Gone Gnomin'

By Jessi Hammond

Tilly's husband passed away suddenly six months ago, just after Christmas.

Now the garden gnomes they'd collected during fifty years of marriage have disappeared too.

Only to mysteriously reappear on a blog called Gone Gnomin'…

A heartwarming kind-of Christmas story about the power of love and family and the silliness of holidays.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kincaid Publishing
• Release date: Dec 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215029053

Book preview

About this book

Tilly’s husband passed away suddenly six months ago, just after Christmas.

Now the garden gnomes they’d collected during fifty years of marriage have disappeared too.

Only to mysteriously reappear on a blog called Gone Gnomin’…

A heart-warming kind-of Christmas story about the power of love and family and the silliness of holidays.

Gone Gnomin’

One

Tilly and Ken had bought the unit two months after the complex was completed.

Back then, fifty years ago, it quickly filled with families. Tilly and Ken’s three kids and next door’s two and over-the-access-road’s five… my goodness, there must have been upwards of forty children in the twelve units at one point. Everyone (mostly) knew everyone, the kids played together in the complex’s tiny playground, and Christmas Day was a riot with the access-road blocked off by cars and everyone bringing plates of food and drink to share and the school-age kids – and a lot of the dads – playing backyard cricket along the road, metal rubbish bins as wickets, while the mums chatted and looked after the littlies.

Over the years, things had changed.

The kids grew up and moved away, the parents followed them or died or moved for work or became grey nomads.

The Christmas parties dwindled as people visited relatives or went on holiday over the break.

And the gnomes somehow migrated to Tilly and Ken’s place.

They had been some gimmick or other by the builder, Tilly couldn’t remember now. As each unit was sold, the owner was given a gnome. Tilly and Ken received a foot-tall fishing gnome, a rod in one hand and a fish in a net in the other, a flat-topped fishing hat crammed above a wide grin and a big nose. Which was hilarious because Ken couldn’t swim and the one time Tilly had gone fishing, the tinny’s bung had been knocked out and the thing had almost sunk a kilometre out to sea before anyone noticed.

They were kind of odd gnomes, really, not the usual type. They were made out of some kind of resin, much lighter than concrete, and were painted with meticulous detail.

‘A cut above the gnome-al gnome,’ Ken had said at the time, and dodged, laughing, as Tilly swiped at him with her magazine.

Ken, who was handy on the tools – he was, after all, a janitor and jack-of-all-trades – had built a two-metre round pond in their tiny front yard, planted native bush around it and stocked it with goldfish before proudly sitting Lucky the Fisherman on its edge.

Over the years, as families