THE FORGOTTEN ONES...?

A former residence

A few years ago, a neighbour from hell moved in next door.  Parties at all hours of the night, people constantly coming and going accompanied by the continuous clinking of carry-outs in the early morning - along with shouting, singing, stomping, screaming, etc.  Luckily, he's now gone and a nice, respectable young couple have taken up residence.

They've now been there for around three and a half years, but it seems as if they only moved in fairly recently.  This has led me to consider the following curious concept which has recently crept into my consciousness.

There have been a couple of houses in my lifetime in which we lived for only four years, plus one we occupied for a mere 15 or 16 months, and despite it seeming to me as if we lived in each of those houses for a good long stretch, I've now started to wonder if, to our neighbours at the time, it seemed as if we were merely a temporary blip in their everyday lives.

If my new neighbours' three-and-a-half-year-occupancy seems far less to me than it is, then it stands to reason that the almost similar short periods in which my family resided in some houses may likewise have appeared to others to be terms of no consequence.  Are we remembered by name by those we lived next to, or are we dimly-recalled shadows that barely register in the histories of some of the areas we stayed?

It's strange to look back on my relatively short time in those places, and to realise that, although they're well-established, carved-in-stone 'epochs' in my life - the details of which are firmly entrenched in my memory - to those neighbours who preceded us and remained long past my family's departure, our time there may be only brief, nearly forgotten interludes in their overall recollections of events.

Makes you wonder eh?  (Nah, probably not.  It does with me though.)