Take, for example, this gnarled chunk of driftwood later marked Exhibit 3-B by the prosecution. It caught your eye one morning at the shoreline: you were looking down, and you thought you saw a miniature canoe, possibly an abandoned child’s toy. It was an elongated arc of wood about a third the length of your arm, twisting a little midway through; but something had eaten dozens of holes in it: Insects? Tiny sea worms? Some pattern of accelerated decay brought on by long immersion in water?
Whatever the cause, the surface of the wood had been so thoroughly riddled that its composition was now more air than solid substance. What remained of the wood was a memory of its former condition, a reminder of its own past. You held it in your hand for the rest of your morning walk, and then it sat on your coffee table for a month, until you burned a steak one night and, needing something to mask the smell, remembered those tiny holes and thought of a use for them.
In a drawer, you located sticks of incense, also chance accumulations, fished from a glass case near the cash register of a San Luis Obispo record store by a clerk who cracked a smile when he asked: “Anything else?” The incense sat alongside pot pipes and hippie jewelry. The smile was because you didn’t look like the type.
But it appealed to your taste for hidden things. Its packaging was musty paper lettered from top to bottom in tiny clusters of italic text, devotional outpourings you sometimes skimmed but never really read: quotations from the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads, something called the Ten Virtues of Koh that delineated the specific benefits of burning incense; and, from Second Chronicles, this passage:
Every morning and evening they burn to the LORD burnt offerings and fragrant incense, and the showbread is set on the clean table, and the golden lampstand with its lamps is ready to light every evening; for we keep the charge of the LORD our God, but you have forsaken Him.
Two packages, Celestial Sandalwood and Dragon’s Blood, sit open on the kitchen counter behind your ad hoc censer. The sandalwood is a disappointment: it smells like men’s deodorant. But the other one’s sweet. You think you might buy another package of it when it’s time to replenish the supply, unless you feel like trying out another one with a fancy name: Vrindavan Flowers, or Night Phoenix. Possibly—probably—you will have moved on from incense by then. But, for now, there’s the driftwood and the Dragon’s Blood, a sweetly spicy smell that also reminds you a little of vanilla ice cream, just the thing for a lazy Tuesday afternoon.
Beneath the counter, the drawers: this one holds the cutlery, that one the spatulas and slotted spoons. Across the small space of the kitchen, there’s an extra bit of countertop next to the refrigerator—it looks like a space-filling afterthought. The single drawer underneath it stores dishrags and dry sponges; on the wall above it, there’s an antique knife rack, another of your serendipitous finds. Who knows how old this knife rack is? You found it at a yard sale for seventy-five cents; it was quite dirty, and probably long past its proper days of usage. But it was hand-painted, and you can never resist old hand-painted things, though it feels like the rest of the world is running out of patience with their kind.
The rack is painted matte-white with a little insignia of an iris in the center. It always takes your eye a minute to resolve on the stylized design of the iris: the three lines making up the stem look like licking flames until you find the four purple brushstrokes ingeniously placed atop, which might also be a dog, or a fox, or some flying creature carrying something dead in its mouth. But they’re a flower. Once you see it, finding it becomes a known route, a path to a familiar place. It cost you less than a dollar, and hardly anyone will ever comment on it, which is exactly the sort of thing you like. The knives it holds come from all over: estate sales, hand-me-downs; only two were bought new, the oyster shucker and the butcher knife. There’s a store with kitchen gadgets in a galleria over in San Luis Obispo, and you stopped in one day. These two were on sale for half price, and their wooden handles looked so supple and otherworldly. Carbon steel from Japan. You knew a bargain when you saw it.
Your sink is stainless steel, dull and practical; it would be too small for a family. You keep it clean, and you have a small vase for flowers off to the side of it. Flowers make everything nicer. There’s no dishwasher in this kitchen; the oldest piece of furniture in the house is the refrigerator, its handle thick and rounded, a relic of the early space age. The remaining cabinets hold a few matching white plates and bowls, and a single unmatching ceramic bowl that gets more use than any of them. When you live alone, no matter how lovingly you decorate your space, you come to rely on the things that serve you best. This coffee cup, that spoon, this rustic beige bowl that’s a little heavier than the others.