As I had a false start last week on my "Change One" program so I have I decided to repeat Week I. So I am just doing the piece of fruit, piece of toast for breakfast and the twenty minute wlk every day for another week before I go on to tackling lunch. The idea of the "Change One" program is to change one thing a week that makes your life healthier until you are a healthier, happier person. For someone who is almost a grouch in winter like I am this should pass the time until Spring comes tip-toeing in again.

The hardest part is where to go on my twenty minute walk. I live on the side of a ridge, it is the second dune in from the beach but up the cliff end so the cliffs rise in tiers behind me. So if I walk towards the beach I walk up hill whichever way I go. We don't look over the beach but the valley and the main road, so if I walk down the hill I come to a busy main road which is very hard to find a break in the traffic big enough to walk across and then there is not a continuous footpath.

So I decided to walk up the road, over the hump, down the hill and along the street we live in. At the top of the next hill I can turn left, go around a loop and back home again. This is approximately twenty minutes. But there is a downside to this walk. It is the way I used to take to go to visit my Mum who had a little house three streets over from where I live. So as I walk over the second rise I can see the street she used to live in and almost see her little house. I find this is bringing all sorts of memories into my head and I long to just be able to run down that street, open the gate and go into that little house that once held so many dear memories.

Okay, so I cleaned that house out when my Mum went into care and I had to pay a fee, a very large fee, to maintain her there. I paid the real estate agent that sold the house, I signed all the paperwork for the sale. I know it is sold and belongs to someone else, has done for three years. From the outside it is not much changed but along the back is a new deck and inside, so an old neighbour says, is a new kitchen and the front room had the carpet torn up and the floors polished. So if I opened the door and went in it is not Mum's home but the home of a complete stranger.

I can understand that when a person has dementia they can sometimes run away to a house they lived in way back in the past. They can knock on the door and wonder who this stranger is who opens it when it should be the dear one they once knew so well opening the door and letting them in to warm themselves. An old fried of ours did that, he was away from his nursing home for over 48 hours and the police finally found him in a suburb he had lived in three moves before. Obviously this was a place that held dear memories and called him back. And so the little road over the hill calls to me.

Because I have lived in this area nearly forty years as I pass the houses I remember the people who used to live in them. I remember them as they were when I was a girl in my late teens, a young married woman, a working woman with teenagers of my own and the stay-at-home carer I have been the last seven years. When I was a young Mum a few mUms gathered together in each others homes twice a month for a Coffee Morning. This was before Playgroups were in vogue and we had about half a dozen Mums and their kids gathering together out of a pool of a dozen or so.

So I pass Judy's house, Barbara's house and Marilyn's house. Judy has been married three times, her aunt lives close by so I have had news of her all the years. Barbara had a husband who spent some time in jail for "domestic violence" as it used to be called. She moved in the middle of the night, leaving most of her possessions behind. She did it with a couple of small children in an old battered car. Almost as battered as she was from time to time. Barbara had a lovely throaty laugh. She loved the Coffee mornings but never hosted one. I guess looking back that she was afraid her husband would come home and create a scene in front of the other girls. Marilyn left her house and her husband and ran off with a tradesman of some kind, can't remember who now. It is such a long time ago.

I pass the houses where I remember the original occupants, those two mortgage families who managed to pay off some of the loan and then moved on to build another house in another area until they owned one outright. Some of them I have met in the local shopping centre or have seen at, sadly, funerals of mutual friends. There are the houses of the older original families too and I think of those "old ladies" who came out to say "hello" and pass the time of day. And, goodness me, must have been the same age as I am now, those pleasant, grey haired women wearing old comfy shoes and loose comfy sweaters, just like the one I am wearing now. How those years do fly by.

So my 20 minute walk is a trip down memory lane, so many things to think about that it seems only a few minutes and I am home again. And there will be new people to remember too, those younger women walking with babies in push-chairs and the middle aged men walking dogs, and even a couple of teenagers flying past on bicycles. If I continue my walk they will say in years to come:"Remember the old lady we used to pass on our walks. I think she lived close by. Maybe down the other end of our street."