home

I’m blogging every day of November, with each day being a post about a thing for which I am grateful. – HH

On the sixth day, I’m grateful for our home.

I don’t take it for granted. I spent more than a decade working among and with folks that had lost theirs, and it still, after all these years, feels fragile, like a thing that could slip away if you turned your back on it for a minute.

It sometimes feels ridiculous, this house of ours. After all, we are just two folks, who bought this house – with two bathrooms and three bedrooms and a living room AND a den and an eat-in kitchen AND a dining room. And a half an acre of land and a carport… compared to our last 1,000 square foot house with the tiny bathroom, it felt like a mansion at more than twice the size of the old house. Sometimes, it still does. I lose Renee in it regularly.

It helped that house prices in Raleigh were beginning to climb, although nothing like they did after we left. And prices here in Jackson had been stagnant for years, meaning we were able to buy the huge house here in the nice neighborhood for $20,000 less than the tiny house there in the, uhhhm, transitioning neighborhood.

The house in Raleigh had a leaky roof and uninsulated walls and on hot days the AC would struggle to get the inside of the house under 80. But we lived there five years, Renee recovered from her heart transplant there, we were able to provide a safe place for our niece when she needed a place to live for six months or so, and we tried hard to leave the neighborhood better than we found it.

This house, the one in Jackson, was a Methodist parsonage for 70 years before we bought it, meaning it was well cared for, but well cared for by a committee. Nobody loved it, in other words. But we love it. We love the long hallway, with hardwood floors, that reminds me of the neighbor’s hallway when I was growing up, that I would run and slide on in socked feet. We love the huge dining room, with the table for ten that was always crowded before the pandemic curtailed that. We love the deck we built last year as a COVID project, the fireplace in the living room, the hot pink bathroom in the hallway and the hardwood floors throughout. But mostly, we love that it is ours.

The never ending project

The last house we lived in was what is politely called a “fixer-upper”. Before we could move into it, we had to rip out all the carpet, put in new floors, renovate the kitchen and get all new (or at least, new to us) appliances.

But that was just the starting point.

It had been a low-income rental for more than a decade, and while the house itself was structurally sound, no one had loved it in a very, very long time. The yard was dismal. Hard, compacted soil, with desire paths across the yard where the neighbors would shortcut through it. A backyard that was filled with privet and briars and fallen trees.

Then there was the leaky roof, the sunken front porch, the rotten bathroom floor… It required a lot of vision to see what could be.

We lived in that house for five years. I ripped out the bathroom floor and tiled it. Renovated the studio apartment in the basement and rented it out. Put fencing and flower beds in the front yard. Built a porch across the front of the house. Built a chicken coop in the backyard. Put in a rose hedge along the road. Ripped out the privet and cleaned up the backyard. Pulled the aluminum siding off the front of the house, discovering shiplap siding in perfect condition underneath, which we painted. Replaced the leaky roof with a metal one. And lots of other, smaller things I am forgetting.

And along the way we hosted friends, had celebrations, had a niece live with us for 6 months or so, and my wife had a heart transplant. That house treated us very well. We loved it, and it kept us safe. And when we had to leave it, we were fortunate enough to sell it to a friend, who would love it too.

I have to confess: I didn’t have any vision. I just knew that this is what we could afford, and that if we loved the house and took care of it, it would take care of us. This is sort of my way of working – I don’t invest heavily in long-term plans. I usually just have a long-term broadly defined goal – in this case, a happy, safe, home that would serve as a sanctuary for us. And then, after setting that goal, I ask myself, what can I do now to move me toward it?

These days, we are in a different house, in a different state. This house was more or less move in ready when we bought it, barring some minor updates in the kitchen and a lot of painting. But this house has a ½ acre of yard, and it was a rental before we bought it. Again – structurally sound, but unloved for a long time.

And again, I don’t have a grand vision. I just want it to be welcoming. To be safe, and to keep us safe. To be a place of rest, of sanctuary, for both us and the birds and the pollinators and the other wildlife that share this place with us. So the question isn’t, “What is the next thing to do on this long list” but, “What can I do, in this moment, to move me closer to that vision?”

I find that empowering in many ways. The first is that I don’t always have $3,000 to build the workshop I needed in the backyard, but maybe I do have the $20 to buy a rosebush or native vine. Maybe it’s been raining for weeks, like it does in the spring here, and so I can’t till the new flower bed, but I can paint the hallway. And living in a place changes how you interact with it, which means that your first year in a house, you don’t know enough about the place to make a list of what you want to change about it.

It also helps me avoid the temptation to believe the false idea that I will only be happy when it’s finished. After all, if it has to be finished for me to be happy – well, that could take years. And science tells us that the anticipation of a trip brings more satisfaction than does the actual trip itself.

So, I don’t have a set date for completion. Instead, I choose to see my house and yard as works in progress, a never ending project, and thus, a never ending source of joy.

What do you want your home to be like?

My friend Ashley was the minister that performed our wedding, and when we were preparing for the ceremony, she asked lots of good, piercing, questions. But the one I remember best is:

“What do you want your home to be like?”

Not your house. Not where you live. Not your apartment, which was true at the time, not your dream house, not your future or your life or even your marriage, but your home.

Because houses change. Addresses change. The city you live in, the state you live in, the number of people you live with – all that can change. But home is never a location, but a space you carry with you. Sometimes, home is a person. But always, home is a decision you make.

I once knew a man who lived outside, in a tent beyond the city, and had done for 12 years when he died from lack of healthcare. At his funeral, we told stories we remembered about him, and one friend told of how a church worker had referred to this man, in his hearing, as homeless, and he interrupted her and said he had a home – what he didn’t have was a house.

Home is a decision you make.

When Ashley asked us that, all those years ago, we had no idea what we were in for. I had been working for a few years at that point with people who were experiencing homelessness, and was making virtually no money. The woman I would marry was on disability for a genetic heart condition, and many of our dates had consisted of sub sandwiches from the grocery store deli, ate in the park.

What do you want your home to be like?

I had grown up on the same land my father had, whose father had bought it for his young family for the marriage that didn’t work out, before he married my grandmother. I grew up one mile away from the brick church where my father had been baptized, where I was baptized, where my grandfather’s name is on the cornerstone. It is where dad is buried, where mom will be buried, and where there are generations of people with my last name in the cemetery.

Within 1 mile of that house I kissed my first girl, saw my first dead body, watched a friend die, learned to ride a bike, felt heartache and misery and ecstasy and joy. I have never felt as safe, as loved, as accepted as I did as a child in that house, in that community. It was the essence of stability.

My spouse had a different experience growing up. Her family moved a lot. A lot, a lot. We counted once, and she had lived in 25 houses by the time she was 29. Their fortunes changed several times during her childhood, shifting from comfort to scarcity and back again quickly. Her only constant, regardless of address or fortune, was her siblings, who to this day she talks to near daily. For her, home had less to do with address and geography, and was instead tied to who was with you wherever you happened to be sleeping tonight.

You really see the difference in our childhoods manifest itself when we travel. When we stay at a hotel, I live out of my duffle bag. As soon as we get there, I set my duffle bag on the luggage stand and put my shaving kit on the bathroom counter and I am done. She unpacks, sets up her toiletries in a line on the counter, hangs up her clothes, even if we are only there one night. In my mind, the hotel is a resting place, but she is making it her home.

What do you want your home to be like?

It was interesting – Ashley asked us to answer it without consulting the other. In both of our responses, we mentioned the same word: Sanctuary.

I had been loved and nurtured in safety and stability, but worked daily among chaos. I wanted a place the outside world could not pierce, a place where the horrors I dealt with daily would not enter, a place where I had control of my environment, even if I had no control over the outcomes of the people I saw slowly killing themselves from addiction and alcoholism.

She had grown up loved and nurtured in the midst of chaos, and wanted the stability she had never known.

We both wanted sanctuary.

So our home has been designed, wherever we have lived, to do that. We eat together most nights while music plays. Our house, wherever it has been, is filled with books and music and plants, inside and out. We have comfortable chairs and lots of lamps and throw rugs and knickknacks that mean things to us, a refrigerator covered with pictures of those we love, and art on the wall that makes us feel things. Our cats welcome us when we have been gone too long, and the last two houses we have lived in have contained graves of our feline friends who left us too soon.

When our fortune’s improved and we were able, for the first time in our lives, to be able to pick out our house, we wanted big windows and room for guests and a big dining table, a yard that was ok for both playing in and growing both food and flowers, a house on a quiet street but with lots of birds and flowers and butterflies and a stately magnolia in the yard that reminded her of the one in the yard of the house she lived in when she was 12.

It was, and is, our sanctuary. It is the place we go to retreat from the ravages of the outside world, where we both know and are known, where we make beauty and a family, both of which provide us protection from a world that often seems like madness.

It is a thing we have designed and built, this home of ours. And like anything one builds, whether a house or a chicken coop, it requires maintenance and care and attention, lest it fall into disrepair and one-day collapse under the weight of the forces that oppose it.

And every day, it requires us to answer the question we were first asked all those years ago:

What do you want your home to be like?