Housesitting

The housesitter is apt to recognize the opportunity as a private windfall, and the pleasure is tandem: first in his own dis-habituation, and then in the adoption of a new readymade home, a vacated life to try on. With the extra keys on his chain, the housesitter leaves work on a different train or by a new road, becomes a local in the café or dogpark, creates or stars in fantasies grown out of his new neighbors’ notice. In the new routines, a film has been removed from his self-understanding; he is available to experience. Initially, everything about housesitting is citational, as though in each activity in the house one carries quotation marks above his shoulder blades, like campy angel wings. Here I am “drawing the blinds”; now I think I’ll “separate” these “twist ties”; who am I exactly “taking” a “bath”?

In Guernica, Brian Blanchfield waxes poetic about housesitting for other people, describing the joys of doing it, and the times when it can all go wrong (like when the person you’re housesitting for comes home early and you’re asleep in her bed and everything is a mess).

I like housesitting for precisely the reason Blanchfield describes above — the opportunity to try on a new life as your own, to become briefly settled in a neighborhood that isn’t your own, and to see how your daily rituals play out somewhere else. It’s a staycation of sorts — especially if you’re housesitting in a home that’s nicer than your own (staycations work so much better when you get to stay in your city but don’t actually have to stay in your own place).

And yes, it’s important to leave the place you’re housesitting cleaner than before you arrived, and to, say, remember to water the plants. It’s better to get a note saying, “Thanks for keeping everything in order!” rather than, “What did you do to my place, and why is everything dead?!”

Photo: Ariel Matzuk

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