In west Java, Indonesia, tiny children cry 'bade ui' (bah-day oo-ee) when they are worried or tired or scared. It means 'I want to go home!' But the connotation is less that of place than a state of mind, that of being safe and secure; being cuddled is as soothing as returning to the house.
Yesterday I woke up thinking 'bade ui'. Even silently in my head I sounded plaintive. (The odd tear may have run down my cheek; who's to say?) The shipping container arrived on Tuesday, and the boxes and things had clearly courted, mated, and reproduced on their way across the Atlantic as there are 564 of them (yes, they counted, and we counted them off on our 'inventory bingo sheet'). Our lovely bed couldn't be assembled because the moving company in England didn't send along the hardware. A screw, a screw, my kingdom for a screw! This morning towering cardboard piles menaced me from above the flimsy borrowed mattress on the floor. We're drowning in stuff. Bade ui, bade ui...
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