Home by Another Way (10 page)

We have begun to feel the need to keep an eye on things here.

Five

T
here is a rule at our house that goes something like this: you gotta have your stuff.

As I recall, the first time it was articulated was when I was trying to explain hauling a stereo system in the trunk of the car to the first place Sara and I went on vacation. Which only seemed over the top to those who were watching me pack, I suppose, because I was trying to fit it in around and underneath the beach chairs I was packing as well. You never know when you are going to get somewhere at the beach and find the beach chairs are uncomfortable.

The whole business would not have been so difficult had we not also been taking a couple of boxes of groceries. You can never be sure the grocery store in the place where you are will have the correct breakfast cereal. Sometimes there are vast differences between the national chain supermarkets in Tennessee and the ones in the next state, though once I am inside, they all look the same to me.

We also were packing a box with incense and candles and compact discs and a pretty tablecloth or two. I put my painting stuff in, too. I like to paint watercolors while I am at the beach, mostly just so I can throw them away when I get home from the beach. Painting is not one of my gifts. And I think there was a boccie ball set in there as well.

Then there were the boxes of books. Sara averages a book a day when she is on vacation. If something wakes her up early, and we do not have to go to town for any reason, she can knock out two of them by bedtime. She was in the red-bird group in grade school in her
Weekly Reader
days, an achievement she still recalls with great pride.

I had a pile of books too, though I do not read as many books on vacation as she does. I think the highest level that I achieved was maybe blue bird with a bullet or some such thing. I travel with a lot of books, not because I am going to read them all, but because I am not sure what type of reading I will want to do when I get there. I like to be prepared for everything
from the ancient mystics to Robert Parker’s Spenser novels to Graham Greene.

Over the years we have stopped hauling most everything but the books when we go on vacation, although I still carry some home stuff. It is my mother’s fault.

My mother is a self-proclaimed nester.

Whenever the family would travel as I was growing up, she would always pack some bits and pieces of home into everyone’s luggage. We had enough siblings at our house that a trip involved three hotel rooms, if not more, and my mother’s first hour or so upon arriving would find her working her way from room to room, putting away clothes and sorting out stuff and setting up the bits and pieces so it would feel like home while we were away from home.

She would put a candle or two in each of the rooms, and then she would add a favorite photograph or two as well. If you were in one of the kids’ rooms, then you
would have a photograph of our folks. The favorite one was a photo from their wedding. If you went into Mom and Dad’s room, there was a photo of me playing basketball and one of my brother with his guitar and one of my sister with one of the series of star-crossed cats that wandered into our family and did not live for very long. And a photo of my two little brothers who were so much younger than I that I still think of them as having grown up in a different family.

A favorite blanket was thrown in for napping and then a book or two and a game. There was always a puzzle, purchased for the trip, a group puzzle that we would all work on a bit here and there. She would bring vases, and one of us would be sent off down the halls to look for flowers. We usually scarfed them from the lobby when the bellmen were not looking. Then she would put them around on the Formica-topped desks and bathroom countertops. We always had fresh flowers at home, from my mother’s gardens, and Mother thought if you had some fresh flowers in your room,
then you would feel like you were still sleeping in the great house we all called the homeplace. More than once I have helped her to rearrange the furniture in some Holiday Inn so it was more homey in some way.

I grew up thinking this was the way you were supposed to travel. I still think she is right, especially if you are going away on business. The people who have hired you to be away with them, speaking or retreating or conferencing with them for a few days or weeks, cannot always be trusted to remember you really do not want to be away from home in the first place. One of my friends who travels and speaks a great deal more than I do says people think they pay her to speak. “I would listen to myself talk for free,” she says. “What they are really paying me for is to be away from home.”

Home is where you find it, people say. My mother taught me that, if you have to, sometimes you can find it in your suitcase.

We are book people, Sara and I. Between us, we have been writing them and selling them and editing them and reading them and representing them for most of our adult lives. We have been collecting them too.

It would be embarrassing for me to say how many books we own. I am not sure I can tell you how many books we own. I can tell you that based on my rough measurements—measuring the shelves in our house and in my studio and the boxes we have in storage—that if you were to line them up side by side the way that you do on a bookshelf, we have about two hundred yards of books. If Barry Bonds stood at one end and tried to hit a ball to the other end, he could hit two home runs into McCovey Cove before he would get to the end of our line of books.

We had some shelves built into the walls of our dining room not too long ago, and we filled the shelves from floor to ceiling with books. It is like eating dinner in a library. We brought two dozen boxes of books from storage to fill the shelves. We told ourselves for months we could get rid of a fair amount of them as we went
through the boxes. In the end, we only gave away about a half dozen or so. How can you give away old friends you have loved and have not seen in such a long time?

These days, when we go to St. Cecilia, we are down to mostly hauling books. Partly because I cannot afford to hire the small jet it would take to get us and all the other stuff down there. Partly because St. Cecilia has been changing me. I am trying to figure out how to pack and carry what are essentially the nonessential essentials, whatever that means.

I still believe you gotta have your stuff. I just don’t gotta have so much of it as I once thought I did.

Everything about being in St. Cecilia is simpler. The more that it becomes home to us, we find it takes less and less stuff to make it so.

The house has a little bit of a kitchen to cook in. It is small enough that you can reach nearly everything while standing in one place. It has enough dishes and
utensils to do the job and yet not enough so you can pass on cleaning up after yourself as you go. If you do not wash out the cups after you use them, there will be nothing clean when you go to have tea. If you do not wash things and dry them and put them away, then there is no room to make a sandwich when you are ready for lunch.

There is a room that is both a living room and a dining room. It is where one of you sits and talks while the other one is cooking in the kitchen. The kitchen will hold the two of you but only if you have your arms around each other. Which happens here in the tropics from time to time, but it tends to delay mealtime.

This one room is where you eat and where you play cards and where you sit late into the evening to read. One of my favorite things about this room is that it will hold so little it only takes about three minutes to pick it all up before bedtime, so it is neat and clean in the morning when we rise. Most all of the stuff we need to feel at home in St. Cecilia will fit on the coffee table.

The bedroom has a bed in it and a pair of nightstands
to hold the lamps you need so you can read at night. It has a small closet and some shelves for the clothes you need as long as you did not give in to the urge to bring more than you have shelves for.

If you need more stuff, you would have a hard time finding a place to put it.

You would also have a hard time finding much more stuff on St. Cecilia.

On our first trip to St. Cecilia, we set out one afternoon to do some shopping before it was time to head home. We wanted to take something home to the children and to the people who watched out for our house and our children and our cats while we were gone. Then it occurred to us we might do a bit of Christmas shopping while we were at it.

We like to think of ourselves as discriminating when it comes to buying gifts. Most people think that about themselves, I am sure, but we have a kind of congenital
disdain for certain kinds of things that people often buy when they travel—we are not really big on T-shirts with slogans or shot glasses with
St. Cecilia
written on them. So we set out to look for other things.