Dear Rosemary
A letter to the woman who lived in our house before us and the family life that continues within its walls.
We received another one of your envelopes in the mail the other day.
A large A4 envelope. No return address, but official-looking enough that I didn’t feel I could simply throw it away. So, for now, it is sitting on the bench while I wonder what one is supposed to do with mail addressed to someone who lived in a house for almost sixty years.
I think about you often, Rosemary.
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I still don’t entirely understand how we ended up here, in your beautiful home, but sometimes I wonder whether you had something to do with it. Perhaps, after living here since 1963 with your husband and your son, Michael, you wanted another family to fill it up again.
I hope you’d be pleased to know that we have.
Michael came back
About a year or so ago, Michael knocked on the front door.
He told us he had grown up here and that he had nothing but happy memories of this house. We invited him inside, but he didn’t really want to come in. I completely understood. Perhaps he wanted to remember it as it had been: the rooms as you arranged them, the furniture where it belonged, his own childhood still intact inside the walls.
His children used to visit you here too, so this wasn’t only his childhood home. It was also the house where your grandchildren came to see you.
He told us it had always been a home full of love and happiness.
It still is.
He also told us how difficult it had been to pack everything away. Before leaving for the final time, he stood at the kitchen sink and looked out at the view.
That same sink is still here.
It is an extremely sturdy stainless-steel sink and, as people like to say when confronted with an indestructible object from the 1960s, they simply do not make them like they used to. I suspect it will outlast all of us.
Michael also took a cutting from the pomegranate bush in the garden. He said it had originally come from his grandmother’s tree.
You might like to know that it has probably quadrupled in size during the almost five years we have lived here. It now produces so much fruit that we don’t know what to do with it. Every year I briefly imagine becoming the sort of woman who makes pomegranate molasses and gives beautifully labelled bottles to friends.
I have not yet become that woman.
Michael is welcome to return for another cutting whenever he likes.
The garden is doing its best
I must confess that we cannot manage the garden quite as well as you did.
The garden that tumbles down towards the Yarra was wildly overgrown when we arrived. We have managed it, which is not the same as mastering it. We occasionally cut things back, clear a path and congratulate ourselves before the entire garden grows over again with renewed confidence.
The front garden, however, is looking rather wonderful.
We uncovered the lava rock that had disappeared beneath years of weeds, and I like to imagine it now looks something like it did in the 1960s, perhaps even when Michael was growing up.
There are bicycles lying around. Basketballs. Inflatable pools in summer. Children rushing in and out and abandoning their possessions precisely where everyone will trip over them.
Maybe it looked like this then too.
It is a very good place for children to play.
The birds are still looking for you
Whenever a bird lands on the balcony, I tell it, “Sorry, Rosemary doesn’t live here anymore.”
They still seem to be looking for you.
I know you fed them, and perhaps birds have longer memories than we give them credit for. Or perhaps they have simply passed the information down through several generations: Try that house. The woman there is generous.
We feed the parrots when we can. A beautiful one visited the other day and let us come surprisingly close.
I know you loved the birds here. You wrote two books about them while living in this house.
I have written two books as well, so perhaps we have that in common, although I suspect our bookshelves would reveal some fairly significant differences between us.
I understand yours were overflowing with literature and legal texts. The neighbours still speak about your bookshelves with a sense of awe. You were a Supreme Court judge—the first woman appointed to that court in Victoria—and I imagine the shelves were as serious and impressive as the work you did.
Mine contain a few proper books.
They also contain an alarming number of oversized coffee-table books and magazines I insist I need for research.
Still, we both wrote here.
I sit at my desk in what may once have been your dining room, looking out through the trees. It is the most wonderful place from which to run a creative business. I wonder whether you sat in this same spot, reading, writing or preparing for work. I wonder whether the light fell across the room in exactly the same way.
How did we end up here?
The first time I saw the house was on the Nelson Alexander website.
I had always hoped I might one day live in a mid-century home, but I never quite believed it would happen. It felt like something other people did. People with better foresight, better timing or a secret knowledge of real estate that I did not possess.
During that period, one song kept circling through my head: Brandi Carlile’s The House on the Rock.
I listened to it in the car on the way to the open inspection. I listened to it again on the way home. I hummed it constantly, as though singing the words might somehow make the house ours.
And then, somehow, it did.
The strange thing is that this may quite literally be a house on a rock. In the basement, beneath the house, there is an enormous formation that looks like either a rock or an extremely committed pile of hardened earth.
Either way, the house has been built around it.
Perhaps the song knew before we did.
We have filled every room
We have moved into every nook and cranny.
Coco, our middle child, is downstairs with her own ensuite. Benji has his room. Indy has hers too.
Having three children, each with a bedroom of their own, is something I never take for granted. I honestly didn’t know it would be possible for us.
There isn’t a day that goes by when I am not grateful for this home.
It has been the most wonderful backdrop to our family life.
We put the fire on and gather in the living room together. Sometimes we watch television. Sometimes we read, play Uno or sit side by side looking at entirely different screens, which may not be the wholesome family tableau one imagines, but it is real.
The room allows us to be together without feeling as though we are on top of one another.
Then there is the dining area, where we knock about every day.
We eat dinner together there each night. The children draw, make things and spread their belongings across the table. There is colouring, craft, slime and an ever-changing population of squishies.
The floor plan is extraordinarily good for a family. It asks nothing complicated of us. It simply gives us room to live.
And everywhere, there are the treetops.
The house looks out across the Yarra, and yesterday four girls rode horses along the boulevard. We heard the clip-clop of hooves moving slowly over the potholed road.
It felt like something from another time.
Perhaps it is a sound you remember too.
The house is still happy
I wanted to write and tell you that we are taking care of the house.
Not perfectly.
The garden is a little wilder than you might prefer. The books are perhaps less distinguished. The stainless-steel sink is still here, heroically enduring everything we throw at it.
But the house is full.
It is noisy and untidy and deeply loved.
There are children in the garden, books on the shelves, people gathered around the fire and dinner at the table every night.
You gave your family a home full of love and happiness, and somehow that feeling remained after you left. It was here when Michael returned to the front door. It is here when the parrots land on the balcony. It is here in the pomegranate tree, the view from the kitchen sink and the sound of horses passing below.
So, thank you, Rosemary.
I don’t know how we found your home, or how it found us.
But I hope you would be pleased to know that it is still doing exactly what a good home should do.
It is holding a family.