Home is such a strange and yet wonderful place to be these days. Over the years I have lived in houses, whether it was a real house, an apartment or a condo – houses seem to come and go in my life and I think I’ve even lost count of how many times I have changed domiciles.
Wait, I know. Twenty-two different houses. The longest I lived in one was the house I grew up in – 21 years. The shortest – about a year.
Very rarely has any house been a home. I can certainly say that the home I grew up in was definitely home. But since then, they have been few and far between.
As we all know, Florida never was home. I lived in four different houses there – an apartment, a manufactured house and two condos. None of them was home though. Homey, yes. Home? No.
Kat and I have been marveling at this very idea recently. She too has lived in many places, but few were actually home. She tried to make each place homey, including the apartment she lived in in Redmond when we started dating. It was very homey, and wonderfully kept. But it wasn’t home.
Without really being aware of it, we were both homeless until recently. Sure, we had a roof over our respective heads, she in her two bedroom apartment in Curry Cove (a name I gave the apartment complex as the scent of curry from all the Indian cooking filled every nook and cranny in the place), and me in my capacious four bedroom house in Shoreline.
Neither was home, hence our claim that while we were both housed, we were homeless as well.
It wasn’t until Kat moved into this house that we found home. It was Kat who first put her finger on it, remarking one night that she finally felt at home. She must, as she’s outside right now, planting primroses in the front bed of our yard.
We don’t own the place, of course. You don’t have to own a house to have a home. Kat even refers to this particular space as the “box that home came in.” For it is inside that home exists, a comfortable space where we both feel safe and secure, free to spread out, be ourselves and enjoy each other’s company, the company of our kids and the company of our friends who we also want to feel at home whenever they stop by.
This transcendence from house to home is fascinating to me. I’ve actually owned two houses in my life, one that came really close to feeling like home in Port Orchard, and the one in Florida that was just a box with some windows and doors. In both places I felt more like a guest than a homeowner, even though my name appeared on the legal papers.
I suppose it’s because I didn’t really choose either house. In Port Orchard, I gave in to my then wife. I really wanted the house with the family room, but the one she wanted won out, largely because almost a third of the house was the master suite and it had a hot tub in the backyard.
While I did actually select the house in Florida, right down to the color of the cabinets and faux window shutters, I knew from the start that it could never be home, largely because my name was not on the deed of the land. I was just a squatter, at the will and whim of the land’s owner and her ever present parents who still treated it as their acre, not hers, mine or ours.
I’m glad I can laugh about such things, being homeless even when I had a mortgage. After all, I made these decisions along the way. There’s no one to blame for the situations I found myself except me.
But to find a home, how unexpected. We didn’t really start out to have a home; it just happened. Kat’s lease was up and we could have never fit us all in her apartment anyway and I had this big rental with extra bedrooms so we could enter into our Brady Bunch blended life.
I can’t even tell you when this house became our home. It’s not like one day we woke up and the house had undergone some magical transformation as we slept. It wasn’t even because we moved all her stuff over here and sprinkled it around along with my stuff.
We smile at how it all did seem to fit together seamlessly, her taste in decor and mine. But that certainly didn’t make this house a home. Nor did the fact that we were even in the same place finally. It was far more convenient than playing “your house or mine tonight.” But even living together didn’t create this feeling of home.
Yes, we know the old saying that “home is where the heart is.” But is that really true? I know my heart has been in it a couple times in my life, and yet, the thought of me being home never entered my mind.
It’s just one of those indefinable things, I guess. I’m sure plenty of other writers have pondered what makes a house a home or what a home actually is. There had to have been poets who lent rhythm and rhyme to the idea as well.
Each of us uniquely knows home when we happen upon it. I suppose it could be a specific place or a certain town or part of the world. We certainly yearn for it when we’re not there. Eventually, all the excitement of something new and different wears thin, and we’re back to wanting to go home again, wherever it is or whoever it is with.
And when we find it, we want to hold onto it with all our might. It’s that rare. I am just glad that I fon’t have to look for it any longer. As Dorothy once reminded us, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.” And that is how it should be.
In the Emerald City, home at last with my best friend and darling wife,
– Robb