Drink From Their Cup
Someone’s house. Someone’s cup. 2021
I am trying to wake up. It’s 7 am here. 11 pm there. 2 am somewhere else.
Even with the pandemic, I’ve been on the road. A month in Mexico, another in Hawaii, back and forth to the little cabin in the woods. Montana. Utah. Wyoming. California. Missouri. Illinois. Washington. Now, a month across the great pond.
The wandering has decreased but I wander still. As I am able. There is more to come.
As I think of traveling and the urge to be in motion, I am drawn to the poetry of the word nomad as essential for those that need to feel the world small below them from an airplane, or see the images passing by in quick succession through a train’s window, or trying to drive a rental car in a foreign land where Google maps can’t pronounce the street names.
From Oxford, a nomad is a member of a people that travels from place to place to find fresh pasture for its animals and has no permanent home.
I don’t quite fit into the definition as I do have a home, a patch of land where the grass only grows if I water it. The place I miss while away and want to leave when I am there. However, it’s the traveling for green pasture that pulls me in and makes me a nomad of sorts.
The green vistas of new worlds and cultures. The foreignness of indecipherable languages. The tastes of foods that are only known to locals. The time zone changes, forever tiring and confusing. All the layers of experience that contract the cardiac muscle in a nomad’s chest, pumping life’s blood through the body.
I am writing this from someone’s house, rented for my stay. I pretend to live in houses that aren’t mine when traveling. I see their pictures on walls, judge their choices for mattresses. I drink from their cup and see the world through the windows their homes can afford me. I’m a nomad with many homes then, each committed to memory and to pictures.
In this familial way of sharing space with strangers, most of them vacating their houses so they make the extra that will help pay the bills, I have learned that no matter where you are in the world, the love and joy that binds people together are the same. It is all there for me, the welcome intruder, to witness in the shape of children’s pictures on walls, a wedding invitation left on a table, an old casserole pan in the kitchen cabinet, deep knife cuts into the enamel pointing to all the baking and food shared.
I walk lightly across these people’s floors, use their linens gently; respecting their space, leaving their private cabinets, foodstuff, and drawers alone. There is something vulnerable about entering their places, seeing the peeling of paint, the half-empty jar of strawberry jam, all alone in the fridge; the broken chair abandoned in a corner that for some reason it is still there, un-sat. It is all so very human.
And then I read their note to me. Here is the wifi, here is the wifi code (sometimes it takes me 3 tries to get it right, so confusing are the letters and numbers). The front door won’t open unless you turn the key just right. And here is a gift for you, some coffee, some chocolate. Here in Paris, a baguette. Here is a list of places you should go, grocery store, pharmacy, Italian restaurant, and Chinese. I read the note, make the coffee, don’t touch the bread.
Before I leave, I go through the place. Are the pillows in the right order on the sofa? Did I run the dishwasher? Grabbed my shampoo from the bathroom? Check. Check. Check. And then I take a moment to gather my surroundings so I won’t forget. I know some places will stay with me for a long time…
I don’t know how much more traveling I will do. What I do know is that if I decide to wander, if I give in to the nomad’s desire to find that green pasture of new experiences, I will also be looking for a house to visit, to live in for a while, and pretend that it is my own.
—jm