More Songs About People and Things

Spending time in someone else's house is always a strange thing. One feels rather displaced, as if you're floating just above the ground instead of standing on it. It's weird the way that our material things, no matter how little we may think we need or care about them, seem to anchor us in our daily lives.

It's people who anchor us in our larger lives - family, best friends, pets, and so on. But in the day-to-day geography that settles our psyches into place and makes us feel truly ourselves, I think the things we have accumulated are what comfort us, even though we usually aren't aware of them performing that role.

In my case, the details of my "daily" are those of a ragged, dirty, loud, sometimes confusing and/or confounding city. And yet, I do find it comforting. It feels like my landscape, somehow, which is very weird in one sense because I am a nature-lover. You might not realize it to look at me, all togged up in weird hats and jazzy sneakers, slamming by in a blur of brightly colored handknits, but I've always been fairly outdoorsy. I get calm walking in the woods, and I can charm wild animals into sticking around if I happen upon them in a glade.

Why, then, choose this landscape for myself? I can't really tell you, except that I feel in my bones that it is home. And when I am away from it, I do feel fish-out-of-water, and I look round, gasping slightly and hoping that I'll be able to make it back to my bowl (or my ocean) in one piece fairly soon.

And yet, when my sister tells me that she loves having me here, that it actually makes her feel even more at home than she does otherwise, I am happy to hear it. More than that. Touched. That is the people thing at work. The circumstances of her life, the surroundings, the schedule and the lifestyle are alien, do not fit me at all. But she herself is Big Important People to me. So puttering around in her kitchen also makes sense in some way, wherever her kitchen might be.

I got no conclusion to draw from this, mind. Just noticing.