Photo: Barry Evans.

When we moved from a house in Palo Alto to a small apartment in Old Town Eureka fourteen years ago, we allowed ourselves three VW Westie (camper-van) loads of stuff to accompany us. Yard sales, thrift stores and a couple of trips to the dump took care of the rest, the accumulation of years of acquiring-but-not-tossing.

It felt good to downsize, so good that, the first year we lived here in Humboldt, I dumped ten thousand Kodachrome transparencies taken over the previous 30 years. I reasoned that, while one pretty slide of the High Sierra was nice, after awhile a granite-ringed, translucent, otherworldly mountain lake captured at dawn starts looking like every other granite-ringed, translucent, etc. In that heady period of purging, quality, not quantity, was the watchword of the day.

Translucent, otherworldly mountain lake. Photo: Barry Evans.

I thought of this recently when Louisa brought this delicious blogpost to my attention, which, in mulling the differences between Nicaragua and the US, noted that the typical Nicaraguan house is neither (a) a storage unit, (b) a decorative statement, (c) an extension of one’s personality or reflection of one’s values, (d) a living history of everything one has ever done or been interested in.

Louisa and I often stay in other people’s homes (we do house exchanges with our home in Guanajuato, Mexico), and derive enormous, if guilty, pleasure, judging their houses by our vaguely minimalist standards. Window sills, in particular, come in for particular criticism; we do like our fresh air, meaning that we typically have to move several dozen “tiliches” (a delicious Spanish onomatopoeia that embraces tchotchkes, knick-knacks, gewgaws, trinkets, trifles, bric-à-brac and just plain junk) in order to open the damn window. Kitchen appliances with more than one setting, complicated shower faucets, too-high shelves for my five-foot-two housemate, cluttered tables and countertops, strange animal parts hanging from the walls — come in for our critical analysis…

…all the while feeling enormously grateful that we have a dry, clean, happy home in which to stay. Go figure.

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Barry Evans gave the best years of his life to civil engineering, and what thanks did he get? In his dotage, he travels, kayaks, meditates and writes for the Journal and the Humboldt Historian. He sucks at 8 Ball. Buy his Field Notes anthologies at any local bookstore. Please.