Columns from The Weekend West

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Opinion Ros Thomas Opinion Ros Thomas

Going Up

The traffic lights at Labouchere Road flipped to orange and I slammed on the anchors. The car in front sped across the intersection. In the distance I could see cars choking the freeway on-ramp.

“This could take a while,” I said to my three noise-makers in the back, but they were busy singing out of tune to the radio.

Up ahead, I spotted the block of flats I lived in as a four-year-old. I flipped up my sunvisor and counted up four floors to single out the two bedroom apartment Mum rented us after her divorce.

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Opinion Ros Thomas Opinion Ros Thomas

I Rest My Case

Last Sunday afternoon, my husband plonked a small battered case at my feet: “I found this in the tractor shed at the farm. I thought you might not have seen it in a while.”

Something about this case had slipped below the surface of my mind. It was the colour that pricked my memory first: a once-luminous shade of teal blue. I slid my hand around the smooth plastic handle and felt a familiar groove against my fingertips: My school case! My primary school case!

I felt a rush of nostalgia. I flicked open the metal catches with my thumbs. They sprang up with the same ‘thwack’ from forty years ago, still eager to perform despite rusted hinges and arthritic joints.

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Opinion Ros Thomas Opinion Ros Thomas

Keeping Time

Memory is a fickle companion. I never know which moments of my life it will choose to preserve. That’s why I like to hang onto things – keepsakes – as an antidote to forgetting.

I still have the doll who followed me everywhere as a child. (She was my favourite because she liked to put me first). I named her Colleen – a good Irish name for a doll made in China. She had turquoise eyes with thick black lashes and strange plastic eyelids that fluttered briefly before closing in forgiveness when I tipped her out of her pram. She also had a blonde cowlick that gave her an unattractive bald spot at the back of her head. But I loved her anyway.

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Opinion Ros Thomas Opinion Ros Thomas

The Restless Years

A homesick Irishman is the last person you expect to find on a storm-wrecked Swanbourne beach on a Sunday morning. It was not yet 8am and the wind was biting. As the kids and I climbed over the craggy rocks jutting out over the point, we spotted a middle-aged dad and his two small boys down in the cove. They were fossicking about in the great mounds of seaweed coughed up by the still surging ocean.

My three kids were keen to see what mysterious flotsam those boys were collecting in their buckets. So the dad and I got talking. His wife was sleeping off a nurse’s nightshift, he told me, and his boys needed to blow off steam. My own husband had just flown in from the Philippines, I told him, and we’d abandoned the house so he could enjoy his jetlag in peace.

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