The Divine Mistake

The Divine Mistake: An autobiography

Theresa Byrnes

Smashwords Edition

Copyright Theresa Byrnes 2009

This first digital edition has the complete text of the original, re-formatted for digital readers. Minor corrections have been made, and the quotation from Picasso has been corrected. The cover art is new, and photos from the first paper edition have been excluded.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Cover photo: Greg Weight

Dedicated to:

My best friends and staunchest allies,

Joseph and Lorraine Byrnes - my parents -

the most generous, honest, loving, creative,

hardworking people

I have ever known.

The unyielding love of the women in my

ancestry and in my life. From them I come

and to them I go.

In loving memory of Roy (Dadayna) and

Jolma Marika

and Terri Vingerhoed.

~~~ ~~~

Acknowledgments

To Amanda Hemmings, Alex Mohan and all at Pan Macmillan who welcomed me to their ranks of salubrious authors - and then waited two years for the first draft.

To Richard Fogl and Ruth Koenig from Barker Gosling Legal Group for their astute professional assistance and good will.

To Hugh at Micro-seconds who gave me a second-hand computer.

To Jan Howley who salvaged the corrupted disc that contained Chapter Eight.

To Wendy Champagne for her editorial contribution.

To the Presbytarian Church of N.S.W.

To the committee members of TBF inc. for their sweat and mateship.

To Charles Blackman, OBE, David van Nunen, John Coburn and Margaret Tuckson for their friendship and support.

To all the artists, galleries, companies and individuals that have participated in and donated to TBF inc. events and campaigns.

To Professor Massimo Pandolfo and his colleagues who discovered the FA gene.

To Dr Ian Alexander, Dr Jane Flemming and the medical teams all over the world who are working to cure Friedreich's Ataxia.

To Derek Parker (Parker Galleries), Cam Crofts (Jim Crofts Studio) and David Altshuler (Oxford Art Supplies), all of whom have let my account soar so I could.

To Bill Moore at City Gym for his generosity.

To Helen Penny, my personal trainer, who guided me to strength.

To Kristina Karasulas and Penny Arcade for their belief in my talent.

To the Marika family for their love.

And in memorial appreciation to Bill Cockle, Barbera Major and to Burnam-Burnam. The events I have written about are true, as I remember them.

It is not my intention to upset anyone involved and for this reason I have used pseudonyms on occasion. There are many times, places, people, situations and scenes that didn’t make it through to the final draft, but they have all been important to me.

~~~ ~~~

FRIEDREICH’S ATAXIA (FA) is an inherited disease of the nervous system affecting approximately one in 50,000 people. Most FA sufferers remain symptom free until puberty. It is then that clumsiness becomes apparent and worsens over a period of about ten years until coordination and balance become so impaired that walking becomes impossible. With the sufferer wheelchair-bound but still with sensation and limited movement, the disease continues. A percentage of people with FA go blind, deaf and lose the ability to talk. In the latter years of an FA sufferer’s life, while the intellect remains completely intact, all control of the body diminishes, leaving them a physical vegetable. The life expectancy is roughly between forty and fifty years of age, eventual death usually occurs through weakening of the heart muscle. Every year in Australia five to six babies are born who go on to develop FA.

~~~ ~~~

I stare death in the face and think,

‘I have always felt a yearning

to be the wind’.

~~~ ~~~

Preface

‘IF YOU CAN ACHIEVE all you do in a wheelchair, just imagine what I can do with legs!’ a person commented after I had given a motivational speech on the power of community service. Clearly, the ability to walk doesn’t necessarily come complete with the ability to succeed. It takes more than a pair of legs to change the world, to be free, to find happiness.

   A well-meaning passer-by declared, ‘You’re so courageous, if I were you I’d kill myself,’ while I was sitting in my wheelchair at a bar with friends. Once again it is blatantly apparent that life’s meaning is completely missed. Courage has nothing to do with the limits of the body but has everything to do with overcoming the limits of the mind.

   This book is about my life as an artist - my love for adventure, self-expression and commitment to transformation. From the outset I told my publisher, ‘This is not going to be a girl-next-door account. It has sex, drugs, and rock ’n ’roll.’ I don’t want to pull any punches, I’m not ashamed.

   I always wanted to be wrenched through life. I’m an opportunist when it comes to experience, and FA is a vehicle for squeezing out more juice. I see my life as an active experiment; to grasp at greatness I must risk failure. I put instinct before caution, ideals before reality and possibility before negativity. As a result, my life is not easy but it’s not boring either. I am the shadow of my adamant soul which leads me sometimes to disaster but always to insight.

   I’m grateful for the adversity in my life, it is a gateway. To transform the ‘mistake’ into something divine requires boldness to go into it, vision to distinguish between clarity and chaos, and the ability to express the difference.

~~~ ~~~

Chapter One A HERITAGE OF STRENGTH

I COME FROM A LINE of adventurers and runaways. I was named after my father’s mother, a Spanish beauty with two major passions in her life: her son Joey and dance. Theresa’s devotion to dance was so fierce that she persisted with it during her illness from tuberculosis. She died when Joey was two.

My middle name, Simplicia, comes from my mother’s mother. It was given to me as an inheritance - it contains the living seeds of her family history, stories of true love and an extraordinary spirit of survival.

It started with Carlos Ga, a Spanish-Philippino ship’s captain, who at twenty-five, with a head full of dreams and striking good looks, was in command of a vessel bound for Australia from England. On board for the journey were John Banyan a Welsh businessman, his wife Amy and their free-spirited daughter Mary Ann. En route, Carlos and Mary-Ann fell head-over-heels in love with each other and Carlos proposed before they reached Australian shores. Dour old John Banyan was dead against the idea and vowed if his daughter accepted the foreign sea captain’s proposal he would never speak to her again.

The ship docked in Cooktown, in far north Queensland and Carlos and Mary-Ann were married there soon afterwards. It was 1883 and they never saw her father again. They settled on Thursday Island in the Torres Strait, an untouched paradise of palms, pristine sea and new beginnings.

My grandmother, Simplicia Ga, was born in Victoria Parade, Thursday Island, in 1900. Tragically, nine years later her mother Mary-Ann drowned. She was a remarkable woman and her death at forty-five years of age left her devoted husband and fourteen children deeply bereft. After Mary-Ann’s death the eldest girls (there were seven girls in all) took over the mothering and Carlos sent the others to the Catholic school and set about arranging marriages for them with local, successful Chinese pearl divers. Simplicia would have none of it and convinced her father to let her move to Melbourne where she could stay with her older sister Zelma.

In Melbourne, as fate would have it, she met a fifteen-year-old runaway called Carl Schunko. Carl had crossed half the world to get away from his father, a general in the Austrian army, who had a similar life planned for his son. When Carl and Elsie (Simplicia) met, continuing the Ga tradition, they fell madly in love. Elsie committed to a life with Carl and they moved to Sydney and married at the Redfern Registry Office before the year was through.

Eleven years and nine children later, in 1936, Elsie fell pregnant with her tenth and final child, Lorraine Anne Veronica Dunn, my mum. In the seventh month of that pregnancy, my grandfather Charles Dunn (Carl had changed his name because of racial discrimination during the First World War), died of a heart attack. Mum never met her father, she just missed out. I think that is her greatest sadness.

During the Depression, Elsie succeeded in raising a family of ten on a widow’s pension. The family pulled together, living on rations and hand-me-downs. Elsie was also good with the needle - she made all her children’s clothes and was able to trade away clothing coupons for food coupons with some of their neighbours. The little ones brought home bags of broken Harold Baker biscuits and Charlie was gaining a reputation as a professional boxer. In order of age, Theresa (Tessie), Mary, Charlie, Olga, Albert, Josephine, Bennet, Henry, Agnes and Lorraine were the proud Dunns.

At the same time, in the working-class neighbourhood of Surry Hills, a young Joseph Michael Bede Byrnes (my dad) was being raised by his grandmother Cora Haughey. Cora was a strong Irish woman who had become a sole parent through a bad marriage to Joe Byrnes (the first), a New York jew and a infamous drinker. Joe spent many an evening knocking Cora about the lino floors of their terrace house.

Joe Byrnes the first had travelled to Australia to experience the ‘new world’. He arrived in Sydney and rented a room in a boarding house in Surry Hills run by Elizabeth McCormack, Cora’s mother. Joe changed his name from Bernstein to Byrnes and took work as a bricklayer. He romanced Cora, they married and before they knew it had a son, Joseph Byrnes the second, a dead ringer for his dad in every possible way.

It wasn’t long before Joe left his first black mark on the ‘new world’ by deserting Cora for the thrill of Melbourne and another woman. Cora eventually remarried, to a fine man called Frank Haughey. Joe the second and Theresa (the dancer) met at a dance. Their life together was cut short by her illness and when she died at age twenty-eight, Cora collected her grandson Joey (Joseph Byrnes the third) and vowed to protect him from his father’s wild ways and savage beatings. Cora, too, copped a broken nose on more than one occasion for her trouble.

By fourth grade Joey had started his first business, hauling bags of manure from the stables at the back of their terrace house to sell as fertiliser. By the end of the day he’d literally be covered in crap. He used the money he made to buy books. It was a tough job but despite his somewhat dysfunctional family life the hard work ethic prevailed. That’s Dad to a tee - if you are angry, bored or dissatisfied with your life you have to work your balls off to get ahead, to make a change or at the very least, to forget.

Cora was a great seamstress. She sat up most nights and finesewed jockey vests by a kerosene lamp. The money she earnt went to pay Joey’s Catholic school fees.

In his early teens Joey took to climbing the huge loquat tree in the backyard. He’d find a position among the spreading branches and sing in angelic soprano all the hymns and Irish folk songs Cora had taught him. Neighbouring housewives would hang over the dividing wooden fences and cry. The kid could sing. It wasn’t long before he became an altar boy and was asked to join the choir at the Catholic church. He was being groomed for the priesthood. But deep within the altar boy, young Joey was developing an alter-ego, that of a bodgie, the 1950s equivalent of a punk.

He began mixing with whores and cons, enjoying the farce of pissing it up, being his father’s son by night and on Sundays toning down his quiff and his language for the church. God finally spared him the agony of maintaining a double life when he was sprung telling an explicitly rude joke to a plain-clothed priest. Kicked out of the church and blackballed from the priesthood, Joey had to rethink his prospects.

Lorraine and Joe met at a dance hall called Surryville, on City Road in Camperdown. Joe was definitely rough trade but he had a charming sense of humour and sweet Lorraine proved to be a challenge he just couldn’t walk away from. Joe was a dreamer. He had learnt the hard way. He was educated by life itself and from his lust for reading. He dreamed of a life beyond the blue-collar crunch. Joe wanted more, he wanted success and Lorraine had faith in the gutsy loner. Joe had talent, Lorraine had conviction. After a very stormy courtship, they married in 1961 at St Patrick’s Cathedral, Parramatta.

Dad got into sales. With sales, the only thing between you and your first million is sheer determination - that’s how he saw it. Never give up despite all the knock-backs! He vowed to become a millionaire by thirty-five. ‘Stick with me,’ he said to Lorraine confidently. He sold cash registers door to door.

For Mum there was no greater gift than family. Their first child, my sister, Lorraine Anne Cora Byrnes, was born in November 1966. Two years later, on 5 February 1969, I was born and they named me Theresa Simplicia Byrnes.

~~~ ~~~

Chapter Two THE TOM BOY

I WAS A TOMBOY, the Joe my dad never had. I loved toy buses and trucks, and I had a pretty impressive collection of Matchbox cars too. Lorraine had dolls, I had bears - my main squeeze was a bear named Teddy. I was given him for my first birthday.

I wouldn’t sleep without that bear. He wore a pink pinafore that had three shiny black buttons, a button for his nose and two more for his eyes. I used to spray Teddy with perfume and the sweetness would particularly soothe me. Furry Blanket, another childhood friend, was a washed-out green, torn and frayed at the edge. Ted, Furry Blanket and me were inseparable. I rubbed Furry back and forth under my chin - the hugs, the scent, the gentle tickling, I had the whole sleep-time saga sussed.

Tunks Street Kindergarten in Northbridge was where I first met Danielle Morrison. My former best friend had just moved to the kindy next door and the parting had been dramatic. Having a best friend was extremely important to me, it helped me to feel safe and loved, I had to find another one quickly. At the time, a stuffed clown was my constant companion. I remember clutching that clown and standing by the classroom door as the kids filed out for playlunch.

I asked each one of them, ‘Will you be my best friend?’

‘No.’

‘Will you be my best friend?’

One boy replied, ‘If you give me ya clown I might.’

I wasn’t letting that clown go for anybody.

‘Will you be my best friend?’

A new girl with blonde hair and blue eyes looked up at me and said, ‘Yes!’

We skipped off arm in arm into the play area and have never looked back.

The first profound experience of myself as an artist also occurred at Tunks on one of the long low tables all covered in paper. The teachers filled paper cups with paint and placed straws next to them. I sucked up the paint and blew it onto the paper. The result was dynamic, no matter how much paint I swallowed in the process.

Danielle had an older brother called Craig and her father Les, alias Lucky Starr, was famous for the song ‘I’ve Been Everywhere’. It was a big hit in the 1970s. Gloria, his wife, was glamorous and melancholy. Luck had married her in his heyday as a young rock’n’roller in the ’60s. Gloria was from Shepparton, a conservative town in country Victoria and when she and Lucky Starr married it made the headlines in the local paper.

The Morrisons were the coolest family. They lived in a two-storey brick home in Northbridge. They had two dogs, Boongie and Kylie, a tabby cat named Ben and a couple of pet carpet snakes. There was a pool out the back, a tree house in the yard and a rumpus room downstairs with painted wooden boxes full of dress-up clothes. The barbecue, the budgies and Luck’s bonsai collection were on the balcony and through the sliding doors, inside the living room, was a bar stocked with bourbon.

I used to stay over at Danielle’s all the time. If I didn’t want to go home, I’d cry and the performance often led to an extended visit. I demanded to be listened to, it was a major issue throughout my childhood. If not, I was a tantrumthrower. I’d literally go berserk, screaming and crying, convulsing with rage until I was physically exhausted. At home my family left me alone to ride it out and after the worst of it, when the screams had mellowed to sobs, I had all kinds of vivid imaginings. The emotional and physical intensity of it took me to a heightened state. I had realisations after some of those tantrums that I remember to this day.

‘If I was dead you’d love me,’ I screamed and I threw myself onto my bed, sobbing. I was in trouble for something, I wanted to explain but nobody would listen. Lying on my bed in posttantrum exhaustion I began to drift. I visualised I was saying goodbye to my friends and family one by one. I was strong, unafraid and philosophical. It was just great to see everyone. Those who cried I consoled. I assured everyone I was ready to go. It was a drawn-out, melodramatic death scene where I had time to perform individually to all the important people in my life. I realised there was power in death. Finally, despite my age, people would listen and all would be forgiven.

In another post-tantrum awakening I was the only real person alive. Everybody else - Mum, Dad, policemen, the entire human race - were role-playing, trying to trick me into believing whatever they wanted. After that realisation I was nobody’s fool, I didn’t blindly trust anyone’s judgement but my own. I knew I was one of the very few free thinkers in the world and I was never going to let that go. I had something to defend and protect. I became the warrior of my spirit and in consequence was always in some sort of trouble.

When I was four Mum and Dad built a split-level, threebedroom house at 7 Loblay Crescent, Bilgola Plateau. The house was ’70s hip with purple nylon curtains and wall-to-wall carpets, ten minutes from the beach and surrounded by tracts of native bushland. Mum and Dad’s business, motivation and sales training, was booming and on the weekends they often held seminars for sales people in a hall near Narrabeen. Lorraine and I went along and were settled together on the grass behind the hall with paints and canvas boards. While they lectured we painted, and devoured the biscuits laid out for morning and afternoon tea.

My parents loved painting. At home we had a wonderful library of art books and when I was five Mum and Dad took us to Oxford Art Suppliers where they bought my first oil paint set. The four of us frequently trekked out into the bush near our home, Lorraine and I carrying our kids’ easels, Mum and Dad the supplies, and we’d set up at a vantage point and paint what we saw.

They were also very keen on education so after I finished preschool, despite the expense, I joined Lorraine at Wenona, a private school in North Sydney. Danielle started there around the same time. I remember the daily family peak-hour pilgrimage, sweltering in the Valiant from Bilgola to North Sydney, where Mum and Dad had their office.

Lunchtime at school, all the primary girls formed a line and crossed the road crocodile-style to join the high school girls. Their grounds were mainly concreted and much bigger than ours. In one particular spot, a small landscaped area, I would flip the small rocks over and watch as hundreds of scrambling slaters spread across the lawn. I was fascinated by those little insects, they exuded personality.

At Loblay Crescent I had a special place on a huge, flat rock right by our Hills Hoist in the backyard. I would imagine I was a lizard and lie on that rock for hours. In its warmth, heated by the sun, I would wonder how long a rock lived for. I’d stare at the patterns of the velvety moss, at the ants running frantically back and forth, at the baby garden lizards that dashed off as soon as I saw them and ponder my existence in relation to time.

In our front garden I had my own strawberry patch. The earth was rich with earthworms hollowing through the dirt, writhing in on themselves and then extending. I’d grab clumps of earth and gently spread them out on the cement drive. Without fail, intertwined worms of all different sizes and shades of blood brown were revealed. I’d examine and stroke their fragile, glossy skin and if Lorraine was around I would seize a handful and chase her around the house.

I derived great pleasure from terrifying Lorraine. She never underestimated me,she just wasn’t quite sure what I was capable of. Don’t get me wrong - she was my best mate, but being the youngest I loved to get one up on her, it made me feel powerful. One afternoon after school we were squabbling about something and the argument was going nowhere so I ran into the kitchen yelling, ‘I’m gonna kill you’. I rattled around in the cutlery draw and yelled out that I had knife. I chased Lorraine out of the house and she ran for miles, all the way to Avalon Oval where Mum was coaching netball. If she had looked around she would have seen that my weapon was only a teaspoon.

Our shared room was decorated with ballerina wallpaper, ballerina eiderdowns and framed Degas ballerina prints on the wall. Behind the bed-heads were metal rods two metres high with large metal hoops welded to their tops. Mum sewed bright pink nylon around the hoops, draped it down either side of the beds and tied it piggy-tail style beside our pillows with pale pink ribbon. Our bedroom was girlie heaven. Lying among all that pink cascading nylon was instantly relaxing. My imagination whirled.

We weren’t neat children. When we did clean our room we shoved everything under our beds and let the long eiderdowns cover a multitude of sins. There was no point in making the bed if you were just going to sleep in it again. Mum and Dad were always pretty cool about things like that, never pedantic tidy freaks. They were like kids themselves in many ways - they agreed it was more fun to go out or hang out as a family than keep the house immaculate. Life was to be lived, they said, not polished.

Cora, Dad’s grandmother, also lived with us in Loblay Crescent. We called her Nanna. She was well into her eighties by then and going senile. She knew just how to trigger Dad and they used to have raging arguments. Although Dad wasn’t a drinker like his father and his father before him - it had taken three generations of Joseph Byrnes to get it right - he did have the Irish temper, and he never hesitated in driving his point home. Lorraine and I became very distraught hearing them hurl abuse at one another, so we decided the best way to stop the family disunity was to kill Nanna.

Poison, we agreed, was the only option and we concocted an evil brew in a plastic milk-shake shaker. The recipe was half a bottle of cheap perfume, half a glass of milk, a tablespoon of laundry detergent, a splash of Dettol, a handful of Fruit Loops, a nip of creme de menthe, five shakes of tabasco, a dollop of tomato sauce, a sprinkling of soap flakes and a cup of sugar for flavour.

‘Here, Nanna, we made a drink for you.’ She never took a sip.

The Byrnes’ tradition was ‘all or nothing’ and sales was an all-or-nothing kind of career. Dad’s circuitous route to wealth took us through some rocky patches. Whenever there was a crisis in either family or business matters, it was not hidden from us. Lorraine and I were not mollycoddled. We shared the seesaw ride between wealth and struggle. If Mum and Dad had money they’d spend it. When they struggled, we lived off canned food, whatever we had. Financial realities were a family responsibility. So when the business hit a rough patch and Mum and Dad had to transfer us from Wenona to the local public school we were happy. It was a five-minute walk from home and a damned sight more affordable.

In Grade 2 at Bilgola Plateau Primary School I was very popular. I had all the girls convinced I was magic. I could make the trees sway and I could disappear, if they kept their eyes shut long enough for me to run away. I learnt early that people want to believe; it’s more fun that way. I also understood that the power of suggestion is so strong, if you take an intuitive leap, like guessing when the breeze is going to start and stop, you can become a leader.

I had very long brown hair and huge brown eyes. The boys loved me, so much so that I had to organise whose turn it was to sit next to me. I prepared a list of their names before class - it was either do that or all hell would break loose in the dive to sit beside me. The teacher thought it was amusing but the girls began to hate me.

The crash came the day I sprouted a wart on my knee. That was it, the girls honed in on that ugly growth and began a slow but effective process of death by teasing. One playlunch when a group of them cornered me and chanted in unison, ‘Warto, Warto, Warto!’ I ran home screaming and crying. I told Mum.

‘They’re just jealous,’ she said. ‘Don’t give them the satisfaction of a reaction and they’ll stop.’ Mum’s advice worked but the whole experience had changed me.

Even back then I was a bit of a clutz. When I ran down Loblay Crescent, which was steep, I tripped and fell regulairly. With the wart on my knee it was very visually dramatic because the top got knocked off and blood literally poured forth covering my whole leg. I hoped and prayed that the wart would be absorbed into the tarmac. Not so, it grew back. But never alone. Warts reproduce. They feed off blood and childhood insecurity.

Warts later, nineteen on one knee and one on the other, the girls stopped teasing me - in fact they didn’t come near me at all. I found refuge in a couple of Grade 2 misfits. The taller, skinny, more mature-looking boy was Mort and the littler, chubbier boy was Charlie. In their intriguing world of scientific experiments, cubbyhouses and worlds beneath dismountable classrooms, the concerns of the other kids seemed dull in comparison.

Summers were spent outdoors. Afternoons after school we went to Simone Cockle’s pool. You couldn’t get me out of there. In the underwater silence my mind ran wild with dreams and thoughts. Water gave me the grace I felt I didn’t have on land - the rhythm of swimming back and forth, leaping into a backward somersault whenever the urge took me. In the water I indulged in weightless, sensuous movement, a cross between a ballerina and a mermaid.

Simone was way groovy. Her hair was long, blonde and so sun-bleached it was white. She had a ‘V’ tan-line where her thongs strapped over her feet and also the ultimate Australian thing: the gap between her big and second toe was so huge from religiously wearing thongs, she’d have to have worn them from birth. The Cockles also had a trampoline. We all loved that trampoline and fought like cats and dogs over whose go it was. Once you were up and bouncing it was hard to let it go. One afternoon Lorraine and Simone were hogging and when I bounced on board with them, they smothered and jumped on me. I was humiliated and my right arm hurt beyond belief.

I wailed hysterically all the way home but Mum didn’t believe me, she thought I was having another tantrum. Three days later when I moved my arm past a certain point I’d start screaming. To keep the peace Mum took me for an X-ray, lo and behold I had a fractured arm. She felt really guilty for not believing me so she told me the story of the boy who cried wolf to explain why she hadn’t taken me seriously. She showered me with love, food and favours for weeks after that. It taught me that something good comes from everything.

Next door to us in a big white house lived the Moon family. They had white, shag-pile carpet and I liked their fluffy floors. Graham and Vicky were a gorgeous couple. He was tall and dark and worked as a pilot, and she was about 5ft 5", with a perfect figure, blonde hair and doe eyes. She was a nurse. Her make-up was always faultless Marilynesque. They had two kids, Evette and Christopher.

One hot afternoon - I must have been nine - I was lying in the yard under our wooden picnic table to escape the heat and Christopher was lying beside me. I was always a sensual being, not promiscuous but definitely horny, easily turned on by the nudie bits in Mum’s glamour and Dad’s photography magazines. That day, I was stretched out with my arms behind my head, drifting, and Christopher was staring at me. He discovered the first tiny dark hair sprouting from my armpit. I was growing up. Dreaded puberty was coming my way. The inevitability of not being a child any more scared me. I was comfortable with the way I was - prepubescent, chubby, reckless and my body would often throb with desire.

~~~ ~~~

Chapter Three TAKING IT ON

CORA DIED WHEN I was ten. Her’s was the first dead body I’d seen. Hungry for experience I had followed Dad into the viewing room but when I set eyes on Nanna, all puffed-up and powdered, stiff and cold, I burst into tears. I ran from the room and sat on a pew outside, trembling with distress. I’d thought I could cope with anything but death was real loss.

We were in financial dire straits. Mum and Dad had to put the house on the market. Lorraine and I found it hard to let go of Bilgola Plateau but we put on a brave face and got excited about our next move. It was an adventure not knowing where we would settle next. We piled