Quote by John Steinbeck;- When I was very young and the urge to be someplace was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch.
Why is it called an itch? I experienced it as a painful, unnamed ache, too deep to be eradicated, and a source of irritation to my mother.
‘You’re never satisfied. What do you want?’
I had no answer. There were no words. So, I gave silent, sullen stares while yearning for more than life then provided for me. I was stultified by the tedium of a small country town. I was frustrated by humdrum days morphing into years without anyone noticing – or so it seemed to me. I wanted excitement. Too many faces were familiar. I craved difference.
My mother, who’d conveniently forgotten she’d once been rebellious herself, railed against my discontent, berating me for what she considered my ingratitude. She’d been a sixteen-year-old at the start of the Second World War and had once seen a way to begin a thrilling new life. She’d hotfooted it to the local recruitment office, lied about her age, and signed up as a WAAF. When he heard the news from his jubilant daughter, my grandfather, incandescent with rage, made his own way to undo the deed. The speed of his journey made my mother’s own haste appear positively snail-like, but he managed to get there before the office closed, which gave him time to go to the pub for a celebratory beer before he returned home. She never forgave him and apparently refused to speak to him for weeks. During that time, my grandmother captured a photograph of my mother sitting on the garden wall, watching my grandfather working in the garden. Her head is thrown back; her mouth open, as, according to my grandmother, she loudly sang a song popular at the time “I can get along without you, very well.” I have the photograph in the family album. Could that sulky look on her face be like the one she rebuked me for?
In time my aching, unspecified longing eventuated into the reality of adventures in numerous countries; the exhilaration of discovering existences so far from my origins as to be astonishing. I’ve breathed in the air of lands that became part of me and called places home that were once alien. I’ve been so fortunate, and sometimes wonder about how my mother’s life might have been. If only her father had allowed her use of her wings to fly the coop.
When I return to where my life began, I view things differently now life has given me all the experiences and enjoyment I once coveted. Long ago I believed I knew every face in my hometown. But strangers presently walk the streets, and if they speak, tell me how blessed they are to be living in such a lovely place. They satisfied their own itch by relocating there and I ponder on my own aching, nostalgic sadness for what once was.
Maturity cures nothing.
Burnside Writers Group 