#16: Home is a tapestry

Relics, antiques, and oddities of my past

We have, in my family, what we call jokingly call the Seven Year House Itch — we've never stayed in one house for longer than seven years. If we didn't move countries, then we moved houses within one country and set up there until it was time to pack it all up again. it dawned on us just a few days ago that this current house we call "home" has been called that for longer than 7 years — a first. The roots have come down, ironically, in a sunlit apartment 11 levels off the ground.

As a result, most of my life has been spent amid a hodge-podge collection of things, a museum of items that are practically, culturally, or historically significant. But they've all come to a head in this apartment, in a strangely incongruous harmony that unites them solely because, really, nothing unites them. Some of these things are oddball pieces; yet others massive artifacts that we grew immensely attached to. As I'm typing this, I'm mapping out this home in my head, rooms defined less by purpose and more by the things that sit in them.

To the left of the main door, on a blank wall, hangs two Chinese long spout teaspots. Ironically, these are the newest additions to the house, but their year of invention dates back to 220 CE. Designed to protect tea-drinking warlords from potential poisoners, and later used as the focal point of majestic Kung Fu tea performances, these twins were abandoned in a cousin's house and nursed back to health by my antique-loving mum.

The living room hosts, among other furniture, an intricately carved wooden recliner shipped from our home in Nigeria and a rocking chair that's been painstakingly reupholstered and polished for over 12 years now. In the crevices of the recliner are memories of 9-year-old me sitting to watch a cartoon, feet clear off the ground. There is an honest history there, veins of narratives that twisted when my parents bought it, shed old characters, and welcomed new ones. The rocking chair, in contrast, is all memories of my mother — for no one seems as at home in that relic as her.

Over the dining room sideboard hangs a metal oddity, shaped to look like two wayside huts but constructed completely from metal scraps, nuts and bolts, and pounded metal sheets. Look past the wear and tear of time and you'll see the ingenuity in the use of scraps and the authenticity of the maker.

Look over your shoulder — there's a giraffe staring at you. This 6-foot tall single piece artifact was wrapped in tens of layers of bubble wrap and verified by just as many official documents before being brought onto another continent. Sita, as the anthropomorphised name is, looks unblinkingly at the ebb and flow of daily meals at the spice-and-condiment-strewn dinner table. On the other side of the table, a massive pile of bronze and pewter pots stand next to a handmade stone rice mill that my grandmother booted out in favour of a shiny electric grinder.

Sitting in the centre of it all for a few moments, I can't help but think that corners of my house are caught in the cobwebs of time, tying past memories with new ones as we create them. From 10 to 25 years old, I've sat in that recliner, walked past that giraffe, wiped dust off the pots, the passage of time marked by my vertical growth and distance from the ground. As a family, we grow from phase to phase, kick off our slippers for heels, our jeans for suits, our bracelets for rings, our youth for maturity. But still these keepers of time remain, in the periphery of my eyes, adding years stoically as I gather mine frantically.

And so this home is a tapestry of me before, me now, and me tomorrow. And so it shall remain.