Dreaming

[textualdeviance]

I want a home life like Sunset magazine.

Beautiful house, beautiful garden, tasty, fresh food. Fun travel all over the West. Living in harmony with my local culture.


I picture myself sipping some sort of local gourmet beverage, nibbling on artisan cheese, arranging big, poofy hydrangeas in a sparkling blue glass bowl, while listening to NPR, classical and jazz through my house's remote-control sound system.

I'll have fabulous summer garden parties in the outdoor living area, where we'll all gather around a fire pit and eat grilled chicken sausage and homegrown peppers and tomatoes and watch our dogs and kids play on the lawn and chase butterflies and dragonflies.

And in the winter, we'll gather inside and I'll make flavored cocoa and cookies and we'll sing silly songs around the piano in the sitting room. We'll make a pilgrimage to see the Christmas ships or head up to the pass to have snowball fights.

Every spring and fall, when the weather is clear and mild, I'll take road trips to go see the rainforests and waterfalls. I'll spend long weekends in the San Juans, renting a vacation cottage with a deck overlooking the water, where I'll sit and read and watch the eagles. On alternate years, we'll jet down to Hawaii or maybe Mexico when the days get just a little too gray.

I'll be the crunchy, laid-back Northwest version of Ina Garten. Or something like that. Heh.


It's not that I'm really interested in getting my life from a magazine, of course. It's just a lifestyle (terrible word, but it's the best fit for the concept) that has always appealed to me. It's all very beautiful and serene and joyful, but in a natural and unforced way. It's rambling vines and overgrown rhodies instead of neatly trimmed box hedges and a single perfect lily. It's a mixed-cuisine potluck instead of filet mignon on paper-thin china. It's the cake with a crack in the top but incredible flavor opposed to carefully sculpted but cardboard fondant. It's the stained apron over the old concert t-shirt and velvet-soft jeans instead of the ironed chinos.

It's not about how things look, but about how they feel and function. Food is supposed to taste good, flowers are supposed to be a riot of color and texture and scents, furniture is supposed to be sturdy and comfortable. I can't imagine a life spent trying to keep every hair in place and every spot off the glasses. I'm a hedonist, and such fussiness just gets in the way of diving into life and enjoying it. Things don't have to be perfect. They're perfect the way they are, so long as you give them love and attention so they can reach their potential.

Oh, of course life's mundanities will go on. I'll still have a job--a fulfilling one, I hope--and I'll still be washing dishes and taking out the trash and fighting traffic and cleaning up cat barf and getting head colds. I'll still get angry about politics and injustice and people who judge me on how I look and teach their kids to be ignorant bullies. But if I have my anchors--my home bases--I'll handle all that so much better. I have a few of these--M, a degree of financial stability, some wonderful friends--but I just want more of the picture to come into focus, and I think that's a large part of why I'm doing this uprooting thing. I just couldn't have the life I wanted where we were before. I dearly hope we can find a home that helps us get there.

Comments

[pixxelpuss.livejournal.com]

That's a lovely picture. And boy, it sounds good to me, too.