Hiraeth

Mine is in Arild

There are places we don't realise we love until they are no longer ours. Places that turn out to be much more than a dot on a map, holding an entire childhood within them: its adventures, its fears, and all the little things we once took for granted. For me, one such place is Arild.

There were grazing sheep and groves of Japanese knotweed. Rocky roads where my cousin would race downhill on her bicycle while I screamed in terror and she laughed. Nights when she fell asleep in seconds, leaving me awake for hours, listening to her snore. We slept in a tent in the garden until my grandfather came out to fetch us. He carried my cousin inside, pretending not to notice that she was only pretending to sleep, while I walked beside him through the Arild night.

And there was the freezing swimming pool, where I earned all my swimming badges. I think a little piece of your heart belongs forever to the place where you first learned to swim.

Perhaps that is how a home is made. Not simply from houses and landscapes, but from people, smells, sounds, and things that once seemed perfectly ordinary. A grandfather's pancakes. A grandmother's sewing machine, turning out stuffed animals one after another. The scent of heather on a summer night, blackberries among the stones in the sheep pasture, and the sea, always there. Things that seemed unremarkable until they became memories.

The Welsh word hiraeth describes a longing for a home that no longer exists, or perhaps for a place that still exists but to which we can never return in quite the same way. It is a particular kind of longing: not only for a place, but also for the person we once were there.

In this little shadow box, Arild remains a small world we can return to. Perhaps that is what memories do. They cannot preserve the past exactly as it was, but they let us open a door, just for a moment, and step inside again.