Nine years ago I wrote about a late-night wakeful moment of deep appreciation of our first house.
What I was attempting to convey then was my prideful appreciation of something owned, a luxuriating in lordship over our domain. Taking advantage of an alone and quiet moment to indulge in the comfort of a place that, because you’ve settled into it and have touched all its cracks and pores, feels perfectly sized for you, matched exactly to your needs.
I like when this happens – when you develop a love for precisely the thing you have because you have it and not a different thing. A kind of irrational love that persists even when a different thing is objectively better. My old sun-beaten, curled and creased leather hat that I’d not trade for a new one. Things that take on the value not only of their construction or creation, but of the living that has happened in them or with them or through them.
I used to tell Sharaun that I never wanted to move from that first house, I said that if we ever reached a point where we had the idea we’d outgrown it we needed to instead check our materialism and re-discover a satisfaction in the magnitude of our blessing. We did move, and for reasons, but I still remember that feeling of connection and satiation – thankful for having what we needed and proud to not have more than that.
Our new home here in Florida tickles that second bit for me, the part of me that is arrogant about living within means and not overdoing it. The home/inhabitants symbiosis I wrote about feeling that night nine years ago will take time, but that “this is all we need because it’s what we have” sentiment is definitely there.
Peace, hugs, happy last day of 2019.
Also written on this day...
- smoke and spirits - 2010
- fleeting festivity - 2009
- our white day - 2008
- mud and weeds - 2004