Day 12

uh oh - i'm off to auckland tomorrow. that's not the uh oh. as much as i love living away from auckland, i love going back there. my friends of a lifetime live there, my family live there, my goddaughter lives there, most of my belongings live there....i just don't anymore. i have a lifetime of memories which r auckland.
i grew up in the same house my daddy did. he was 5 months old when he moved in, and nearly 50 when he moved out(cept when him and my mummy were first married....they lived in another house for a while). when we were growing up we had a huge backyard with enough room for the most gigantic vege garden and also a decent size 'backyard cricket pitch'. there was a huge oak tree too, my uncle planted that when he was a boy. it's still there today, it's not allowed to be cut down. the vege patch has gone though, as has the cricket pitch. daddy sub-divided.....our place was almost the last section in the street to be sub-divided. i thought it would never happen, but then it did. there is no backyard anymore but still memories. stuffing our faces with feijoa's from our huge tree, me making my wonder woman huts under the lemon tree. making juice from the tangelo's off the tree that was planted when i was born. eating mandarins off the tree that was planted when my brother was born. playing in the tree hut in the huge old oak tree. and those are just the memories from when i was under 10. i lived in that house for 20 years and then i rented it with flatmates a few years later for 18months.
when i was a teenager there were so many more memories, but they mainly revolved around sneaking something, someone, out somewhere.....basically sneaking.
back to the uh oh....the reason i head back to auckland tomorrow is that my high school, onehunga high school, is having it's 50th jubilee and therefore a reunion. until today i still wasn't sure if i was, actually, going to go to the reunion....do i really want to see people i went to high school with that i didn't really like very much? but then, so they really want to see me, having not liked me very much.....i was the loud one at school - bet you are so not suprised! so hey, i have changed (ok, not in the loudness stakes), but in many other ways....i think it's called growing up.