Dear Badfish, my favorite Blogger,
You , me, David Attenborough and Barbara Kingsolver…the Hermit Crab Connection. I love how you seem to be able to make a home for yourself wherever you travel. I, on the other hand, am only completely at ease in my own house.
I’ve been thinking a lot about my house lately. I think I may be ready (finally) to write about it. I will title it “My House as a Life”. (Have you seen the movie “Life as a House”? )
But I will have to tell it in chapters. Here’s the preview.
Young woman with small child, left by husband so he could move in with secretary….
Oh wait, that could not sound more boring. It happens every day.
How about this?
Young woman, abandoned with small child, fights to keep the family homestead…
Better, but not particularly enticing. Sally Field and Cissy Spacek already showed us this story in their great triumph movies! (Places in the Heart and The River)
Wait, I know.
Reformed Hippie returns to her Sixties roots and shares home with 52 people and 16 animals over 40 year period. Stories abound.
Yeah, that’s where I’ll start.
The Hermit Crab connection? Well, they have this amazing system for replacing their homes when they have outgrown them. (see Attenborough and Kingsolver connection below)
But you know what, there is no antonym for the word “outgrow”. If there were, it would describe where I am in my life, and where many of my baby-boomer generation are also. This is a problem in our culture. We are living so much longer than our ancestors that we don’t even have words to capture many of the dilemmas we now face.
Like the fact that I have “ingrown” my home.
I wonder what the Hermit Crabs do as they age………….
I only know I have to write about it….
I had no idea what a process I was interrupting when I collected these empty shells on the beaches in Fiji.
Watch David Attenborough explain. One Of my favorite all time videos!!!
And as for Kingsolver….
http://www.kingsolver.com/books/excerpts/high-tide-in-tucson.html
(It says I can not reproduce this but can I legally include this link??)
Trailer for “Life as a House”
I love the post and look forward to the followup stories!
HA! Just ran across this (from latest post)…I must have been offline when you posted this. Gotta love David A. I have a video of Duncan changing shells, but this is so cool…that they’ve created a system to move homes, eh.
That’s so funny. I wrote that one very early on in my WP experience, trying to get your attention! (winking emoji here…)
Oh, so see…if you’d have inserted the link, I would have noticed.
Got it but how do I do that?