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My parents have had their home (the house I spent the bulk of my childhood in in Loxton) on the market for almost two years, but it came as an almost complete surprise to get a message from Mum informing my and my brother that they had finally sold!

The housing market in Loxton isn’t exactly booming and our house, being sized for a family and thus relatively large, probably needed an out of town family coming into town to work as a teacher of doctor (the main reason new family’s move to these relatively small regions) in order to sell. We had long speculated and consoled ourselves that this is what would be required and that it might take time, which it did, but ultimately, it is exactly what happened!

Funnily enough, Mum’s message came through almost the exact moment the state’s Premier was getting up to announce that we would be going into, what infamously turned out to be a brief lockdown! Thus, within the space of an hour or so, my childhood home was sold, I thought I would be entering lock down for a week, and the wedding I was meant to be the brides’ best man in was cancelled! (due to COVID restrictions). An eventful week to say the least.

I will have the chance to go home to Loxton one last time and I think it will be a bundle of emotions. I never loved living in the country. I’ve always preferred the city and haven’t maintained many friendships with school friends who remained in the town. I am still very close with a number of school friends but they all, like me, made the move to Adelaide for uni.

That said, I love our house. It is, for want of a better term, homely. It will likely always be what I think of as home. I am very excited for Mum and Dad to make the move to Adelaide, to make spending time with them much easier for all involved. But, as is probably to be expected, there is a small part of me that is sad, or perhaps more accurately, nostalgic for the house overlooking the river where so many memories were made.