I woke up this morning in the bedroom of my childhood. The paint is a different colour and the built in desk and narrow wardrobe were removed many years ago. The bed I used to lie in and wish my life would fast forward as you do when you are young is gone but one flight down my sister’s room remains almost the same, her white ‘Queen Anne’ bed and side table a memory trigger. I’m not sure why, yet her room is always the one I see when I have flashbacks to Christmas either 1967 or 1968. I can see the hot pink coloured woven wastepaper bin filled with gifts I can’t recall other than a tin of toffees. I loved those toffees I kept the tin for years. Our parents always bought us at least one matching gift (and something useful clearly) in different colours so my sister’s bin was pink, mine I think was yellow - I suppose they did this to differentiate our Christmas spoils. I must have coveted her colour to attach the memory to her bin and how strong a memory it is. I can feel the scratchy texture of the bin and smell the burnt caramel toffee encased in shiny colourful wrappers - what was the brand? The wastepaper bin and the toffees. The colour and the scent.

Memories are made of these, sights scents sounds and touch. The work that I do supporting people and my own journey to become more comfortable being my imperfect self is a daily reminder of how powerful our mind and body connections are. Our bodies remember everything. If we have questions about why we think feel or act a certain way, our bodies have the answer. Everything we’ve heard every thought every reaction every feeling was being stored somewhere in us even before we were born.

I consider myself fortunate to be here. Not everyone can revisit, let alone wake up, in their childhood room and many people would not want to. My memories here are happy ones, some are more visual than others, some are feelings so fleeting I want to grab them and hold them longer and some I want to travel back in time to and rewrite my actions.

I am grateful this house has always been a home to return to, a physical space I can visit for as little or as long as I need to. We all need a safe space to let our memories visit us in.

I can close my eyes and recall an earlier self; me as a child, a teenager, a young woman, a beginning parent; single me, married me, divorced me, I’ve been all of my versions of me here. In this house I can revisit my childhood, my first dates, teenage parties, rebellious arguments, family engagements, marriages, divorces, falling in love and healing a broken heart (several times), endless deep and meaningful girlfriend conversations smoking cigarettes and drinking wine. My gypsy spirited mother left this house to follow her dreams forty years ago and my beloved father died around this time ten years ago. My father’s second wife, my stepmother who adored him, is now the caring guardian of our family home, keeping safe not just the familiar furniture and the classic retro building but the meandering garden, the old boat shed and the other cherished spaces for my memories to wander in.

So this morning I woke up here as a perennial woman and I opened the same window I did when I was an eleven year old girl. The same window I imagined vampires coming through after too many horror movies at the drive-in, the window I climbed out of as a teenager to sneak a forbidden cigarette or open widely to let the moonlight stream in - my head full of romantic dreams.

Fifty years later the view is the same the memories remain and I am the same, the sum of all my experiences, all my memories. Same same but different.

Karen ❤️

Memory Keeper