Category: home sweet home

maría has a new magical digital camera.
now there are almost no safe spaces,
safe from documentation, in the house anymore…

tonight mihui will come home from three weeks of house-sitting in Berkeley. a house with a mad cat who needs so much attention that at night it wakes up the neighbors (who actually come to ring the doorbel asking if mihui could keep the cat quiet) if it is not sufficiently caressed, she told me on the phone. or something like that, mihui’s stories tend to be larger than life.

speaking of which: house-mates told me that meanwhile mihui is making stories from our house into a sit-com. a series of characters and stories spun out over a number of episodes – like Friends or Sex in the city, but set in Santa Cruz. true, this town is very marketable. (although it’s likely to be branded as paradise, and then i’m worried about this eternal return of the repressed in this paradise, as the movies and Hitchcock show us…) and true, the stories in and of the house don’t stop. but i’m holding my heart (another literal translation of a flemish expression) to see what comes out of this. (to start with, my character is the one with bushes of hair under her armpits…) and giulia, sahar, marco, wim, lotte, yoran and arwen, if i were you i’d hold my heart as well. (let alone “europe”, oh this old one will get represented in a funny way…)

meanwhile leta is psyched and maría is happy with the perspective of becoming famous. cynthia is doing the writing while mihui is doing the story-telling. cynthia’s rich daddy is paying, as he considers it time that his daughter makes it in Hollywood. and just about everyone around here seems to agree that it’s a good idea to have a sit-com about our house. it makes me wonder…

i haven’t known it otherwise: our house continues its flow of changes. over the summer back home i got the emails announcing that cynthia would move out and mihui, living in my room at the time, would officially move in. news that was cheered by many. this weekend we’ve learned that ammon the lizzard guy wants to move out. the process of finding a new housemate starts again… (let’s use a hidden camera during the interviews, leta joked, and that’s how i was informed about the sit-com…)

very grateful for the house this weekend. thinking of the story of coming here. the decision between this place and the chavez co-op. perhaps the most difficult part of the decision: how commiting to a house meant staying at least for a little bit longer in this town, and the washington house definately felt more “rooting” than the high-turnover student co-op. how it came to me. after the second meeting at the chavez house on a dark wintery sunday evening, i walked along the beach. suddenly, out of nowhere, a hugh shell arrives with the tide, just in front of my feet. i’ve never seen a shell like that here, before or since that night. i looked around, and found myself to be alone on that beach. it seemed to have arrived for me. i took it home, put it next to my bed, and decide that i’ll go for whatever feels better when i wake up.

then it came to maría, three months later. a dream at the earth activist training camp, about our house. the evening she gets back she tells me about the dream and that she must look for a house like that. just the week before it had become clear that in the end three people would move out of the house, and that we had to find one more new housemate. a dinner the following evening with leta, and it is decided that maría will move in.

this strange sense of being guided to the house, and finding the grounds for a good and gentle space in what, at least for me, is not a very friendly social territorium. i also learn this weekend, from maría who knew it a longer time, that a young girl took her life in this house. somehow something transformed into a gardian angel staying close to this home.

it’s dark by the time the airporter arrives in santa cruz. it’s a monday night, must be around 10 pm and as we drive through down town. it looks deserted. almost no one on the streets, almost no lights. also the house is dark. the board in the entrance tells me that leta and ammon are home, but they are already sleeping.

the scent of the house. i had forgotten this scent. also, it had changed; in june and july the house’s scent was mixed with that of so many different people. now it was back to its own. a very familiar one, i am reminded, in these immediate ways that scents work, of the house in Tarrytown. perhaps it’s simply the scent of wooden houses with big kitchens and porches, and therefore i associate it with the States, as i never lived in such a house back in Europe. it is a friendly scent.

my room is made beautiful by mihui. a fresh bed to crash in, a sweet letter and presents. a mug with three skeleton mexican ladies – trio las panchas – and a note that it’s maría, mihui and myself.

and then are the spiders. many of them, having spun their webs all over my room. i’ll be living with spiders this season.

it’s not painful to be back in santa cruz this time.

yoran is making friends with everybody in the house.
but mihui is his biggest friend of all.

i’m cute you’re not seems so unfair

and sahar and arwen simply fall in love.

mihui and cynthia continue to struggle through their friendship full of tensions. we heard that cynthia insisted that mihui pays maría and me for living in our rooms next months, since not paying would make her – cynthia – look bad…

and it’s necessary for her to come up with some kind of explanation of why maría and i are “so nice” to mihui. mihui and maría were married in a previous life. and i was a lover of both of them. that’s why there’s still so much love among us. i kind of feel sorry for cynthia now.

oh maría. so this is what “we were lovers in a previous life” means… 🙂