Photographs: January 2008 Archives

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.

There are times when I am overcome by the loveliness of the everyday objects that surround my little rituals. The process of making cocoa - so pleasurable, and not nearly just because the result is something warm and chocolatey.

There is the whole beauty of warming milk in a little pot on the white stove. There is the mug it goes into - my very favorite, a large, handmade purple one. There are the small, creamy bubbles that appear on the surface.

And then there is the whole blue-and-orange theme that appears in my kitchen in mid-winter when the fruits all run to clementines and oranges. Someone at the Darling Clementine factory is very astute in their packaging design, knowing how beautiful those little tangerines look against that particular, almost-lapis shade of blue. And the lettering is just perfect. I have been caving into my desire for those pretty little crates all winter, even though in previous years I usually chose the cheaper brands of them.

If it sounds like I am in a better, even dreamy mood, well, that is because I had a better, even dreamy day, following on the heels of a wonderful surprise last night. I am going to keep the details to myself for once. I think I need to hug it around my arms the way one does those delicious secrets when one is young.

But please enjoy these photographs of some of my favorite images from daily life. I always look at these things and think that I want to show them to you, and I hardly ever seem to want to draw the camera out and go through the motions of capturing and loading and sizing and so on. Tonight, though, the Nikon just jumped out of its shell and took them for me. Or so it seemed. (Okay, not really, but doesn't it sound more poetic that way?)