My Owner's Travel Confession

 Today's post is a guest post by my owner, Madame Housewife:

I will confess to never having been homesick. I have been desperately ill and wanted to be home, but it isn't the same thing. Never once when traveling have I missed anyone at home, not even children (there goes the Mother of the Year Award). Such is the lure of a far off sunrise. Sometimes when traveling I hear other people speak of how eager they are to give a loved one a gift they have purchased for them.

"Can't we just ship it to them and stay here?" I think to myself. Isn't it the thought that counts? (There goes the Friend/Wife/Daughter of the Year Award.)

The proximity of other interesting places fills me with a particular form of want. When first I went to Italy I thought how easy it would be to get to Greece. Later when I traveled in Greece I thought how easy it would be to go to Turkey. England makes me think how close I  am to Scandinavia. Central America lures me south to the Amazon and Andes...and so on...

Sometimes snippets of poetry, the odd movie line, or fragmented ideas from favorite books swim to the surface in my mind. Things like "set sail for ports unknown" or " I'm going out exploring one day, you watch." I come alive in strange places. I'm inspired. I'm hopeful. I'm ambitious. I imagine that I will come home and do all the things I've been putting off. I'll make art. I'll write more. I'll do tai chi in a park at sunrise.

Then I return to my house.

I put tiny  soaps from the hotel in the bathroom closet. I do laundry. I hoist my suitcase to the top shelf of the office closet and as I do dreams slip out of it and disappear into the ordinariness of the everyday. I suddenly think how hard it is going to be to find a tai chi class in the south. And how fierce the mosquitoes are at dawn.

There must be a way of capturing that feeling of possibility I have when traipsing around strange cities and making it last past the moment I put my key in my own door and wonder if the house always smells like this...

The reason for the change in familiar surroundings, I am at a loss to explain. Perhaps my muse is an elusive creature frightened off by the enthusiastic greeting of my dogs when I enter. Maybe everyday life just crowds out creativity. Could it be that my creative seed just longs to be scattered to the four winds instead of making dinner?

I'll bet there is a soul killing agent in laundry detergent ."Guaranteed to get out the stain of the quest for adventure no matter how deeply it is set in."

Okay, that's a bit dramatic.

But see what happens when I spend too much time at home?

(There goes the Housewife of the Year Award.)