Other People's Houses

In Singapore, we rented someone's furnished house for six months. Luckily for us, it was furnished nicely with beautiful things. Nonetheless, I brought some of my favorite things from home out of my suitcase. I didn't want to be one of those knick-knack people and it isn't like I have a collection of porcelain ducks, but I do have my favorite small things from home. I prop them up on the windowsill of the kitchen of where ever we're staying. As we travel, I add in the little things I pick up along the way. It's my version of the altars I saw in Singapore and that I see all over in Bali. Balinese altars generally have flowers, fruit and incense, while in Singapore I'd see some flowers but also mugs of black coffee and the occasional cigarette. My altars are a bit random and include things from various flea markets and occasionally things I find on the ground. We now have pictures of my little altars in several of our homes, and my little Eiffel Tower and pair of creepy yet cool hands are becoming a little like the gnome in Amelie.

The longer that I am away from home, the more I want our space that we're staying - even temporarily - to feel like home. I feel like Mary Poppins unpacking her carpet bag and tailoring her room to her tastes. They say the divine is in the details. I say it's the little things that make or break your sanity - and when I am constantly adjusting to new spaces, I find I can relax a little easier when my eye can rest on something familiar.

We do find some enjoyment in living in other people's houses, especially in the kitchen. In our last house, all the dishes in the kitchen seemed to have been raided from some church basement reception hall, especially the pressed glass punch bowl with twelve matching glass mugs. We found a set of china with servings for twelve (including tea cups and saucers and coffee cups), and twenty - I kid not - ashtrays.
In our current house, you see our favorite coffee mug above. The house itself is palatial, big enough to house an entire Chinese village if need be. It is full of Buddha statues; Shiva and Ganesha also sit propped up in the living room. There are enough floor pillows, candle holders and incense burners for a meditation retreat. In the kitchen, the stack of take out menus are only for the organic or raw food/vegan restaurants. But in the coffee cups, we found Tweety Bird, which just goes to show that even those on the path to enlightenment need a little humor now and then.
Another favorite thing in other people's houses is the bookshelf. In the last house we stayed, the bookshelf had an odd mix of Dutch classics, English classics, and New Age and meditation classics. Despite my Master's in British Literature, I have a few glaring holes in my reading. I atoned for some of this in that house, reading Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and George Orwell's Animal Farm and other things I should have read in the ninth grade. It was in this house that Kent started reading one of my all time favorites, Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. He didn't finish the book while we were staying there, so he took it. I replaced it with a copy of Dickens I had finished thinking it would go with the theme the house's owner had going.
So far every house we have stayed in has had a copy of Autobiography of a Yogi and The Course in Miracles. Just in case there was any doubt about the metaphysical slant of Bali's Expats. It's a little like in the States where every hotel room has a copy of Gideon's Bible.
I do think that it is the living in other people's houses that has me miss home the most, but now because I miss the place. I miss my things. Even Kent who tends to be a bit ascetic misses our things when it comes to our kitchen tools. We have grown savvy enough to travel with good kitchen knives if only because you will not believe what people use to cut bread with - it may be why The Course of Miracles is on the bookshelf, because it will take a miracle if those poor people have to chop a tomato.
I did kind of think I would transcend my love of objects, that when we got back to the States and went through our storage unit, we would be able to purge a fair sized portion of it figuring we lived a year with out it and didn't miss it, and we may still purge a lot. Before the purge begins though, I am looking forward to opening boxes of my cookbooks, my own favorite coffee cups (not a cartoon character among them), even my odd collection of pretty jars I used to keep my things in in the bathroom cabinet. And probably, after we unpack everything at home, and once again are surrounded by piles of our own crap, I will miss the simplicity of living in other people's houses.