Being at my mother-in-law’s flat is certainly refreshing and pleasant for so many reasons. One is the neighbourhood! The first Sunday I was here I walked from Sainsbury’s to the flat via the alley, a very short walk to the local supermarket, and noticed that there were loads of people out in their front gardens mowing and caring for the grass and flowers. It was nirvana compared to Tolladine, and felt a bit like I had walked into the life of Ward and June Cleaver. The kids soon reminded me that this was not the 1950’s, and that they are not representative of Wally and the Beaver! Getting to know England the way I have, I am cynically positive that this is more like the Stepford Wives than Leave It To Beaver, but that aside, it was a scene I have never seen played out in Tolladine, where the neighbours are more like Sanford and Son meets Fawlty Towers.
Coming into the Flat I feel better than I did at the old house because it is cleaner and very finished. Mom is always ready in case Her Highness the Queen happens to stop in for a spot of tea. Well, at least mom won’t be as ashamed of her home as I would have been if the local Council Officer stopped in!
We never planned on stopping in for very long, so there was no justification in putting money into the place, especially as it is a rental and the money lost could never be recouped. But under the rental agreements in this country, if we wanted the place to look nice, we have to invest in its decoration from wall coverings to carpets, to light fittings and the garden (yard). The council only rents the structure in its most basic form; walls, shabby floors, and a roof with electrical fittings and heat. There is a kitchen and basic toilette, but even a shower is up to the renter. The one we fitted in the house was torn out after we left! We decided long ago that it was not worth wasting money in such an arrangement on making the house nice, and as a consequence we lost out on having a home.
Mom’s house feels much more like a home in so many ways, but nothing more compels this feeling than when I walk into the bathroom first thing in the morning, when all the scents of usage are gone and the tiles are left to fill the air with their odour, and the slight damp that might be resting on them. It takes me back to one of the two scents that always lingered in my great-grandmother’s bathroom on Leighton Drive in Ventura, California. Of the two scents, the dominant one was always Irish Springs Soap, which great-grandma used faithfully for as many years as I could remember. The other matches almost exactly to this tile smell in the bathroom here.
I am not expert enough to tell you for sure that the smell is damp tiles. It is not important really what it is, but rather, THAT it is. The scent takes me back to a place of innocence and youth for me, and identifies itself very much as a home for me. Strange then that I find something like this to warm my senses to the place I knew before, and the place I am going to now.
Home is where you make it, and where we go now, we will make it our home and we will chose our favourite things that emanate scents that will remain in the minds of our children as home.