The Homes of Men

It’s just a little different.

When I walk into a home, I can derive a lot of information about the inhabitant from the knickknacks, but only if it’s a woman. Men throw off some strange clues, as far as their environments. A single man is freed of womanly constraints, and free of her decisions as to what is worth displaying.

Here are a few examples.

Watering Cans

One man I dated had a nicely furnished home with a glass-sided curio cabinet that held music boxes, and long shelves running around his living room that displayed a watering can collection. I was baffled. “Those belong to the former tenant,” he told me. The former tenant was his ex. When she moved out, she took only what she needed and left the rest to be collected at a later date.

Sure enough, five months after we’d started seeing each other, she showed up with a U-Haul and stripped the house bare. There was no remaining knickknackery whatsoever until a friend of his asked if he could store some Native American art there, at which point a few Navajo sand paintings and some Bev Doolittle (I know she’s not Native) prints took up residence on the walls.

But what if I hadn’t asked? What if I’d assumed that this man had a fondness for watering cans of all types, shapes, sizes, and fabrications? I have never seen a watering can collection before or since. What if we’d broken up before the former tenant had reclaimed her things? I’d have thought him fussy. Would I have been able to date him for the length of time I did if he’d been a watering can collector?

This does not keep me up at night. It’s just something I wonder.

Ugly Furniture

Another man I dated is remembered, not for his knickknacks, but for his living room furniture. If he had items of a decorative nature, they were overshadowed by the presence of the complete works of Louis L’Amour (bound in genuine leatherette) that filled his bookshelves. If you’re read Shopping at the Used Man Store, you know this didn’t end well.

Anyway, he had a set of a very specific kind of furniture. I’ll put a photo of it here for reference:

Now, please understand that this furniture was prevalent in the early 1970s, and I dated this man in the mid 2000’s. And to add to the ugly, some of the cushions were a brown floral, and others had been covered with a busy little floral print lavender cotton. He lived in a VERY nice apartment in a nice complex, he had an early model Prius and a big white truck, he owned expensive computers, a ‘number bed,’ and a fortune in fishing tackle. And this was his furniture.

His aunt and uncle had given it to him when he got divorced. He seemed to consider it an act of generosity on their part. Did he not understand that he’d been given the equivalent of White Elephant furniture, a set so ugly that Goodwill would refuse it?

We sat on it to watch his gigantic newly-divorced-man television. He didn’t really have room for the TV, the couch, and the loveseat in his crowded living room, but, as he said in all earnestness, “I didn’t want to break up the set.” Break up the set? I suggested he do so, but for firewood.

He didn’t laugh.

Coffee Cups

I dated a man who had lots of knickknacks one summer. He had souvenirs from his time teaching outside the USA, and some jade carvings he’d inherited from his grandmother. He had some motorcycle-related items and some Robert Wyland dolphin art I could barely bring myself to look at (in defense of this, those are actually worth money) (but please, no.).

Anyway, he also had a glass-sided curio cabinet, but his did not hold music boxes from a former tenant. It held coffee cups from all the recovery-related events he had attended in his 25 years of sobriety. I’d like to scoff (I love to scoff), but I found both his sobriety and his commemoration of it admirable. Plus I have a LOT of coffee cups, but the thing is I drink out of mine. The year before we met, one of his “former tenants” got mad at him and began taking mugs out of the cabinet and smashing them on his floor. The police were called.

You cannot mess with a sober man’s coffee cups.

Almost no knickknacks

My own personal husband owned exactly two knickknacks when we met: a wooden box and a small carved bear. By the time he moved in here, the bear had broken, so he just brought the box. It was no trouble to find room for it.

He did have one other decorative item: a ceramic cookie jar in the shape of a beehive. I have it on my hutch, where it lives harmoniously with my own collection of honey servers. It is the Queen Bee Hive.

Since I have so much decorative crap, it’s nice that my husband doesn’t. But he finds ways to decorate our house. He accents tables and countertops with small drifts of opened mail, lending a homey touch with various piles of ripped-open envelopes and ancient balance statements, maybe a cruise advertisement or two. He lets these accumulate until I ask what all that stuff is? Is that mail that needs tending, or…? At which point he goes through it, recycles and woodstoves it, thus clearing space for his next installation.

This is the perfect setup for me, the all-time champion accumulator of things.