In the context of looking for something else entirely, I came upon a list, in my father’s handwriting, listing my family’s perambulations from 1960 to 1995.
starting from the day my parents met, my father noted their respective addresses at the time. Then they married, and he more or less immediately left for California to complete his postgrad degree while mama stayed behind in the old country for the duration. #2 was a period of renting a scrappy place from mid-1962 to mid-1963. THen they separated again, with my dad in one city and my mother decamping to her parents’ place in her birth city in order to have me. Near the end of 1963 we were reunited as a family back in my dad’s home towh, living in a back room in his mother’s house briefly before moving into our own flat where we lived from January 1964 to July 1969. Then there’s an address I don’t even recognise, a transition point during which we moved to Novi Sad permanently as a family, and then there’s the flat that we lived in when I was growing up, between 1968 and 1973. Then we moved to Africa.
We spent two months living in a hotel, initially, when we got there, which was not ideal.Then we moved into a flat, infested with ticks when we got there, which was NOT fun. We stayed there for less than a year, and then moved into a house in a brand new development, so new that it smelled of paint when we moved in. that lasted just under two years. Then we moved countries, and for five and a half years we stayed put in a place, which seemed to be something of a record. Then things fell apart a little while Dad settled on a job in yet a third country and while he fussed around in South Africa (for some months) Mama and I went home to the old country and her parents’ house yet again until things were settled. from February of 1982 to july of 1983 we lived in Pretoria, South Africa – technically, anyway, because during that time I was accepted into the University of Cape Town and I moved there and then my parents followed in the second half of 1983. From August of 1983 to October of 1994, we lived for the longest consecutive period of our lives in our house in Cape Town, the one that my mother always considered to be her favourite home. THen things fell apart again. I left for New Zealand in 1994. My parents followed eventually but couldn’t do it all at once so we spent a while apart or in different configurations in our house in Auckland, where we stayed (individually or collectively) until 2000, at which point I moved to the USA. My parents followed (again) a few years later. In the US I lived in two places – a 2-year stint in Florida, to which I then gleefully waved goodbye as I shook its dust off my feet and moved to the Pacific Northwest where I’ve been ever since. Counting up just the places that I myself have physically lived, that makes for sixteen moves into at least five countries across three continents in my lifetime.
I am a professional tumbleweed, it seems.
Oh lord. I really never ever want to move again.
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