Veronika Wild

-Image by Copilot   There are in fact quite a few empty chairs around our dinner table of late. Youngest son has gone to work in Queensland. Two of the older granddaughters have just gone to Melbourne to study.  We knew this was going to happen. My daughter was looking forward to less squabbles about whose turn it was to take out the recycling or stack the dishwasher, less noise, a bit of space in the bathroom and less chauffeuring. But the house is so quiet. There’s not much excited chatter around the dinner table, no one needing a costume for tomorrow, no music blaring from bedrooms. Freedom is a strange thing. I felt the same when my daughter left for college, when my oldest son moved in with his girlfriend and when my big sister left for work in New Guinea. I wonder how the youngest granddaughter is taking it? An only child at last. No more nagging and bullying by big sisters, and yet...Who is there to play cards with or watch a silly movie? She won't be far behind....

The Science news of 2008 anyone? The weather is fine and the hills beckon, but I am stuck indoors sifting through past lives -mine and my children’s, and even that of the previous generation. My youngest son, having given up his flat in preparation for a move has brought three rooms worth of goods down to my little house and we have now have to sort through them. Two households into one simply won’t go and worse than that, I am being reunited with things that I thought I had managed to pass on years ago – old furniture, kitchen tack, books and bits. Usually I am the leavee with new adventures to pursue and have never had the slightest regret or thought about having to leave behind a few worldly goods. Not so this time. Easiest to deal with is the impersonal but useful stuff – kitchenware, tools and such, to which little emotional baggage is attached, though it is rather sobering to see some chain store bought items now being advertised as ‘vintage.’ It made me thin...