Lingard Street

A old haunt seen through wiser eyes.

Tonight, we wandered these once-familiar streets.

I swung my camera to my side to avoid the eyes of teenagers on bikes gathered on the corner.

It's hard to shoot at night in residential areas without drawing attention, but there was something about tonight that made me travel thirty miles just to take these two photos.

Lingard Street is my dad's old street from the 1980s, when I was a child. I know it so well and can walk its kerbs and grids with my eyes closed.

It's at this house where my dad, brother, and I spent the most time together. Weekends watching old Elvis movies, my brother practising wheelies on his BMX, evening walks to the corner shop for pop and crisps.

I remember dirty fingernails, scraped knees, the smell of caterpillars on leaves and lilac skies.

After dad moved from here, we split off into our three separate lives. Then they both passed away twenty years apart from one another.

Someone else *loves there now. I could see their faces lit up cinematic blue from the light of the TV. I could see the curve of the walls, so familiar, through the gap in the blinds.

I've been unable to understand why I feel such a regular pull to this time and place.

Tonight, my fourteen year old daughter stunned me with this:

“Perhaps it’s the last place you connected with your dad and brother, so you’re returning to feel close to them again.”

Yes.

*a typo that should’ve read ‘lives’ but I like the idea that other people are loving one another in the walls of this place now.