It was in early July, before the rainy season had quite lifted, that I was told my grandmother’s house was to be torn down.
That old house, where I was left every summer holiday as a child, was for me a kind of sanctuary that the passage of time had forgotten.
To see it one last time, I boarded a train home for the first time in years.
The fields sliding past the window were exactly as I remembered, but the shopping street by the station had changed beyond recognition, and where the sweet shop I used to visit had stood there now spread an unfamiliar car park.
When I turned the key and stepped inside, the familiar air — dust mingled with the smell of tatami — swept thirty years away in an instant.
In the dim living room my grandmother’s beloved tea cabinet still stood untouched, and when I pulled open a drawer, out came a bundle of faded photographs.
Turning them over, I found dates written in my grandmother’s thin, meticulous hand.
A grandmother still young is laughing on the veranda.
Beside her, the small child I was, in a straw hat, is squinting against the glare.
People go, houses are pulled down, towns change their face.
And yet what has settled deep in this chest of mine is the one thing no one can tear down.
Standing in the garden at dusk, looking up at the crape myrtle left to grow wild, I could not move for a long while.
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