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I was taken aback by how long it had been since I’d last come to town.  

It’s amazing how time creeps up on you like that. One minute you’re at Grandma and Grandad’s place every few months, knocking around with your siblings. The next you’re going through Grandad’s drawers, packing him a bag of his most precious possessions. The next, you realise it’s three years since you even drove down his street.  

State Highway One was an absolute shocker. I was driving the old straight line, heading South from Christchurch. Rolleston, Dunsandel, Rakaia. The storm was fierce. There was surface flooding and the rivers were up which obviously made things worse, but some of the potholes were so large they could’ve swallowed the irrigators that usually crawl the paddocks on either side of the road.    

Those irrigators have brought a lot of prosperity to mid-Canterbury. But not on Grandad’s street. His place was an old state house on what Dad always called the wrong side of the tracks. Given the main trunk line cuts right through the middle of town, it’s a literal thing in Ashburton. 

Dad reckons the family moved in in about 1967. A two-bedroom place, clad in a shocking baby blue, an 85m2 state house, on a 900m2 section. They don’t do property like that anymore. The Tames had arrived from UK a few years earlier – migration had cost them everything they had. By the early 1980s, on his limited income, Grandad saved up and for $21,500 he bought the house from the government as a home for life. He spent his working life slowly chipping away and paying off the mortgage. The quarter acre dream.  

Grandad always had an amazing garden. He made the most of all that space. There were vegetable beds and fruit trees, a huge compost heap. Flowers out the front. Harakeke. We used to play games of hide-and-seek and go-home-stay-home before retiring inside for luncheon and tomato sauce sandwiches and vegetable soup. At home, our parents didn’t put salt in our food, and it was always a thrill to eat a hot lunch prepared by someone less concerned by cholesterol readings.   

The neighbours back then were mixed. I remember Grandad telling us once that if we hit the tennis ball over the fence it was best to just get a new one. I doubt the Police were strangers to the neighbourhood. Inside, I used to curl up in Grandad’s La-Z-Boy and read Grandma’s gossip magazines by the fire. On the times we stayed over, I read old Biggles stories. We’d all get covered in Labrador fur. They had a faux grandfather clock in the living room with a mechanism that filled every silence. Click, click, click.   

Grandad lived in that house for 55 years. He raised his sons there. He lost his wife, there. When it finally came time to leave, my cousin found his war medals, hidden away in a clothes drawer.   

When I came around the corner, the rain was pelting the windscreen. It took just a moment to get my bearings. The little place next door was gone. A similarly vast section, where once there was a humble cottage, it was filled now with a tidy row of modern units. 

But there was Grandad’s. Some of the baby blue cladding was missing. The harakeke and the flowers at the front had all been ripped out. I’m sure the veggie patch is done. But the house was still there. Tired, but still there. 

Nothing lasts forever. I can’t say with certainty when I’ll be back. But I know one day I’ll come around that corner, and Grandad’s place will be gone too.