World's Finest Hydration System

Day 289: World's Finest Hydration System

We are all a little out of sorts, feeling the lost sunshine and looking forward with mixed feelings to our real lives. The house feels chilly and dark, and there is little food except the Christmas packages - chocolate and cheese and coffee and smoked fish and sausage - from various Rickmans. Uneasily, I have taken stock and realized there is little left that I want to get rid of, short of a wholesale rethinking of my entire portfolio of goods.  Everything I see is either useful, or beautiful, or evokes fond memories. 

Jane's house is very comfortable, and yet, she is not acquisitive.  In her cupboards are heavy glass plates and off white china with brown patterns and little green four-ounce Coca Cola glasses, patterns and styles from my childhood. I have the feeling that if some of the dishes from her every day ware broke, she'd just keep the perfectly good rest of the set. Someday, when there were few enough left that she couldn't set a table, she might get a new set. She's had her big comfortable sectional sofa for the whole twenty years I've known her.

I believe that objects are just a means to an end in Jane's house. It's the people in the house, not the house and its contents, that matter. A sofa is a comfortable place to sit. A mug is a thing to drink coffee out of. A blanket is a thing to keep you warm. What's important is family, and humor, and affection, and comfort, and God. Stuff doesn't really matter, except maybe the old corduroy rocking chair that her mother rocked Richie in, once upon a time.

After 287 days, I'm still not quite ready to rethink everything. I felt relieved, peering around the red storage closet, to lay eyes on an object I didn't recognize and realize that it's an old, dusty water vessel I've never seen anyone use. I can put off confronting a crisis in the stuff project, at least for one more day.

On Monday, back to work.