On Home and Hospitality
Today I’m thinking about home. About wanting a home and about the tradeoffs and opportunities of having one.
I’m thinking about all the homes I’ve been in over the last three months (we’ve officially been on the road in the U.S. for a quarter of a year!). All of the couches and air mattresses I’ve slept on, all of the guest rooms I’ve unpacked my backpack in, all of the hearths I have crossed. We have been the recipients of so much hospitality.
We’ve gotten these sustained glimpses into other people’s lives that I’d never before had, or at least not had so repeatedly. We saw a smorgasbord of values made real, a dozen different ways to set up a life.
We saw home as a big house with a fenced-in yard, 20 minutes’ drive from anywhere you could buy food, with sponsored-by-Costco larders. We saw home as an art-filled apartment, each wall a testament to past adventures. We saw home as a place to raise children, to have pets, to make art, to make food, to make happiness. Home as an investment, home as a sanctuary, home as a status symbol. Homes with rules and homes without. Impeccable homes, lived-in homes, cluttered homes. Homes that were reaches, and homes that were compromises; homes that welcome and homes that cold-shoulder.
In California alone—the state we’ll end up spending the most time in on this trip, and the place many of our favorite views were seen and memories were made—we’ve stayed in a stylized and artfully decorated apartment in Beverly Hills, a comfy beach house in Manhattan Beach, a warm one-bedroom lined with travel memories in Emeryville, a minimalistic one-bedroom lined with blue-dyed fabric reminiscent of the ocean a few blocks away in Santa Monica, and a modern, well-equipped apartment in Westchester. (Not to mention a string of hotels along Highway 1, which don’t count as homes but do contribute to our running total of beds slept in, currently at 35.) Seeing so many different ways of living and different choices made by different sets of values and opportunities has been an especially rich environment for figuring out what I want in a home.
Definitely want a guest room situation with as inviting of artwork as Kerianne and Ned’s.
Diego living his very best life in LA.
A few weeks ago, I turned to Diego and said, “Eres mi hogar.” (“You are my home.”) We’ve repeated it to each other often since. Beautiful and romantic, yes, and also true; in this stage of my life, where my belongings are either strapped to my back or tucked away in a closet at my dad’s house and I usually don’t know what city I’ll be in a week from now, Diego is the closest thing I have to a constant place to come back to. When I was traveling on my own, I created that place myself, with routines and rituals and lots and lots of books. Now that there’s two of us on this adventure where no day is the same as any other, I see something foundational in him. I know how he’ll receive me and support me, and that has been grounding in the same way that a physical space can be grounding.
Wanting a home and not wanting to want it
I’m writing this from the place I think we’ll end up having stayed for the longest uninterrupted stretch of this U.S. adventure—my cousin Jule’s LA apartment. We’re dogsitting and plantsitting and enjoying the chance to get to see more of LA beyond the Hollywood sign and the beach.
I’d forgotten how nice it is to have a place. To have one set of walls to come back to over and over again. To have abundance. To be able to buy full-sized toiletries because they’re taking up shelf space in your shower, not adding weight to your pack. I don’t think I’m ready to put down roots, either in LA or elsewhere, but I have been thinking a lot about what I want my next home to look like when I am.
Thinking about where those wants come from is interesting. Seeing my friends’ interpretations of an adulthood space has made me believe that we design our own environment based on how we performed in previous environments. We get these paintbrushes, literal and figural, and can cover up whatever was wrong with the homes of our past, the homes of our childhood. If there wasn’t enough food on the shelves, we have overflowing pantries. If we grew up in grimy spaces, our house now is clean; if we were used to hypercleanliness, we now have space for mess. If we had the right mix of everything, we seek to recreate that in our own space.
I keep many lists. Two of them are especially future-oriented. One is full of things I want to do when I’m a parent, gleaned from novels and family stories and podcasts. Have a safe word for when someone else picks my children up from school, make museum trips fun by looking for dogs in the paintings, et cetera. The other one is a list of things I’d like to have in my house one day, much of it having been added over the last few months, after seeing so many houses in action on this trip. I want an outdoor shower. I want built-in bookshelves. I want a home office that can be converted into a beautiful guest bedroom, framed prints from my travels hung on the walls, a kitchen full of natural light, a speaker system that’s voice-activated so I can put on the Gipsy Kings while my hands are sticky with dough, a big couch with bright throw pillows. (And those are just the physical items—we’ve already discussed my long wishlist for a future city.)
Oh, and I want a nice, fully-stocked in-home bar for making my friends the cocktails of their choice. (Thanks Matt / Noelle / Courtney, we love you.)
I want, I want, I want. I have this wishlist and I have this guilt that the wishlist exists. I just wrote a piece about sabbaticals for a corporate blog, where I connected the plight of the millennial worker facing low wage growth, expensive housing options, and the unlikelihood of a traditional retirement to the rise in companies offering remote work options or sabbaticals, as if by addressing the immediate exhaustion they’re off the hook for addressing the circumstances that led to it. I just read Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends, which I enjoyed much more than her second novel Normal People, and particularly so for her masterful inquiries about social system, fairness, and alternate ways of living. This passage from The New Yorker’s review of the book sums it up perfectly:
Her writing emanates anxiety about capitalism, which purports to be a meritocratic system but actually functions as a diabolical inversion of communism, redistributing wealth and privilege at the whim of the people who already have those things, ‘for whom surprise birthday parties are thrown and cushy jobs are procured out of nowhere.’ If Rooney’s characters aren’t especially ambitious, if they have low stress thresholds, if they prefer foreign vacations to office jobs, forgive them. The game was over by the time they came of age. Rooney is writing novels of manners about an era in which the expectation of caring for others no longer obtains, in which it’s easier to wreck a home than to own one. ‘I’m trying to show the reality of a social condition as it is connected to broader systems,’ she said. ‘You would hope that by trying to show those things in process you can say, ‘It doesn’t have to be this way.’
Lauren Collins (with quotes by Sally Rooney)
How can I plan for home ownership when I’m not sure I believe we should own homes? How can I want to have things—throw pillows, framed photos, bookshelves—when I know that having things is often a salve for the debilitating efforts we have make in exchange for the temporary security of being able to have things? How can I live with the guilt of having when so many others go without, and when my own actions contribute to that reality?
Less revolutionary, more Martha Stewart
I’m not saying I’m a communist. I am saying I have lots of thoughts about the way our very American values are constructed and what they represent. Owning things, having a big house and a big green rolling lawn that probably requires immigrant labor to maintain, holing up inside said house with said things and consuming massive quantities of prepackaged media to find escape from the reality of a stressful existence focused on securing money and basic rights (healthcare, housing, education) for yourself and your loved ones…can’t be the only way.
But okay, let’s pause the bigger-picture what-is-wrong-with-our-world musings and say: I’ll probably have a home of some sort at some point in the next five years. I’d like to, and I have a track record of working for the things I’d like to have and achieving them. And one of the biggest reasons I want to have a home—be it an apartment in Mexico City or a beach shack in Costa Rica or a house in Colorado—is to be able to welcome people into it.
Receiving someone is an art. I want to try my hand at it. Diego and I have been the recipients of so much generosity on this trip. If I think back about it with a certain kind of wispy gratitude, I can be brought to tears reliving the dinners that have been cooked for us, the towels freshly folded, the housekeys pressed into our hands along with the instructions to make ourselves truly at home. Having your basic needs for shelter, food, community, and warmth provided by someone looking for nothing in return is beautiful and life-affirming. Always. Especially so when the person isn’t someone who owes you anything, who gives you kindness not by virtue of blood or “paying it back” but because kindness is something that they believe in and want to see prosper.
I believe in kindness, and I want to cultivate and create a home and an environment that effuses it. I want to invite every person who’s hosted me over the last three months, every person who’s bought me an ice cream cone or a beer, and every person who’s picked me up, dropped me off, or drove me somewhere over to my house. I want to feed them, I want to give them a place to rest their head, I want to make them feel welcome to what’s mine, because it is also theirs.
Matt is one of the people who I can’t wait to treat to a beer in our new city, wherever it may be.
Which means I want a home that’s warm, with a comfortable guest bed, with clean towels, with a big dining room table. My list of wants keeps growing. But thinking of how I’ll share those things with others does make me feel slightly less guilty for wanting them.
We’ve talked before on this blog about how generosity doesn’t always come easily to me. Being around so much of it these last 90 days has burned into me an even bigger desire and impulse to turn that around, particularly when it comes to my space.
Going forward, I want to welcome everyone into my space. I want to be the kind of hostess that Keya was to us, or that my Aunt Carrie was; the kind that makes you feel supported mind, body, and soul. The kind who reminds you that home is not a set of walls, but rather a sense of safety and respect, of protection and understanding, given freely and formed wherever.
I want to make them all the Ecuadorian dishes their heart desires (and/or just assist Diego as he does that).
I will never say it as well as Maya Angelou: “The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.”
Come as you are, friends, to wherever I am next. You will not be questioned. You will force-fed carrot cake. You will be loved.
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