The Pink Pig In The Window

Have you ever smelt a familiar smell or seen a familiar sight that has brought a memory flooding back from years ago?  Sometimes to hit you like a sledgehammer and sometimes of something you thought you had put behind you and preferred to have forgotten?  I had one of those moments just this week.

To be honest I wasn't expecting it and for a moment it knocked me sideways.  It all started when I had to take my car in for it's MOT and some work to be done on it.  Nothing unusual in that.  The dealership where it had to go to is at the opposite side of town to anywhere I usually visit and it was morning rush hour so very busy.  Grid locked in fact.  So here I was, sat in my car in stationery traffic waiting for the lights to change when I glanced to my left.

I was at the end of a residential street.  The house on the corner of the street was nothing special or unusual - large picture window overlooking the street in which it stood, smaller kitchen window fronting onto the road on which I was queueing.  It evoked a reverie which went back twenty years. Twenty years ago there was a pink pig in the kitchen window and a vase of yellow daffodils in the picture window.  The garden at the front of the house was filled with daffodils.  I hated that pink pig - it represented everything that was wrong with my life at the time. The vase of daffodils I found upsetting because I knew who had bought them.  They had bought me some too - but they shouldn't have been buying any for anyone else, only me. It was hurtful. Very hurtful.

I had been left alone with a baby only 7 months old, was facing an uncertain future and scared of what it held.  Through the blackness which became one day drifting into another, a week becoming a month and longer that pink pig, daffodils growing facing the sun and affectionate gift of more daffodils in the vase on the window haunted me.  They were happy.  This was their house and despite all the devastation going on around it was a happy house.  It wasn't fair.  How I hated that happy pink pig in the window and now, twenty years later, a fleeting glance at the house and just for a second remembered the pink pig with a raw, stabbing pain.  Life has moved on - of course it has - but sometimes, just occasionally and when you are least expecting it, it comes and bites you on the bum!  When it does, it hurts.