The Yugoslavs move in
I ran into a friend at Rouse’s today and she asked why I wasn’t at the Gemini party last night and I said my inlaws arrived from Croatia. She said, “Oh lord, a while back I had a roommate from Yugoslavia and her family came to visit for an entire summer. It was like the Yugoslavs took over – they moved furniture, cooked weird food, and kept the curtains closed and lights dim.”
She meant it in a good way. Later today, I went downstairs to get something and the house had been rearranged, darkened, but alas, there was no real weird food to speak of. Yet there was something very familiar about it – from a house in perfect order, it seemed to suddenly have a lived-in quality that our house sort of lacks with just us and our neat habits.
I grew up bouncing from my grandmother’s house in the country with all my cousins to my aunt’s apartment in New York and multi-generations living there amongst the plastic carpet runners and weird plastic items always in the claw’s foot tub. There was always someone at the kitchen table – old to young – day through night – eating, reading, drinking coffee.
I miss that.