Making a Home Halfway Around the World

Notes from Guam

In This Issue:

• Note from Shelley

• Art: From my art journal

• January Pappus (i.e. Musings on Stuff)

• Journal Prompt

• Publishing & Other News

• Photos from Guam

Note From Shelley

Hello from the beautiful, tropical island of Guam!

I’m so excited to share some of my new surroundings with you, dear reader, so I’ll put a few more photos at the end of this January edition of Pink Dandelions. While apartment-hunting, C and I are living in a lovely hotel with a balcony overlooking the incredibly turquoise water of Tumon Bay. Slim, beige beaches rim the water with multi-storied hotels rising from the emerald green vegetation just beyond.

A short walk away are luxury brand retail stores, restaurants of every variety, massage parlors and spas, and the ABC convenience stores you also find all over Waikiki. We drove to the K-Mart, a 24/7 behemoth that is the largest K-Mart in the world where we stocked up on hotel living supplies: allergy meds, instant ramen noodle bowls, coffee pods, water, protein powder, Cheez-Its, and toothpaste.

In this issue I’ll share musings on moving halfway around the world and nesting in a new place; Pinterest; a journal prompt; updates on my writing projects; and a gallery of photos from Guam.

Enjoy!

Shelley

January Art

I drew this portrait with art markers. She represents me but doesn’t really look like me. She has questions about creativity, purpose, meaning, and moving forward, but she’s open to the universe and trusts everything will come together. She just has to envision what she wants and then do the work.

January Pappus

A pappus is the seed fluff drifting on the currents of air, carrying the seed to fertile soil in which it can germinate.

I was going to title this month’s newsletter “Finding a Home Halfway Around the World” but changed it to “Making a Home” instead. Because finding the actual structure, whether apartment, condo, or single-family house, is only the first step in the larger project, which is to make a home here in this place so far from where we started in New England. Like a dandelion seed carried by its umbrella of fluff, my husband and I drifted on career and geopolitical currents to a place I never imagined I’d visit, let alone live.

We arrived nearly two weeks ago after a three-legged journey from Maine to San Diego to Honolulu to Guam. I envy the first-class travelers and aspire to have my own private pod the next time we fly so far, which, I’m told, may be possible because of all the points we acquired on this journey. Suffer now, reap the benefit later. Yin/yang. Sounds about right.

The natural beauty of Guam astounds me. The water is the clear turquoise of travel brochures, the vegetation the lush green of the jungle. It’s the “dry” season now, which means the sky is blue with white puffy clouds, and there may be an afternoon shower but nothing too, too drastic. Large black butterflies drift past my perch here on the balcony.

Long ago, when I was in fifth grade, I became obsessed with reading about Hawaii in the classroom encyclopedia. I remember making a detailed drawing of a hut-like home on a sandy beach beneath a coconut palm (pretty sure the hut was pink), and dreaming of one day living in that place. Lesson: Be careful what you put out to the universe. Sometimes it delivers much later than you imagine!

Around that same time, I used to cut out photos of rooms from the Sears and JCPenny catalogs, plus photos of furniture, photos of men and women and kids and babies that I could move around. I’d arrange the room photos on the floor into a house. (Not sure where I came up with that idea, but I remember that fondly. I still enjoy making collages.) The point here is that I liked the idea of homemaking and always dreamed of having my own grown-up home.

When we bought our first home in Norway, Maine, we made it ours. We stripped wallpaper from walls, repainted floors, built bookshelves. My piano had a spot there. I dug and planted garden beds and did the best I could with the furniture we’d inherited and collected ideas for decorating. I thought I’d live there forever. But life has other plans, and we ended up selling that house. We moved to family housing at the University of Maine, and later bought our house in Limerick.

I had a hard time putting art up on the walls in the Limerick house. Something kept me from believing it was a forever home, even as I put down roots in the community and thrived there. Strange, but even after twenty years it feels like a “new” house to me. (That’s something I need to work out with a psychiatrist, so I won’t bore you with it here. I’m only mentioning it in case any of you have experienced something similar. You are not alone!)

When we moved to San Diego and found the apartment we lived in for five years, I made more of an effort to decorate. I looked for a rug with the turquoise and pinky-orange I was obsessed with. I created little vignettes and lined up books by color on the Ikea shelves we bought from a neighbor moving out just as we moved in. I bought a beautiful French-style desk on Marketplace and a pretty desk chair for my writing space. I potted plants for the balcony. I learned I’m really not all that good at home decor & design. I could probably use professional help in this arena, but I tried.

Now here I am on an island halfway around the world and those household goods are in a shipping container somewhere on the ocean, and I’ve been given the opportunity to make another home ours. This time, I’m determined create a living space that feels like a tropical paradise retreat. I’m going to buy local arts and crafts and incorporate them into our space and hopefully meld our San Diego furniture with new Guam pieces. I can’t wait to find some flea markets!

Why is this important? In a world that feels chaotic and/or strange and/or unnerving, we need a place to feel safe, nurtured, and inspired. Our spaces are an opportunity to reflect our interests, our memories, our aesthetics, and even our values. If we believe in simplicity and sustainability, our homes can reflect that in a calm and soothing and minimalist scheme. If we value tradition, our choice of furniture styles will lean more toward classic antiques. If we are free-spirited, an eclectic and/or modern melange might be more appealing.

“Your home should tell the story of who you are, and be a collection of what you love.”

—Nate Burkus.

While I’m here in the South Pacific, I want to embrace being here. That means learning the history and culture, cooking and eating local cuisine, bringing local art into my home. It’s a fantastic opportunity to stretch myself, experiment, maybe even indulge what I’m calling my “expatriate fantasy” a bit, to be a world-traveler, to experience the world as an international-type person.

Maybe you aren’t traveling anywhere but are ready for an update in your home. Give yourself time to play. There are so many online resources that one can go down a rabbit hole on any decorating topic. I know this because I spent an entire day looking at peel & stick wallpaper and tiles! Even if you aren’t planning a major or minor redo, you might find starting a Pinterest board with ideas and colors and design elements feeds your creativity.

I encourage you this month to assess your living space and find big or subtle ways make it more fully your own. Observe and appreciate your space, your art, your furniture, your family photos…all the little touches that make your apartment or house a home.

January Writing Prompt

Describe your ideal space. What is the purpose of the room? How is it decorated? What sort of vibe does it have? Imagine scents and sounds and textures. What do you do there? How do you feel when you are there? Now, write about how can you incorporate some of this vision into your current space.

Writing & Other News

This month I’ve been dreaming up a new women’s fiction, later-in-life, starting over novella series that I will set in Guam!

My character, Stephanie, is recently divorced after a scandal in her upscale Maine community, and her career as a literary novelist has hit the skids. When she’s offered a chance to ghostwrite a cozy mystery series, she takes a jump into the unknown, creatively. And when she finds a stray postcard sent from Guam circa 1968 addressed to her late mother, Steph decides to sell her home, store her furniture, and move into The Peony Beach Hotel on Tumon Bay. There she struggles with her writing project, meets new people, flirts with an international businessman (who is maybe really something else?), and learns that the second act can be even more exciting and fulfilling than the first.

This much I know. Will there be a bit of intrigue? Seems so. Most important, I want Steph to navigate conflicts with her grown children who can’t understand what she’s doing, a mentor who turns out to be a nasty piece of work, and her long-time publisher who keeps telling her, in so many words, that’s she’s a literary has-been with no chance of making a comeback. Sorry, not sorry.

If this sounds fun to you, yay! I’ve created a Pinterest board you can follow called Guam Novella Series. I also have some other boards for books, art, gardens, and cottages if you are interested. If you have a Pinterest account, follow me and I’ll follow back. I’d love to see what you’re pinning.

In other writing news, I’m in the process of weaning myself off of Facebook and Instagram and will instead focus on this newsletter. I’m also keeping my writing journal on ShelleyBurbank.com if you want to read more often. There’s no subscribe button for that blog (for all kinds of reasons, mostly technical, and I’m too tired to wrangle with it again.) You’ll just have to bookmark it and check in when it suits you.

No word yet on the short story I submitted last month.

I hope once we are settled into our new apartment, I can really bear down on the writing. I still want to fix Rosalie (are you tired of hearing that? Me, too!) and of course I need to think about the next Liv Lively book. Plus another (secret) series idea that I think will knock the socks off people. I’m going to attempt to work on several projects at once.

Thanks again for reading and supporting me! Below find the gallery of Guam photos.

Photos from Guam