'Oh, domesticity! The wonder of dinner plates and cream pitchers. You know your friends by their ornaments. You want everything. If Mrs. A. has her mama's old jelly mold, you want one, too, and everything that goes with it -- the family, the tradition, the years of having jelly molded in it. We domestic sensualists live in a state of longing, no matter how comfortable our own places are.'
--from The Lone Pilgrim by Laurie Colwin
Are you a domestic sensualist? I suspect I may be one. Or at least there is a part of me that is drawn very deeply to the realm of home and hearth and all that expressed there.
For a while I lived very simply in a religious community where I didn't have much in the way of domestic space. Just a simple but beautiful room that contained a bed and a desk. People who live in this way are traditionally called 'home leavers' because they have given up the householder life.
The room had a window that looked out on a tile roof. On winter afternoons, the sun would pour in low and thick like honey and I would raise the torn rice paper shade up as high as it would go. On a small table in a corner, I started keeping an electric tea kettle and packets of tea and cocoa. Eventually, there appeared several lovely mismatched mugs and plates and a brightly colored tim filled with chocolate and cookies. I piled a few oranges on a plate and made sure I always had a jar of almonds on hand. This led to a little stash of cheese and crackers and who could stop it from there?
While steeped in the renunciant life, I eventually discovered that in fact I was a domestic person. But rather than fight it, I instead followed it out of the temple and into my own little apartment. To this day I negotiate the sometimes confusing, often rewarding world between these two ways of being. I long ago gave up on trying to figure out if I was a monk or a domestic sensualist. I decided I was both
What I've discovered since then is that domesticity and renunciation are not so oppositional or polarizing. In truth, they inform the other in ways that are surprising and challenging, and each reveals something in the other that couldn't be seen in singularity. At the very least, my monk-self offers restraint while my domestic sensualist keeps it all lively and engaged. Life is seldom an either/or proposition.
(Images: Dana Velden)
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It is funny, I still am surprised whenever anyone compliment's my room, or says how "Homey" it feels. I never really considered if it was unusual. I think I may be called to reflect a bit more on this question.
i need that blue bowl
Lovely post, Dana. I've been coming to realize that I'm much more of a homebody than I thought I wanted to be when I was a college student. I wanted to be independent and was almost aggressively against the idea of being a housewife. Now it makes me very happy to keep house (though I do work outside the home as well). My twenty-year-old self would have had a meltdown.
My own love of beautiful-but-useful things has been passed down from generation to generation on my mother's side. My great-grandmothers both loved pretty china and gardens, my grandmothers love baking and sewing, and my mother is a florist, gardener, and perpetual thrift store veteran of finding beautiful and unusual bargains. My family home is one of the most lived-in an cozy places I've ever been in.
I think the hardest part of being a domestic sensualist (love the term, by the way) is keeping things clean and organized. I can't wait to have a bigger kitchen (all my lovely stemware and serving pieces are packed in boxes), a garden, and a knitting basket full of lovely yarn. Then I'll be set for life.
javagrrrl:
Blue bowl is from Anthropologie, about two years ago so I don't know if they still have it.
I love that top pictures. Its beautiful.
I am so blessed to have nearly all of all of my older relatives' lovely things - not furniture (sadly), but linens, porcelain, crockery, pots, crystal, silver, carving sets, wooden cutting boards, vases, tea and chocolate pots, and assorted tiny, useful holders of things. I care for and iron the linens myself, scenting them with lavender water, I wash the glassware and china by hand, drying them with special tea towels, and just at times look at them and remember things like my Gran's Christmas pudding steaming in that particular pudding basin, or my uncle serving sherry in those glasses. I feel as though these things are a privilege to own, and a bit of a burden. I have to consider carefully which child will get which of these things, and be certain the stories are passed with them.
My description is very similar to dksbook. I am surrounded by things that others loved and saved, so now I carry on the tradition.
I'm the happy recipient of most of my grandparents' mid-century items (my Grandmother, when asked why I get to have "all the cool stuff" by my siblings/cousins... she sweetly replies that I "asked for it when I was about 9 or 10 years old, that's why.") So I cherish my Heywood Wakefield dining set, my cool 50s shadow boxes and my 1930s enamel kitchen table (among other things). I can't wait until Grandma lets me have her prized (and fabulously kitschy) salt & pepper shaker sets I played with as a child. I know my son will love them too.