Zeroing In

Last week I celebrated my birthday. The units are reset and I have a clean empty 0 in my age: a hole to filled with new days and months and years.

Tomorrow we must return our library books. For months I have been going in and lugging great basketfuls home. Read, children, read, for soon we will not have these books. More words a minute; faster! Learn these stories, gaze on these pictures. We’ve read a lot, but we also had to play and cook and pack, so we didn’t read them all. And tomorrow, they go back, and for the first time since I arrived here, I will have zero books on loan and the librarians will wonder what happened, perhaps wrongly concluding that our heads just got too full of stories.

When we first moved in to our flat 6 years ago, we painted the chimney breast a deep royal blue. It was Ottoman opulence, the masters’ blue for the Virgin Mary, the colour of the magi’s illuminated map of the constellations. Indeed, I often wanted to paint tiny gold stars onto it. Instead, we have had to paint the whole house magnolia, ready for the new tenants. The roller and brush are rubbers erasing toddler scribble, messy handprints and our home.

Then, from Lahore come photos on our phones. A friend is looking for a place in which we can be the new tenants. He pans around entrances, bedrooms, cupboards and kitchens, giving single word commentaries: front entrance…bedroom….master bedroom…storage…kitchen. It is all very obvious until he suggests we rent a school to live in. The video is of teens in blazers lugging their own armfuls of less colourful books around, whiteboards on cement walls and a glass door saying, ‘Atlas Learning Services’. ‘…Front entrance,’  intones the commentary. Bedroom….master bedroom…storage…kitchen is not what I am seeing where the students are lolling on desks. Has he misinterpreted my desire to home-school as school-home? There’s going to need to be a lot of painting of magnolia to change this one into a home, that’s for sure. But it is nice to know that somewhere, someone is rolling paint and erasing pen marks from walls to prepare us a home.