Prrrism! Where is that pisspot?!?

My grandmother asks me about D's journey home, because she's wondering how we're going to fit all our LA and DC belongings into what's "already a very well-furnished house." (Subtext: It's filled with her belongings. Sidebar: Did you know that my Bracknellian grandmother mostly collected antiques that conceal chamber pots inside them? True story.)

"Well," I say, "you have to remember that, because of the stairs, you only saw a little less than half of Farfara. There are two rooms on the upper floor that have almost nothing inside them."

"Hmm," she replies, "Well, you're coming here on Valentine's Day. That's a good plan."

"I think it's very romantic."

She lets out a cynic's sigh (I'm reluctant to call it a snort): "That's not the word I'd use, but I suppose so."

Nostos

D and I talk about fifteen minutes a day, between my work schedule and his. We see one another about once every six weeks. We've been together since the last millennium; we've lived apart - first in separate states, then coasts, then countries, then oceans - for longer than it took Odysseus to make his way back to Ithaca. Today D starts the weeks-long land journey home to Farfara. It's like living in the era of stagecoaches and telegrams.

We'll meet in Washington on Valentine's Day, whence we'll wend our parlous way north in a snowtireless U-Haul through February-drear Maine and New Brunswick. Home: permanently.

This is my idea of romance, and I want no other.

Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful

My grandmother was perturbed that she had nothing plaid to wear to the Burns Day festivities. 

"We'll have to rustle up something in the McC------- tartan before next year," I told her.

"Oh no, it's quite hideous," she replied.

"Yes, well, I'm afraid we've got a choice between co-opting someone else's tartan fraudulently, or wearing our own quite hideous tartan."

"Look," she said, laying down the matriarchal law, "I'm not going to get an awful tartan to wear once a year. If I get it, I want to use it all the time. You wouldn't shack up with a man because he seemed right on a special occasion; you'd have to actually *like* him. The same holds true here."

True story: the words "shack up" are her own elegant turn of phrase.