wasping it up in mexico

I feel content.

Mine has been a good life.  Not always a life well-lived, but it has been good.

Wednesday night I was sitting on the couch in Babs's casita -- reading -- when one of the most profound senses of well-being I have ever experienced wrapped itself around me. 

As cosy as a boa constrictor.  Without all of that nasty suffocating.

It was undoubtedly due, in part, to the book I was reading.  Aaron Copland's What to Listen for in Music.  Analyzing music always has an effect on me.

But there was something in the very atmosphere of the casita that made me feel at home.  No.  Not at home.  Elevated beyond that.  I felt as if I was where my soul wanted to be.  And that is quite a different thing.
 
For those of you who do not know (as well as for those of you who do), Babs spent a good deal of her professional life designing.  Mainly restaurants. 

But you need only spend a few minutes in this casita to know that a designer's subtle hand pulled together all of the disparate threads to create -- well, a soul nest.

Take the living room, for example.  You will not find great works of art or expensive antiques.  But every time I look around the room, I expect Moss Hart and Kitty Carlisle to stop by on their way to a play.

Not that the place has any connection to Manhattan.  It is thoroughly Mexican.  But it has that same classic upper middle class American apartment feel that is timelessly comfortable. 

The room I will miss most, though, is the bedroom.  Besides being almost as large as my living space in Melaque, its design has the same sense of taste.

I was lying in bed the other morning and noticed how subtly Babs had balanced her colors.  The green of the lamp is echoed in a wooden ferris wheel on the dresser, and then picked up in the painting just above.

I think I offended her a couple weeks ago when I referred to my computer setup here as being a bit girly.  But the house is girly in the sense it has benefited from the sensitive eyes and hands of a woman who knows what she is doing with texture and color. 

As a guy, I suspect I would not have even noticed if I had not sent my lawyerly analysis on a quest to discover why I was feeling so content.

And that brings us back to where I started, doesn't it?  Feeling content because of my surroundings.  Where I live as comfortably as a medieval pope.

But with far better accommodations.  For a few more days.