Free Home by Another Way by Robert Benson

of the natural ventilation generated by air drafts moving from the Atlantic and over the volcano and through the house. It has louvered shutters on the doors and the windows to keep out the rains and to fight off the hurricanes. It has a sharply sloped roof and a veranda along the front. Many of them have a world of gingerbread on them, or at least that is what Sara calls the bits of latticework and fine fretwork full of whimsy and delight. Decoration board is what St. Cecilians call it.
    The house has a kind of just-enough-ness that washes over you when you walk through it. A simplicity I am reminded of when I walk through my house.
    The first time I walked through a St. Cecilia house, something deep inside me jumped up and starting saying I wanted to live in such a simple house. And something else inside me started asking, What are you going to do with all your stuff?
    I started to ask Mr. Adamsgate what he did with all his stuff, but I decided against it. I had an idea what the answer might be.

    I think our stuff grows on us. At least mine does on me.
    In my house at home, we have a library table that my father found years ago and began to use as a desk. After he passed away, I ended up using it as a desk for a while myself. Now it is our dining table.
    In Sara’s office there is another good-sized dining table that belonged to one of my grandfathers. It is sturdy enough to hold the amount of paper that goes with doing the kind of work Sara does.
    We have a kitchen table we picked up somewhere along the way, one of those old-fashioned enamel-topped tables from the forties. We bought it to go with the kitchen after we redid the kitchen so it would look like Sara’s grandmother’s kitchen.
    So now the table we used to use in the kitchen isin the back hallway. It is a drop-leaf affair I am unwilling to part with because Sara had it before we were married, and it reminds me of those days when we first began to fall in love. We are still at it, by the way. Because we have the table in the hallway, we pile stuff on it so you can hardly get through the hallway to get outside.
    Once you do get outside, there is a long table from the millinery store my great-grandfather owned down on the city square in the town where I grew up. Or at least the base of it came from there. We found it in my grandfather’s basement when he passed away and have been putting a succession of plywood tops on it ever since so we can use it for a buffet table whenever we have parties in the backyard.
    Then there are the large wrought-iron table we eat on outside and the small wrought-iron table we have coffee on sometimes. There are also two wooden tables we bought from a favorite store up the street.
    In my studio there is a long slab of Formica mounted on two stools that functions as a desk for me and afolding sewing table I use sometimes when I go outside to write, something I seldom do, but I keep the table just in case. I think of it this way: just by chance, if I want to write somewhere besides the place I built so that I would have a place to write, and someone is having coffee and eating lunch and throwing a party on all the other tables when it occurs to me to go outside and write, I will still have a table.
    Then there are the two tables in storage and the big oak one my aunt has that she promises will come back to me someday and the big pine table that used to be my desk, the one that made its way to Illinois with my younger brother.
    It would seem that there is a corollary to the “you gotta have your stuff” rule: you gotta have a table to go with it.

    Once when we were driving along a blue highway through the hills in northern Alabama, we passed asign in front of an antique store proclaiming they were having a sale on “dead people’s stuff.”
    I cannot imagine getting rid of a single one of the tables in my house, let alone the other stuff. China, books, baseball memorabilia, golf clubs that I do not use, and all manner of stuff is