Homes, Houses and Abodes

Does this door entice you in? Does it entice you to explore its rooms and muse about its history: all the lives that have been lived within its walls, the tears cried, the laughter shared and the pictures painted?

I am attracted to houses - stone cottages, city dwellings, wooden cabins. I'm drawn to photos or paintings with houses in them. I automatically reach for a novel with a picture of a house on the cover. A house holds, within its walls, many secrets and stories. When we travel, I keenly search out houses to explore and their history to be discovered. On a solo trip to London, shortly before M and I married, I toured as many homes as I could.

I visited Charles Dickens' house in Bloomsbury and walked miles across London to look inside the home of a historian whose name I forget. I also searched out Elizabeth Barret Browning's house on Wimpole Street and Virginia Woolf's on Gordon Square. As both those homes are privately owned, I had to be satisfied with the view from the curb. I took the train out of London to Hampstead to be inquisitive at Keats House, the home of poet, John Keats. I toured Anne Hathaway's cottage and Warwick Castle.

A great disappointment on that trip was my visit to Shakespeare's abode at Stratford-upon-Avon. My memory of this hundreds year-old house is of the large cement sidewalks, a modern day moat, to accommodate the hordes of tourists. The house stood empty and overused, devoid of any personality, like a woman who has been visited by too many men.

Aix-en-Provence is Paul Cézanne country. The famous painter lived and worked here for almost all his life. On a sunny Sunday afternoon M and I walked out of the city and up the hill to his house which, one hundred years before, was in the country, not the suburbs. I was delighted as I walked into his overgrown garden. I couldn't wait to explore the rooms of his stone cottage.

M waited in the garden while I entered between the red doors to enquire as to the cost of exploring the home. For 8 Euros, I would only be able to see his studio upstairs - it was sizeable and probably filled the breadth of the home, but I was not interested in that alone.

I wanted to see past the small entrance hall and the living room, which now served as the reception area and gift shop, to the other rooms: to the kitchen, the dining room, and the views of the garden. I declined the entrance fee. I settled for what I had already gleaned of the home: its black and white tiled floor in the entrance, the living room with its fire place, large window and double doors. I photographed the red front doors as a memento.

I don't just enjoy other people's homes. I enjoy my own too. I am a home-body. As much as I enjoy traveling, I love to be at home, pottering away and spending time enjoying our private space. Coming home is the best part of having been away. It's good to be home!