It’s already started; my Facebook and Instagram feeds are quickly filling with vacation photos of smiling friends and family relaxing on sunny beaches and atop verdant mountain retreats. Summer is officially here, and this week Washingtonians were forced to reckon with it, as perfect temperatures gave way to blistering heat and we were all rudely reminded that we live in a swamp, a hardship post. No one in his right mind would turn down a day, a week, a month away from here given the choice. The summer weather is so predictably miserable that by late July Congress can’t bear it any longer, and they all pack up and head home for a month. Those who have the means follow suit, and greater-Washington becomes a ghost town until we hear school bells.
For the first time in many summers our family has no vacation plans. We recently sold our home in the suburbs and we’re all excited to move into a new house, still under construction, in the heart of Old Town Alexandria. Our move-in date has slipped from May to June to July (I am assured we will be able to take up residence *some time* this summer). With so much up in the air, we decided to hold off on travel. Instead, I’ve devoted every free moment to painstakingly packing up our home of eight years.
Faced with a storage crunch, I’ve begun sifting through the detritus that clogs my attic, closets, and drawers. It’s an enormous task; I curse my complicity in a consumerist culture one moment, and delight in an unexpected find the next. As I sort through a seemingly endless quantity of plastic storage bins labeled things like “children’s toys, ages 1-3” and “summer clothes, 4T-5T,” my mind floods with images of my daughters, years younger, playing with those very toys and wearing those same sundresses. Nostalgia can easily get the better part of me, and the work can be emotionally exhausting.
It’s helpful to think of this process as curating. Instead of focusing on the things that won’t make the move with us, I’m delighting in the things that will. No one has ever accused me of being a minimalist (friends know one of my maxims: if you really love something, buy two), and I can’t imagine our home without so many of the quirky, wonderful objects we’ve picked up on family vacations. There’s the brass study of a street sweeper I found in an architectural salvage shop on a drive through the Cotswolds, the ceramic lemon topiaries (two, naturally) in the cheeriest shade of yellow that I spotted in a storefront in Sorrento, the icon of the Blessed Mother that we purchased near her final home in Ephesus. We love these things because they are beautiful and because they’re touchstones that hold our memories.
I’m the daughter of an architect and I love design, and if I had my druthers I would redecorate every couple of years. But given the choice between spending the evening in a professionally-decorated home or the home of someone who has carefully selected each object themselves, I’d choose the latter every time. A very creative and cosmopolitan friend of mine lives in a one-bedroom apartment on Capitol Hill full of well-worn books piled artfully on tables. Ginger jars and a pair of hand-painted porcelain Staffordshire Spaniels (one of whom wears its owner’s beret) stand guard over a fully stocked bar cart, brimming with vintage glassware. A basket full of paints and brushes and some of her recent watercolors sits on the floor nearby. The ambiance is always perfect—warm light, music—and as you sink into an overstuffed chair you feel happy and right at home in her beautiful world.
Much less elegant surroundings can also elicit the same feeling of contentment. There is a wonderful chapter in The Wind in the Willows entitled “Dulce Domum” (or “Sweet Home”) that recounts Mole’s return to the meager abode he created for himself in the earth, accompanied by the rather sophisticated Rat. At first he is embarrassed—it’s more rustic than he remembered, the cupboards are empty, and it needs a good cleaning—but after stoking the fire and organizing a feast with friends, it doesn’t take long for him to feel the magic of the place again. As Mole turns in for bed, “He saw clearly how plain and simple—how narrow, even—it all was; but clearly, too, how much it all meant to him, and the special value of some such anchorage in one’s existence. . . . [I]t was good to think he had this to come back to; this place which was all his own, these things which were so glad to see him again and could always be counted upon for the same simple welcome.”
The best homes are living things. They welcome us back, hold our memories, and evolve with us. This summer I’ll try something new. Instead of looking forward to an escape, I’ll delight in the comforts of home, and the joy of creating a new one.
April Ponnuru (@AprilPonnuru) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a senior adviser at the Conservative Reform Network. Previously she was an adviser to Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign.
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