homish

I've never lived nor will I ever live in my daughter's home. Yet at the same time during my week visit I feel at home despite our very different decorating styles.

Both of us cram memories into the house, some of which are mine also.

The owl candle I gave my mother on one of the times we weren't at war. It went to Europe with me after her death and back again with my daughter many years later. The panther candle was a gift to her from me given sometime in the 90s and bought at the annual candle fair in Grand Saconnex.

The Catalan dancer is so typical of where I live now. Llara's walls are covered with her needlework, a life-long hobby taught to her by my late best friend of 53 years. One piece was in my Riverway condo decades ago, an honor place over a dry sink that I refinished in Swedish style that neither of us have.

A Café du Soleil calendar for 2017, a favorite Geneva haunt of us both. Llara doesn't feel she's in Switzerland until she's had a fondue. Rick and I went there the night we reconnected. The Geneva Writers Group that helped my writing so much met there for years. Each year I send her the new calendar with its original theme.

A photo of her as a child with my Dad hangs in the spare room. It was Christmas, strange to be warm instead of freezing, but then my Dad was living in Florida, his lifelong dream.
 

A MASH star poster given to us by an artist friend shortly after the series end and his framing showed his imagination. He had happened to drop artwork off as we were watching the last episode and having a MASH party.

It is not the material value of any of the items, but the memories that are buried within. We both feel our homes are sanctuaries. I hear people talking of their home as investments, which they are, but also of trading up. 

Llara's and my homes are investments, but investments in memories that tell of our hearts and souls.