House Confusion

Being a second home owner is certainly a blessing, but it also presents some unique challenges we did not anticipate when we embarked on this venture.  We fairly quickly found that we suffer from a phenomenon we dub “house confusion.”

Some symptoms are rather simple. After sleeping for a few nights on the island, on awakening for the first morning back on the mainland, I have a flash of uncertainty about where I actually am. I don’t seem to suffer this effect in reverse, which may or may not be trying to tell me something.

 Another symptom of the house confusion disorder is less benign. Walking down an aisle in the supermarket, I can have a very clear thought that I am out of maple syrup. But then the question becomes “where”?  I often cannot remember which refrigerator is lacking this staple, yet I am certain that we need it somewhere. The maple syrup goes into the cart, and later that week travels to the island with us, where we open the fridge to find three other bottles of maple syrup waiting for their new friend, right next to two bottles of catsup, and three bottles of relish.

Of course I fear that not being able to mentally catalog the pantry contents for two locations means that I am losing my memory (precociously, of course), but this began when we bought this house 12 years ago, and has neither worsened nor improved. If I were more organized, I might have developed a technical solution to this issue, such as keeping an actual database with the current grocery inventories, but I can assure you that I am not that organized.

 I am reassured by my husband suffering a similar problem with the current location of his tools. He has a few staple tools in each place, but most others need to travel with us to where they are needed. This has resulted in project delays in both locations, when it is discovered that the drill is exactly where it is needed but the drill bits are not, or the sandpaper is on island, but the sander is back on the mainland. 

As disorders go, house confusion is relatively benign, and somewhat self-limiting. I will probably not be buying maple syrup now until we are out of it in both locations. And in the meantime, we’ll just have to eat a lot of pancakes.