There’s something about staying in a stranger’s vacation abode when you yourself are on vacation. As impersonal and theme-appropriate the decor may be (for skiing: the prerequesite Navajo pillow, brown leather and Western art) I can’t help but wonder what the real owners are like and what the decor is where they currently are. (If at the beach then: perhaps loads of wicker, blue and white plaid and white coral on the fireplace mantel).
It’s hard not to have imaginary dialogues with these people about certain choices that have been made whether they be small (”Pillows embroidered with gold pine cones: are you sure about that?”) or large (don’t you want your master bedroom to face the montain as opposed to the hot tub?) but at the end of the day, you can either let the fact that the bathroom has a green shag bath mat throw you, or forge on and appreciate that you’re in a beautiful spot, framed-photographs-of-elk-be-damned.
As I haughtily make little notes around the ski condo, I can’t help but think that so too, have renters done the same of my home, when we vacated it for a summer. (”Did she really need that faux ocelot throw on the family room sofa?!”) and that they are as powerless to see their changes ever imlemented, as I am now. In a few more days, more strangers will replace me in these same rooms and perhaps laud the very details I find fault with. It’s our perogative as renters after all: to take hold of a place temporarily and suspend belief that it is yours.