Home Stuff

My home is no longer my own.

During our stay in Australia, our friends Robert and Holly have been care taking our rancho in Shingletwon, CA (I always make that typo...). They welcomed us home last Friday evening with an extravagant and delicious BBQ dinner party. Overwhelmed with emotion already, I stepped back from the cheerful bustle of the gathering and observed that our friends have slipped very successfully into the life we left behind - in fact, more successfully than we had ever done. They have been able to make their way in this rural community in ways that we never could. They have made friends of our acquaintances. They have made a life where we merely lived.

I walk around my house, still decorated with the artifacts and accoutrements of my life and feel my own personality like an outsider. These objects are familiar, yet they tell a story of person I don't quite know and not at all the same story told by my collection of discarded treasures back in Sydney. Each of these objects comes with a story, a history, a memory, a feeling. I ache with nostalgia as I remember the taste of the dinner in Austin when we got that picture, or the smell of the streets in New Orleans when I bought that skeleton chest, or the angle of the sunlight through the campfire smoke when we bought all those little bobbly-headed turtles from that snot-covered boy in San Felipe and we were so pleased with ourselves because we talked him down 5 pesos before we realized how petty was the accomplishment.

I am proud of the contents of my Sydney apartment because they represent frugality and resistance to conspicuous consumption, but I as I look around at my collection of stuff, I feel a strange arrogance - not for the items themselves nor of my ability to own them, but for the rich tapestry of my personal history that they represent.

But then nothing deflates arrogance like a cat. Not that I expected any sort of of welcome from The Cow, but the slightest hint of acknowledgement would have been nice...she certainly had plenty of acknowledgement for Robert when he opened that can of wet food, which evidently he does every night, which certainly accounts for her reassignation of affection.

Yet further illustrates the many ways in which my home is no longer my own.