Maybe this is just something that can happen to you as you get older, but for some reason in the last year or so all of a sudden I’ve become very aware of several things that we seem to have many versions of in our home. Maybe it’s because we forget that we have something when we’re traveling and don’t realize we already have at least one or two or even four of until we bring said purchase home and start looking for a place to put it only to find another one of its kind already there. And here I thought I was a minimalist!

Take the Hamsa, “Hand of Fatima”, an amulet that defends a home against the evil eye. Several of our Israeli relatives have sent various versions of the Hamsa to us with a blessing for our home and, of course, they are so beautiful that I love hanging them up but I’ve often wondered that if you weren’t me or my husband, (which you wouldn’t be because I am me, he is he and you are you….) then I’m not quite sure how our home would look through your eyes to see Hamsas adorning at least one wall of each room, if not two or three. Still, it seems like you can never really have too many Hamsas because is there ever such a thing as receiving too many blessings or warding-off of the evil eye?

The hands must be doing something because we lived in our home for almost 15 years come this December, which is the longest I’ve ever lived in any place in my entire life. After a weekend of enjoying my side of the family, now we’ll be enjoying David’s side of the family for a few days before we all jump back into school and life. David and his brother already had a truly obscure Austin scenario while driving down Slaughter Lane they spied a huge fish, like the kind you would eat, laying on the side of the road. It seemed like it had been alive at one time (meaning it didn’t look fake or like someone’s abandoned art project). Now what, you begin asking yourself, could have possibly happened that caused this fish to be on the side of the road? My brother-in-law said, “oh you know, it’s from road rage, you know when people get road rage and they begin flinging fish at each other….”. I explained to them that it is for times like these that those handy cameras on the cell phones are truly meant to be used. To memorialize the impossible, digitally. Otherwise, it just becomes a really big fish story…a good one no doubt, but still a story….

It feels good to have family sound asleep in almost every room in our house tonight. Sometimes I really do feel like I could live in a commune quite well, as long as everyone picked up after themselves and, of course, as long as we could hang as many Hamsas as we desired.

May the force be with you…