Category: home sweet home

loving&fighting

a sweet house christmas dinner tonight. it was my cooking night but didier is the real chef: we do a whole lamb leg and lots of baked potatoes. and my secret santa, who knows me well, gave me a delightful t-shirt with words that seem appropriate for the new year to come, for all of us –
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x-mas tree

new creatures came to inhabit our house while i was away. among them, a christmas tree. maybe it’s not fair to impose christmas on a tree, and then it’s not a pine tree – it’s a cypress. a living tree, which will be planted in our back yard at some point. but meanwhile we thought we might decorate it. the whole house, which these days is not only the 5 of us but also didier, george and maryann, and sarahjain and her kids dropping by. decoration american style – stringing popcorn with some cranberries. except for mihui, who loses her patience with popcorn and uses all cranberries. (and the real problem with making popcorn garlands is of course that one keeps on eating popcorn.)

it’s a bit embarrasing, but we end up jumping around the tree and singing christmas carols. (later i talk and sing to giulia on the phone and we note a difference in carols: back home they all seem to revolve around maria and joseph and the small child, the crib and the barn and the three kings, while here there are so many about rednosed raindeer, sleighs, jolly seasons and white christmas.) actually this doesn’t sound embarrasing at all, but wait till i manage to upload maría’s videoimages of the event…

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going to nashville

chirps, cries and laughter wake me up in the morning. sweet housemates all happy with what they discover in their shoe. with maría and me living in this house we just knew that Sinterklaas would not forget to come by, despite the distance which must wear the old man out. it did take some convincing to get our housemates to put out their shoe (“you mean, a real shoe, one i actually wear?” yes, this is from way before stylized Santa stockings). i just have time enough (in between packing and finishing up yet another article…) to pour my Sinterklaas goodies in a bag, put my foot in that shoe and run out to the Santa Cruz Metro station.

a long day of travelling. once more i get blessed with a clear sky and see the Rocky Mountains and the Great Plains. i even get to see the Mississippi this time, shining in the dark. an overlay in Denver and i find myself, yet again, investigating how cities and regions get branded in these transitory spaces (so what is one supposed to bring home from this place…). Denver airport is quite an impressive one among its species, i had already noticed. on the flight to Denver i shared the row with an engineer who was (vaguely…) involved in its construction and who remained filled with admiration for the project (i learned that the building is supposed to be storm and tornado proof).

walking through corridors of gates my eyes fall on a guy leaning on his guitar. i look at the gate number and sure enough, this is my flight. i’m going to Nashville. to meet maggie.

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autumn

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autumn is coming to an end, at least that is how it feels. it rained yesterday, and here rain is winter. autumn for me was living with spiders. my garden room is full of them – they come and go through the gaps in the crooked window frames, they spin cobwebs all over the room, sometimes i find traces of them in dreams, in my bed in the morning and through bites on my body. cohabitation. i’m enjoying the proximity of these creatures a lot.

memories of other autumns pass by. autumn 2004 – profound exhaustian, agony and sadness. the breakdown, the fall. made soft by winter and spring in istanbul. autumn of 2005 – dancing joy and happiness. contente d’etre heureuse, as they say in that beautiful circus that came to visit saint-gilles. torn away from that by the winter in santa cruz. and now autumn in santa cruz. it’s gentle. gentle compared to the intensities of previous years. and gentle compared to this summer, with the beautiful intensity of the caravan of friends and the angry intensity of my santa cruz resentment. gentle with lots of nest warmth and writing solitude. and some class adventures and some political challenges that i don’t quite manage to live up to in the flow of this writing life.

and in some hours time i’m flying to london – oh, a radical different intensity of things to come, perhaps, who knows, a second autumn.
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(maría’s photos, of course)

community

melissa is dropping off bits and pieces of her stuff and slowly moving in. leta mentions inner light to her; it reminds me how soon the church tends to come up in conversations in our house. to reassure melissa, leta emphazises: “it’s not about jesus or anything, it’s all about community, you know.” or liberal and new age religion in a nutshell.

populated worlds

working on the porch today, reading maría’s beautiful article while she’s taking a nap. she must have just closed her eyes when three young guys decide the side-walk in front of our house is a good place to sit down and smoke pot and have a conversation. it’s the things they say…

… as long as if you take good care of yourself… it doesn’t matter if then you’re an asshole or a good person… cause if you take good care of yourself, nobody can hurt you… they can’t touch you… the most important thing is taking good care of yourself…

almost funny. if it weren’t for the fact that meanwhile i’ve heared too many americans say variations on that sad hermetic theme. soon the side-walk friends leave, in their own reality, stoned. i go back to maría’s writing, all about care for others, kinship and companionship, creating shared worlds and lives. how scarry it would be, to be here alone, with this rather wide-spread american illusion of fortress egos that can, with more protection (and security) remain untouched. (here they tend to call it independence, or even freedom.) but reading maría, and seeing her finally getting some sleep on the bench on the porch, brings me a smile of gratitude.