disintegrated. I go back to uneven wooden floorboards, to a bathroom with rose-coloured tiles, to the lounge room that doubled as a concert hall for my elaborately choreographed performances and to the place I learnt to love words. I return to that house in sleep, and though it aches, I’m glad. I’m glad a space exists that will not crumble with age, that is mine and mine alone, shaped by memory and the sweetness of youth.

Dream analysts will tell you that dreaming of your childhood home represents a regression, a yearning for the past, but I say otherwise. My dream house exists as a refuge from the corrosion of time, and though my memories may fade, I believe that the house will always exist somewhere – in a little pocket of space just for me.