under the balinese sun

The totality of my time and attention since moving has been consumed by helping Kitty acclimate to her new environment and making this place baseline livable. Both required much more bandwidth than I could have anticipated. Kitty had only ever known one home; all eight years of her little cat life were lived at the hotel. She’s also really sensitive and wildly territorial, so it’s not surprising she was a bundle of anxiety and nerves for the first handful of days…but also curious. Trying to make sense of where she was, she’d express interest in exploring. Any slight sound or sudden movement sent her shimmying behind a bolster, where she’d stay for hours. Eventually, she sniffed every square inch of the villa and garden with me by her side, so obviously needed to move onto the neighbors’ yards and surrounding areas. This morning, upon waking, she headed straight out the front gate, and for the first time, I didn’t follow her.

As far as making this place liveable goes, let’s just say that although this joglo is abundant with beautiful Balinese design and surrounded by a vibrant garden overflowing with plants and flowers of too many varieties to count - it’s a bit rustic in a lot of ways and living in such close proximity to nature presents challenges one couldn’t anticipate unless you’d actually done it (which we hadn’t). I feel a little bit like Diane Lane’s character in Under the Tuscan Sun, when the shutters on her ramshackle villa are banging violently during a thunderstorm with rain pouring in, pigeons roosting in her bedroom, faucets working at random, tasked with making her new house a home.

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