Leaving the Attic

I found a picture the other day of the attic room the last time I saw it, empty of furniture and with the cat sitting on the shelf in the alcove peeping out – I suspect I was hoovering , and that was why she’d climbed up out of the way. I was to be the last to leave the house – to go out of the front door and close it firmly behind me, with the cat in her basket and all her paraphernalia (food bowl, water bowl, litter tray) and drive her to Ex Hubby’s new house. She’d been shut in the empty attic room while the removal men took everything from the rest of the house and loaded the van. E-H (let’s call him that for short) had been waiting for the call from the solicitors to say the money had been transferred and he could go into the office to drop off the keys and pick up the ones for the new house. Weirdly, in our previous house move I’d also been the one left behind to close up while he and the children went to collect the keys. So I was last to enter and last to leave this place, though I’d first left it over seven years earlier. I had to give him time to get to the office, exchange the keys and then drive to the new place – I may even have been waiting for him to call me to confirm he was in there, I can’t remember, in fact I’d forgotten about that day until I saw the photo.

I used to joke that my mid-life crisis started when I began my PhD at 38, and never finished. But looking back from this perspective, I think it ended sometime in the year following that last day in the attic, after the final upheaval of moving the last of my stuff deposited that day in E-H’s new garage down to this house, somewhere in the trauma of chemo, maybe the dawning of the year after that – a quarter of a century of crises, depositing me at last on the shores of the third age, the Age (supposedly) of Wisdom.

Through my forties, I had the sense that my life-path was not going in the way I would have chosen, but that time was running out to find anything different. I’d pinned my hopes on being able to continue with an academic career, but that ground into the sand of endless, fruitless job applications, a succession of part-time, temporary admin jobs and a failing marriage. My fifties ultimately brought a new sense of hope, of the potential for doing things differently – it would take courage and persistence that I’d previously dismissed as impossible, and a willingness to walk away from a tarnished dream in search of a shiny new one.

I miss that hope now, as I sit here, on my captain’s chair at my leather-topped desk, watching the gulls fly calling past my window.