Hey all, it's been almost a week since I got back from Kedah and i sincerely wish I could take everyone back there with me - 5 hour drive and all - one by one to just be there. My family has moved around a lot and sometimes I end up craving the feeling you get of simply walking into a new house and having it hit you that it's going to be your home from now on. That you've left the comfort and memories and familiarity of your old home and that this "thing" - this house - is to be yours. It's that weird rush of being thrown out of your comfort zone where you're forced to re-examine your priorities.

But last week, I had a different kind of experience. It was earth shatteringly amazing. Like a release from worrying, doubting myself, over-thinking things. It was like I had left everything bad about the world behind and I'd run head-long into happiness.

We left on Friday. Alayna and Anisa left ahead of us with my aunt and they got there hours earlier. We left late cause Mum and Dad were checking on this leak in the car. So we ended up leaving at about 6pm. We stopped for dinner at 8.30-ish in Ipoh and ended up having some pretty bad food, to be honest. Their claypot chicken wasn't cooked. And they used kampung chicken so it was really tough. Anyways, we got to Kedah really later (around 11-ish) so we decided to just stay at my grandparent's house instead of looking for the hotel in Alor Setar in the dark.

When we got to the house, it felt strange. It didn't feel like all the other times I'd been there. It felt like coming home. It's so hard to describe how beautiful the house really is (to me, anyway). It's a small, open escape and I love it. It's just this single-storey semi-detached house. The driveway is paved with faded gray and purple bricks and to the left of the driveway is the garden, I'll get back to that in a minute. The front porch proper is actually really small. It's tiled
and covered by a pretty small roof so my grandparents extended it, so to speak. They made a set of wooden frames and hung some mosquito netting over the top of it so it's like an archway extending out of the porch. Then they let honeysuckle grow over it so it's all covered with leaves and little vines that can't come into the underside of the netting, but you can see them when it's bright.

The real front door is set in a rectangular entry-way in the wall, like an alcove. It had a grille going lengthways then the front door was set in the wall 90 degrees to the grille. They don't use this door anymore, though so they use it as a storage space for shoes, umbrellas and that kind of thing. Sort of like a closet. Now they use the sliding door as the front door. There's a grille over it too then there's a regular glass and metal sliding door. The porch is a wrap-around porch but it's only about 4 feet wide, so basically, it's pointless. If you walk past the sliding door, to the side of the house, my grandparents have built a green, plastic extension out of the roof and there's a koi pond with a fountain. Past that, they kind of paved the ground themselves by shoveling the earth out of the way to make it flat, then they placed bricks in this strange pattern (I just found out it's called a herringbone pattern) around a small willow tree. Past that, there's the backyard which leads to the kindergarten behind the house (my parents and grandparents own a small chain of kindergartens or pre-schools, call them what you will).

The thing I haven't mentioned, but is vitally important is that the whole garden is really a garden. There are trees, bushes, plants, herbs, flowers, everything. There are hibiscus that are bigger than my hand all stretched out. There are white ones too. They have this small herb garden where they've planted sage, marjoram, dill, rosemary, basil and parsley. They've got lime trees, longan trees, a mango tree and a mata kucing tree, I think. And the grass is just nice. Not too short or long.

The crazy thing about this house is that it REALLY changes with the weather. When it's in the morning, it's cool and humid. It's as if you're looking inside the fridge with the door open and you know the cold air is kind of melting around you as you look inside. The temperature changes with the color from a cool, cool blue to a slow, burning gold. It isn't hot, it's just right. Then as the day moves to the afternoon, it starts burning up. The light from outside starts really burning bright, as if it's screaming for your attention and it gets really hot. When evening comes, it's as if the sun is giving you one last good bit of fight before leaving for the day. It's insanely hot up to about 5 then almost dies by half by 6. From 7 onwards, the moon has its way. It's ridiculously cold (colder than my bedroom here, with the air-cond at 16) and it's deliciously wonderful.

There's this gorgeous sense of homecoming that I just can't explain. I wish I could. I'll post pictures later.