Moving isn’t what it used to be Remember those beautifully quaint TV shows like ‘The Waltons’ or ‘The Little House on the Prairie’ where the men went to work and the women stayed at home and looked after the children? The work of the man was physical and took brawn whist a woman’s job was to be caring and, quite frankly, to do just about everything apart from make any kind of money. Children would grow up with the parent’s friends children and would eventually get married and move into a small farm house in the same village.
These shows depicted an ideal, a simple life filled with simple pleasures and as we look back, it all seemed so easy (apart from the crying children and blisters on the mans hands). They showed the same people living in the same village generation after generation in a well choreographed dance that was passed on seamlessly from parent to child. But I can’t help asking myself, what happened. When did it all go wrong? At some point people started changing this choreography and somehow we ended up at today.
The simple life lived in sepia tones has been replaced with... well what has it been replaced with? I for one have no idea because everywhere I look there is a new and different version of normal, and its electrifying.
Back ‘then’ you fell in love with your best friend (who was probably called MaryJane) you borrowed some money from your dad and built a delightful house in the next field and own a couple of cows and a pig. (The animals weren’t really necessary but it paints a good picture, throw in a bit Lets take the simple element of find some- of black and white, a flickering screen and one you love and moving in together. some heavy grain and your set).
We replaced our cows with airplanes and our parent’s friends children with people from far fetched countries who we met whilst traveling or more often than not met at the local shop. The world seems to be shrinking! We date (court, if your from ‘back then) people whose mother tongue is different to our own, their history is fascinatingly incomprehensible in comparison to our own, yet our normal is equally as strange to them. Inside this ever revolving door of difference we seem to discover love. We
leave our villages and move to the city where we fall in love with what can only be described as an alien. We want to continue our sepia dream by moving into a beautiful house in the heart of a magnificent city. Borrowing from parents for the most is just not an option as they are busy paying their own mortgages and if not they are hopefully on holiday in a place we can barely pronounce the name of. We could to go a bank, but lets be honest this has been covered in a million other articles, so as you know, ‘your screwed’.
So you get a job doing something you only heard about two days before and don’t even know what your job title means. When I say you get a job I mean you too Mary-Jane. Yes we all have to bring home the money now. You can’t stay at home looking after the kids you don’t have and you need to work for nearly all of your life to earn enough money to buy that house to live in anyway.
less fields owned by a single farmer. We go to work in the digital pastures where we hope the endless cycle of 0’s and 1’s will some day bring home a single one followed by many zeros.
We struggle as the cute little house on that perfect little Prairie did but not for ears of corn, for a feeling of belonging, the feeling of home. We want to slump into the sofa of a place we can call our own in So off to work we go leaving the pigs and the arms of the person we love. cows to graze in the vast pastures of end-
We move from home to home asking for favors to borrow a mates van only to return the favor by watering their plants whilst he’s on holiday. From apartment to apartment, country to country we bounce our way through life in what would seem, ‘back then’ a reckless and cumbersome existence.
As time progresses this strange world filled with people from all corners of the globe slowly becomes normal, this melting pot of gold at the end of the multicultural rainbow becomes your village. The small apartment you can barely affordbecomes home and that person from across the globe becomes your soul mate.
Life is electrifying in this sense, there is no longer a ‘path through life’ there is only your path, your journey. Luckily expectations have evolved along with our desires, but not in equal measures.
We are all from our own kind of ‘Little House on the Prairie’ and we all have our own stories to tell but when we meet someone new, we are equal. In that very moment a new story is begun. A new chapter in your life novel has begun. Maybe, just maybe, this will be the most important story in your life. This person, someday, may be the one you move in with, the person you build your perfect sepia toned life with, only this time it will be in technicolor.
Our desires are excitedly flying through the roof breaking all the boundaries of past dreams whilst our parents and grand parents of the past generations attempt to keep up in with their expectations. This new world, this unmeasured, exuberant, creative living we now see as normal is hard to grasp for those people who would Those tv shows were right, we all want a honeymoon for two weeks in a city that home and we all want to be loved, it just is now only 3 hours away by train. But looks different now. somehow, they do, somehow the generations before us who lived through the changes have managed to keep up.
Photography and Story: Ed Gregory Models: Olivia David and Sibu Dladla Hair and Makeup: Jo Coletta Styling and production: VEEVEERS