Shells, mulberries & the seaside shack

A little letter for Rafi

I’ve just spent time about 5 hours north of Perth in Western Australia in a coastal town my grandparents live and where my dad grew up.

I’ve written about it for Rafi

And I’ll share it here with some photos too ❤️

•••

Rafi,

It’s picking mulberries for breakfast, from the mulberry tree hidden amongst rusty wheelbarrows, broken ladders and an old fence in the back yard of your great grandparents beach shack.

Stepping over bee’s from your great grandfathers hive and feeding the Djiti Djiti from your hand.

It’s having your height measured on the door frame, you’ve grown 6 inches since this time last year.

You see all your uncles and aunties heights from their childhood on the old fridge that’s about to be replaced, and all the way up the cupboard door.

I want to save the fridge door and somehow frame it.

It’s sitting on the same steps I did when I was your age, munching on apples, playing with shells and overlooking the ocean through the two palm trees your grandad planted when he was your age.

It’s wandering down Sandy grassy tracks following your granddad and his own dad, single file with a little bamboo fishing rod in hand down to the river and catching your first fish.

It’s doing puzzles with your gigi as the sun sets over the ocean out the window of this little beach shack.

& waking up to snack on more apples in bed with your grandad and his mum, your great grandmother, sipping tea and looking out over the ocean through the window. You’re living the childhood I had, running into that bed in the mornings for chats and cuddles.

It’s playing soccer on the grass as the golden sun sets,

And painting in your colouring book on the veranda.

It’s searching the garden for bob the bobtail lizard & watching your granddad kitesurfing in the waves across the road with your new binoculars that you call your “nockies “.

This little beach town,

Held your great grandparents after they arrived in Australia by ship from Kenya.

There was something about this dry coastal community by the sea that they found nostalgic.

It’s where your grandad grew up, in this very garden, in these very walls, on this very beach. It’s where he fell in love with your Gigi…

It’s where I spent every summer holiday,

With all my brothers and sisters, collecting shells, carving soap bars into animals, feeding the birds, climbing out the windows to get down to the beach.

And it’s where you get to be, even for a short while, adding another generation of memories here, in the same little beach shack, with its little tin kitchen sink, and mugs all hanging with pictures of wrens or natives on them.

The same little routines, the 5 cups of tea a day, the same art on the walls.

& I think how lucky we are to have our memories all anchored in this place, in this home.

Decades of dinners around this table.

And decades of sunsets right here.

I hope you feel it in your blood little one.

I hope you feel yourself here, and myself, and my dad, and his.

The salty air within you,

And the golden sunsets through you.

It all becomes apart of you & apart of us.

This is special.