Embrace the everyday

Memory's a funny thing, isn't it? You'd think the more something happens, the better we'd remember it, but the opposite often seems to be true. Our brains seem wired to store the surprising, shocking or unfamiliar and to discard the familiar.

This has been on my mind a lot lately, as we first cleared out and now prepare to sell the old family home after my father's passing last year.

Memories came in a flood as we went through his things, and the gathered ephemera of 50 shared years stored in one house. The time dad shaved half his moustache off before sitting down to Christmas dinner and no one noticed. The time my brother stayed locked in the shower for ages because 'the only shampoo in here is for shiny hair and I don't have shiny hair!'.

Then it occurred to me that memories were missing. Memories that hadn't been filed and sorted, because my brain decided they were just too mundane. Dinner time, for instance. For 18 years before leaving for college, and for a few years after that, too, I sat at the family table for dinner. Which seat was mine? Who was to my left, and who was to my right? Every night, for year after year, and it took a few interrogations of my sisters to dredge up the information.

Three of our family are gone now, and all those precious everyday hours with them, around that table, are gone, too.

Like most kids of the seventies and eighties, I got around town on my bike, mostly. I'd jump on it to go up to the library, riding home with a Tintin or an Asterix under my arm, or to visit friends, or just to pelt down the forbidden Wilderness Brae as quickly as my pre-teen legs could pedal me (until, that is, I was doing just that and mum and dad, faces frozen in surprise and fury, drove past and caught me at it). But where was my precious bike (a beautiful blue racer on the frame of which the previous owner had painted, in flowing, delicate script, 'The Flying Scot') kept? Where did it live when it wasn't hurtling around sharp bends on country roads? We had nothing as posh as a garden shed, so where did I store it?

I think it might've been in the space under the stairs in the downstairs hall, but I couldn't swear to that. How would it fit, with the phone table under there, too? Didn't the rest of the family - there were six of us in that house - mind a bike taking up all that valuable floor space?

As I get older, these are the questions that increasingly occupy my brain. When I dig out old family photos, it's obviously lovely to see familiar, often long-gone, faces, but I find myself wishing whoever was on the other side of the camera had tilted it just a little bit left, right, up or down, so I could get a better look at the carpet, the curtains, the lampshade, the shoes, the pet just out of sight. We lived with all these little details every day, until we didn't. Until the lurid, oversized petals on the wallpaper were painted over, or the white leather couch was traded in for something in a more 80s-appropriate gold velveteen, or the dog made her final visit to the vet.

It's the everyday that gets lost to time, not the spectacular and unexpected, and, sometimes, when I think about that house we're going to sell, where another family will soon start a whole new story, it's the everyday I miss the most.