minimal bliss

The house echoes now. Nothing's here. Well, that's not true: we have everything we need, and then some. But our numerous possessions, currently squashed like a third-trimester fetus in an oblong metal womb, have yet to arrive from across the ocean. It's a mystery to me. How is it that we can function perfectly well with none of our stuff, and yet a massive shipment is going to reach us (early next week, they threaten) and we will have to accommodate it all.

For the last few days housework has been a sheer pleasure, like playing house as a child; trivial, optional, insignificant, amusing. There's virtually nothing to clean! Little to launder! Back in Hove, I never saw the bottom of the laundry hampers as I could only manage to scoop off the top layers, wash, dry, and fold the clothes, then deliver them to appropriate bedrooms before soiled stuff spilled over again. Eight laundry baskets were in constant use. Just prior to our move, I spent over £100 having all the washing done, by someone else. I really truly don't get it. Why did we need all that stuff there, but not here?

I admit I have fantasized about the container ship sinking into the Atlantic and our possessions disappearing, only to be recovered centuries hence by treasure-seekers. Those hypothetical future finders would appreciate all our detritus so much more than I do now. One woman's meat...

hummingbears

Hello, blog. I've abandoned you for quite some time. It's therapeutic having a space to write but it can also feel like a burden. I write when I'm anxious, I realize. That's going to color my output.

At the moment the anxiety centers around my departure tomorrow from the family homestead in Los Angeles. The children and I are flying back to Toronto, our quote-mark 'home', to rejoin husband and cat. The middle child said, in a spurt of positive thinking, that Toronto already feels like home. I meanwhile woke to the BBC World Service news, on a local public radio station, and for a few moments believed I was lying in bed at home (no quotes) in Brighton, listening to Radio 4. I feel simply dislocated.

I sit at my computer, at my parents' dining table, watching hummingbirds flit around the feeders that I put up for them each time I visit, and which my parents allow to run dry when I go. Poor little avians, feast and then famine. I read that there are hummingbirds in Toronto, in the summer, but I haven't yet discovered any. False advertising or insufficient patience?

Hummingbirds in summer. What visits in winter? Polar bears? I fear February.

talk talk

Everyone here sounds like me. So strange after almost 17 years of speaking with a 'foreign' accent when I'm at home. I am still a foreigner but have lost my vocal indicator system. Now you can only tell me apart from the locals when I try to spend change, and do it incompetently.