For years I've wanted to be able to name our home. But it just isn't something that's commonly done in Canada. So, even if I did name it, the likelihood of the name ever coming into common use was pretty slim.
Then I moved to Uruguay.
People in Uruguay name their houses! Practically every home you see has the house name posted on the gate or on the lawn. In fact, the houses don't have numbers in most neighbourhoods of our city, just names. So when you get an address it sounds something like:
Bay Street
between Brunswick and Douro
House: Talsma
City
Postal Code
(makes me a bit curious about mail delivery, but it seems to work)
The home we have rented already had a name: Yuchan. Yuchan is a variety of tree here that is growing in the front yard. But there was no sign, and we thought this might be my chance to name a house.
Before long we had chosen a name.
When my Dear Man and our colleague went to work out the final rental agreement with the owner and the lawyer, they asked if we could choose our own name. The owner balked.
"You can't change a house's name! It's bad luck! It would be like changing the name of a ship or boat; it just isn't done!"
We thought that was the end of it, and I resigned myself to living in a place called "Yuchan".
And I tried not to be too disappointed.
Later that same day the two men met again with the owner about something else, and he brought up the naming question. "You go ahead and give it a name if you'd like," he said. "In all the years we've lived there we never even made a sign for it. It will be fine."
So, here we are, in a home we love, quirks and all, AND I was allowed to give it a name!
A couple of days later we realized that we needed to work fast: the telephone company was sending their workers to install our phone line and the address we'd given included the new name.
One of the teen-aged boys on our team got out his sautering iron and burned the name into a leftover piece of lumber that was in their yard. On our next trip to our house we set up the new house sign.
It is my prayer that everyone who enters our door will find refuge: a place of sanctuary and peace, welcome and safety:
Bienvenido a El Refugio
Welcome to The Refuge
I've always wanted to name my home, too... Must be a Melissen thing ;) THEN, I met my now best friend and they've always called their home by it's street number, 905 (said Nine Oh Five)... and everyone in their family calls it that :) Nothing amazing or meaningful, but still, when 905 is said, memories and familiarity and the feeling of 'home' are associated with it. I lived there for a year, so 905 was and is definitely a place I felt/feel those things...
ReplyDeleteSounds like a really nice name, hope it will give you many hours of refuge, though I'd also hope you don't need it because you feel like a refugee.
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