Most of the people I know just turn down the heat and lock the door when they go on vacation. If they have pets, they ask a friend to take care of them. If they have a garden and indoor plants, they arrange for someone to water them. Some people set their lights to turn on and off at appropriate times. They don’t have housesitters. It’s popular, though, in some circles. We benefited from that once.

After moving to Port Vila, Vanuatu in 1990, Eugene and I were having trouble finding a house to rent. There weren’t many to choose from. Finally, we found the “perfect house.” The only trouble was, it was still under construction.

Should we wait until it was finished? we wondered. We mulled it over for a while, and, though we were sick of staying in a hotel room by then, we decided to wait.

As Christmas approached and the house was still unfinished, the walls seemed to be closing in on us. That’s when we received an offer to housesit for friends of friends. The couple was going back to France for a few weeks for the holiday.

It felt a little strange to me, the whole concept of housesitting. How did they know we wouldn’t break a vase or do something to their washing machine? What if we spilled red wine on the sofa or on a prized oriental carpet? What if I used the fruit knife to cut an onion? How would they know we wouldn’t steal something or drink all their best wine or snoop through their desk drawers.

Obviously, we didn’t do any of those things. Still, sometimes I felt an uneasy about the intimacy of being inside a stranger’s house.

And then, there were the animal complications: our newly acquired male cat and their sweet little female cat and big German shepherd. But that’s a story for another time.

All in all, our few weeks housesitting for the French couple were successful and enjoyable. Eventually we moved into our new house. It was my favorite house of all the many I’ve lived in.

Some time later, I heard about a young American couple who were the housesitters-of-choice in Port Vila. They were popular because he was a skilled handyman. When the family returned from vacation or homeleave, they’d find their house better than when they left it. All those little nagging problems that had been hanging out at the bottom of their to-do lists had been fixed.

That’s all I knew about the couple. So, I put them in a story. The Housesitters was published in the Summer 2024 issue of Caveat Lector. Today I’m including it in my list of stories at the top of the page.

Here’s how it begins:

THE HOUSESITTERS

by

Nicki Chen

The day is breezy and warm, clouds forming and reforming, dropping a little rain and moving on. A typical day in the South Pacific. Julie has opened all the windows in the Zhangs’ living room and is dancing across the shiny tile floor to the sound of Chinese drum music. The songs are intricate and provocative, suggesting movements she’s never done before—lunges and finger-flutters and tai-chi-like leg raises. She beats an imaginary drum. Then, as the song changes, she raises her arms and twists at the waist, clapping like a flamenco dancer.

Stopping to catch her breath, she leans on the carved nesting tables. Already the sun is out again, streaming through the dining room window. It floods the pure white walls and floors with its light. This is the way the whole house is: white. “Blank walls inviting us to the ten thousand possibilities,” Julie said to Riley their first day there, bending her speech to suit the Chinese character of the house.

Of course, the walls aren’t actually blank. Shu-hua, the young beautiful wife of Dr. Zhang, is an artist. She has paintings to display: oils and Chinese brush work, the oils peopled with sensuous blue and green shapes and dabs of Chinese red, the scrolls brushed with branches and wings and mountains in the clouds, everything suggesting something beyond landscape. Like the walls, Shu-hua’s paintings invite one’s imagination to the ten thousand possibilities.

Perhaps Julie is more sensitive to the houses now than she was three years ago when they started housesitting. She is, perhaps, more ready to bend to their identities, to let each one show her exactly what it has to offer.

You can read the rest on Caveat Lector or click on “Stories” at the top of this page. Caveat Lector