Today we got back in the car again and drove six hours northwest to my childhood town of Armidale in the Northern Tablelands. As soon as we’d checked into the motel, I slipped into my running gear while the rest of them headed to the pub. I didn’t run particularly well, but every step released a floodgate of memories from a happy but partially forgotten childhood. Passed our little Newling primary school where our ten-year old hands are embedded in cement to commemorate the bicentenary, by my piano teacher and the house where the dog who bit me lived. There goes the doctor’s surgery where my second brother and I hid under a table when our youngest brother was screaming wretchedly as the doctors tried to fix his split tongue. Sprinted past the grounds of the Anglican Church where we endured a weekly torture of lengthy sermons and bad singing, and into the playing fields where we used to run cross-country. Around the course I ran, following the arrows painted on the trees, the course the same now as it was when I was a nine year-old kid. It had just rained, cooling the air from its thirty-four plus temperature and soaking out the scents of the sweet, raw Australian bush.
It might be the nostalgia talking, but I could see myself living here again…
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