Change is like a hill slowly covered in houses
My granny’s house used to face open land on a hill on the south side of Edinburgh. When I used to visit her as a child, I would play on the land opposite the house. It stretched up towards the top of the hill and beyond that to a golf course and then across more open land to woods and a famous stream.
I was not yet ten years old when they started to build on the hill. In the space of two or three years, all the open land across which I used to roam — as far as my courage would take me — was covered in new houses. During the period of the build, my father and I would walk up the hill, no longer across the grass, but along rough new roads — as yet without tarmac — and watch the extent of the reach of the new housing.
This was my first real taste of dramatic change. A year or so before this my parents and I moved house but it was only a street away and nothing in the immediate geography of my environment changed. A park separated me from my old habitat and all it meant was that I now entered the park from its southern gate instead of the northern gate. I saw the same people, I went to the same school, and I felt I lived, in all vital aspects, in the same place.
The change on the hill above my granny was different. What I had taken to be my hill — and a permanent part of the landscape of visiting my granny — was suddenly both taken from me and completely altered. When the houses were built and people moved in and my granny’s house no longer faced fields it felt my granny had moved in a way that was much more significant than my own recent change of location.
And yet, within a couple of years, with the houses weathering on the hill and the growing familiarity of the new sight across from my granny’s windows, it became hard to remember the empty spaces and the grass slopes that led up to the top of the hill. It was still possible to reach the top of the hill but the way was by road now. I stopped going because the route was no longer an adventure.
My granny was not one to complain. I don’t remember her expressing any strong opinion on the blossoming houses opposite. As far as she was concerned, it made little difference to her house and to her life. Her acceptance was mostly indifference.
My father, who had grown up in the house, was rather more irritated by the changing view. It was the destruction of his playground, his childhood. He had had many more years of the looming presence of the hill’s slopes than I had. But even he, after a while, accepted this demonstration of progress.
We moved away from Edinburgh and it no longer affected him. He rarely returned to the street or the hill.
That move away from Edinburgh and from Scotland was obviously a bigger change than the move one street that had left me so unaffected earlier. I look back now on the appearance of the houses on the hill as a teasing trailer for the subsequent changes that would mark my life.
The changes that cause the most upset are those that seem to upend the familiar patterns of life, whether it is places, people, or things. They happen usually with little warning. But they are useful, too. For they hint at the changes we can make ourselves.
The lesson, too, is that nothing is permanent and we should carpe diem the fuck out of things when we have the chance. Strong relationships, love affairs, great jobs, travel, anything in which we have a chance to revel and be grateful.
I haven’t seen that hillside for maybe forty years now but I remember it both free of houses and covered in houses. Both states are part of my past; the change happened, I survived, and life goes on.
As a boy, it felt like a part of my universe — the universe in general — was crumbling. But the universe kept going, regardless.
