There Is No Place like Home, Whatever That Is According to our writer, home is both longing and belonging.

“Home is not just the place where you happen to be born. It’s the place where you become yourself.”

—Pico Iyer

The house I share with my husband and dog is home for me. It is the place I long for when I am exhausted, sad, or cranky; the place where I can hide and stop worrying what the world thinks of me. The dog clearly agrees; the minute we turn onto the crunchy gravel drive he leaps up and runs back and forth between passenger seat and hatch in a frenzied blur, beside himself with joy. But for my husband (who I sometimes wish were less honest), the house where he grew up will always be home, too, in the most primal and maudlin sense of the word.

Early in our marriage, that particular house came up for sale, and I held my breath. The neighborhood was no longer the sweet one of Andrew’s boyhood, but I feared that would not matter. I pictured the house as he might, its windows glowing as dark falls. It represented the safety, love, and warmth that had shaped him. If you have someplace like that to return to, why would you not?

Andrew mentioned the sale only lightly; he did not insist that we buy his childhood home. But it took me another decade to fathom the intensity of his relationship to that otherwise unremarkable house. “It’s been decades since you lived there!” I still want to exclaim. “We have made our own home together!”

It makes sense, I kept telling myself. In the first years of life, your home is your entire universe. It cradles you and fills your senses. As soon as you can reach high, grab the shiny doorknob, and toddle outside, you see what your homeworld actually looks like. Odds are, it will be the first thing you draw: a box with a triangle on top, two square eyes to let the sunshine in, a tall door to let your friends in. It is your kangaroo pouch, familiar and comforting when the rest of the world is strange.

My earliest memories are not of a happy pouch. They only go back to the big, dim house in Bellerive Acres where my mother “moved back home,” as they say, my father having dropped dead of a heart attack on the golf course when I was eight months old. A duplex, it was built of dark red brick, with a swoop of roof to one side and a pretty front porch no one used. My great aunts lived upstairs and my grandparents downstairs, with me and my widowed mother tucked into the second bedroom.

We always felt like boarders, though only now can I articulate that.

The living room was mainly brown, with a drab green scalloped rug and—surprise!—a pink Naugahyde armchair. Even as a little kid, I somehow knew my grandmother had not bought that chair as design whimsy but for a deep discount. Or in spite, knowing that my poor beleaguered grandpa would have to sit in that sticky carnation-pink chair every night to drink his beer and read his newspaper.

When I was ten, my mother moved the two of us to an apartment, and the world burst open. Suddenly life was fun. We bought plastic Parsons tables in bold colors and a blue and white mod stereo, and my friends came to hang out at the swimming pool. From there, she bought a condo, and that Christmas Eve, we put together, with more laughter than skill, a ping-pong table in the basement. We sewed all the drapes ourselves, and we snuck out at midnight to break the condo association rules by repainting the turquoise door a calmer ivory.

Yet even that condo is not as rosy for me as Andrew’s childhood home. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard, a French philosopher writing about architecture, elegantly translates my confusion: “How can secret rooms, rooms that have disappeared, become abodes for an unforgettable past?” Because, he answers himself, the past is securely fixed in those spaces, the memories easy to summon. They return us, Bachelard says, to “the land of Motionless Childhood,” where we were protected from the wild things that lurked outside our bedroom window.

• • •

Mildred and Silas, oil on canvas by Cary Reeder. (Used by kind permission of Cary Reeder)

“To be forcibly evicted from one’s home and neighborhood is to be stripped of a sheathing,

which in its familiarity protects the human being from the bewilderments of the outside

world.”

—Yi-Fu Tuan in Topophilia

While I rattled around in the gothic duplex, my friend Lauren was living in an idyllic 1920s home with two parents and several older sisters. She loved her home; she can still rattle off details of every room with photographic accuracy. Her descriptions are intimate, possessive, and haunted by loneliness, because soon all her sisters had left home, and these particular memories are hers alone. The finished basement, for example, with its built-in Formica and chrome bar and a clock with ladies in cocktail dresses painted at each hour. An ideal place to take shelter when your dad is depressed and your mom is hurling her furious, sobbing disappointment at him. When Lauren started high school—I knew none of this, we had lost touch by then—her father’s partner embezzled money, and her father went bankrupt. They struggled for several years, and when she was seventeen, they had to sell the house at a sharp loss.

She does not remember anyone ever sitting down with her to explain; somehow she just found out they were moving, soon. Between sobs, she wrote her name in the back of the closet and added the years she had lived there. “If I dream of being in a house, it’s that house,” Lauren says softly.

“Because in my mind, that’s home. I had an idyllic childhood, and then it all fell apart.”

They moved to a smaller place farther north, and she had to spend her senior year at a new school where she knew no one. She had lost her parents along with the house: “They were tired,” she says, and would never again be as available to her, emotionally. “I spent the next decade trying to find people who loved me. And when I married and we had kids”—here her voice relaxes—“I made sure they would have that security and that sense of being loved and protected that we all deserve.”

•  •  •

Remembering Lauren’s cool finished basement, my mind flashes without warning to the unfinished basement at 88 Bellerive, the damp gray concrete ugly and spooky. I loved and hated going down there. My favorite place to explore was a little room called, for reasons no one could remember, the keep-out. Its rickety shelves were crowded with small useful objects, nails and screws and such, and just outside its door was an old steamer trunk filled with lace and buttons and scraps of silk or wool. Behind the clothesline, garment bags hung in rows, zipping shut the tea dances, lost loves, and dreams that once softened the hearts of these fussy, wrangling old people. I can still feel the garment bags swinging wildly when I pushed my way through them, rattling the mothballs.

Like it or not, that house lives in my bones.

•  •  •

“We shape our dwellings, and afterwards our dwellings shape us.”

—Winston Churchill

In The Poetics of Space, Bachelard insists that “we feel calmer and more confident when in the old home, in the house we were born in, than we do in the houses on streets where we have only lived as transients.” Maybe he does. If you returned me to 88 Bellerive Acres, I would instantly revert to shy uncertainty.

Going home—for holidays, lockdown, divorce, illness—is an eager dread. Yes, Mr. Frost, “home is the place where, when you have to go there,/ they have to take you in.” But to haul out another chestnut, you really can’t go home again. Never the same river twice, Heraclitus warned. Not only will your home have changed, but the self that returns is not the self that left.

Nonetheless, home takes you back—in a doubled sense. You belong again, but the catch is, you are taken back to the age you were when you lived there. Professionalism vanishes, and you turn whiny, chafing for an independence and respect you forget you have already earned. You leave grumpy and sad, because going home was supposed to feel good.

Even our language enshrines what shelters us. Sure to succeed? You are home free. Slide into home base, and you are safe. Home keys are where your fingers rest. Homestyle is wholesome and comforting. An open house is the consummate welcome. “Make yourself at home” is an instruction to relax.

Good Fences, oil on canvas by Cary Reeder. (Used by kind permission of Cary Reeder)

At bedtime, my husband and I play thunderstorm music even in the draught of summer, exaggerating the coziness of being tucked in safe and dry. “Everything comes alive when contradictions accumulate,” Bachelard notes, and this feels especially true inside a house. Heavy dark draperies closing out winter snow so bright it makes you squint; a hearth against damp November chill; dim coolness on a glaring August day; a thick-carpet quiet as soon as the front door shuts out the chaos of traffic.

In Malicroix, French writer Henri Bosco conjures a vicious windstorm and shows us his house “holding firmly to the soil of the island.” It “yielded nothing to the storm.” On that lonely and frightening night, it became his mother.

Odd, to see one’s house as one’s mother. But just as home calls up thoughts of family, it can also substitute for family. A locked door that opens only to you? Rooms that offer the consolations of food and sleep without demanding your credit card? A home offers its own limited version of unconditional love.

Nobody ever continues that Robert Frost quote, but in the next line, he says he should have defined home as “Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”

•  •  •

Home sweet home. The stuff of needlepoint plaques, and a sentiment that often hides the truth. In Beloved, Toni Morrison named Sethe’s plantation Sweet Home, an irony so pure it stings. When she runs north and moves into 124 Bluestone Road, her house is a symbol of arrival, freedom from slavery, pride. Yet “124 was spiteful,” “full of a baby’s venom,” haunted by her guilt.

Still, she refuses to move out of that house, even for the man she loves. “This house he told her to leave as though a house was a little thing—a shirtwaist or a sewing basket you could walk off from or give away any old time. She who had never had but this one.”

A home grounds and locates us; it carries our history. As Bachelard notes, it contains “the sorts of space that may be grasped, that may be defended against adverse forces, the space we love.” The “castle doctrine” encodes a right recognized since the sixteenth century: if you are threatened within your own home, you need not retreat, as you are expected to do elsewhere, to avoid violence. If need be, you may kill the intruder. In your home, you are king.

In the early years of this nation, as in many European countries, the only people who could vote were the tiny kings, men who owned property. This was thought to give them a greater stake in society and its governance. Now the advantages are more practical: you have privacy; you can hang pictures and paint your walls purple; you are building equity and lowering your taxes; and you have escaped greedy landlords who hike your rent every year.

Is it any wonder that the dearth of housing and skyrocketing real estate prices have left us bitter? For the first time in several generations, owning a home is an unattainable dream for many. That simple fact is influencing our election, troubling our economy, and rocking our collective psyche.

•  •  •

“Where thou art, that is home.”

—Emily Dickinson

In one of my nightmares, a tornado spins across town, picking up roofs and cars and gnarled apple trees and tossing them through the air. I see houses wrecked and a panicked, wailing crowd, their safety, privacy, ease, and future plans yanked from them in a matter of seconds. I glance around wildly as I thread through this crowd, until finally, I spot Andrew, and my heart settles.

He is home for me. And I hate that fact. I love my husband with every ounce of energy I possess, but if he is my home, what happens if he dies first? I am homeless, adrift forever? Psychotherapist Esther Perel softly asks a young man who has lived in many places and is now in love, “Is she home for you?” His yes is eager, but I recoil. Another person will always be so different from you, unable to wrap around all your sharp edges and soft bulges and accommodate all your interests and moods. I am home to myself. No person, no place, no building, no ideology takes that role for me.

This is bravado, the noblest form of bullshit. When I was a kid, my mom was home to me. Now home is my husband, whether I like it or not, and whatever dog we have at the moment. Also a few dear friends, a few hangouts from grad school days, and oddly enough, London. Which is not my favorite city, yet I felt instantly at home there.

One cannot steer the homing instinct; it finds affinity wherever it chooses. Often home is where the old people are—grandparents and porch-rocking neighbors who stayed put their whole lives, ballast to keep everyone else’s voyage stable. Without people who stay there, a place is soulless. Home orients every cell in our bodies. Old people and animals know this, which is why they are loath to move.

Some species cannot survive even a few yards from their tiny ecosystem, their unique habitat. Me, I am more of a crow. As long as I have my creature comforts, I am willing to pick at any city’s cuisine. Do those of us who are adaptable and a little shallow—not in values, necessarily, but in how sentiment inscribes itself—suffer from our lack of rootedness?

In grad school, I was briefly engaged to a guy who informed me that we would have to live by an ocean. In fairness, he had grown up in the Philippines, surrounded by ocean. But I did not need to live by a soybean field.

At the time, I thought my boyfriend homesick and petulant; today, I know how tightly our brains braid place into identity. In harsh, bleak northern climes, there is less of the easygoing, leisurely public joy that you find on a balmy island; it is as though the personality absorbs the weather. In a rainforest, one’s sense of time blurs: the seasons are hard to tease apart, and you can only see your immediate surroundings. On the plains, you can watch the slow approach of a storm or an enemy and prepare yourself. I might be indifferent to the Midwest, but its terrain and critters and wild weather have shaped my sense of the world, maybe even humbled me. If I had grown up either in Paris or on a rugged island, would I have more confidence?

A naturalist friend of mine, Dr. Susan Barker, is in love with not just her hometown but all of southwestern Illinois. She knows the ancient history of its rock formations and rivers; she can name its trees and wildflowers and spot its shyest wild animals. Once she emailed me to describe seeing, as she drove home after a trip, “an amazing golden light like none I’d ever seen. Never had green grass and winter wheat glowed so brightly. The wheat was just tall enough, and the west wind blowing just fast enough, that the field was an ocean of green waves.”

I might have found the same sight beautiful, but to her, its lushness was a welcome home. Still, she is lonely. The intellectual companionship she sorely misses could be easily had in a big city, but she cannot, will not, pry herself from this land. I am exasperated by her stubbornness, yet I envy her. I envy Andrew, too.

Shadowplay, acrylic on board by Cary Reeder. (Used by kind permission of Cary Reeder)

•  •  •

A neighborhood is a cluster of homes, and it, too, imprints itself. Memories stick like Post-its to every block—daring exploits, eccentric people, gossipy scandals. Homeboys bond by territory. Brits use shorthand for their homes: “Come over to mine.” We say, “This is my street”—how weird, to act like we own a street. Yet merely by eating and sleeping there, we lay claim.

In Sula, Morrison writes about the Bottom as having been “a real place.” Then the neighborhood disintegrated—and was redeveloped as a golf course. “Now there weren’t any places left, just separate houses with separate televisions and separate telephones and less and less dropping by.” Even if those separate houses managed to be homey, they were cut off from the larger sense of home.

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s first musical, In the Heights, is all about home as neighborhood. Usnavi winds up (skip ahead, this is a spoiler) staying put, because the Heights have given him and other displaced people a place where they belong—both geographically and to one another. His friend Nina says she used to think she lived at the top of the world, with everywhere else just a two-dimensional map.

When she left for college, the matriarch of the neighborhood sent recipes: “I had to make sure you remembered the flavor of home.” And when Nina’s mother finds out her daughter has been struggling at Stanford, she yells, “When you have problems, you come home.”

About another character, Usnavi observes, “I’m running to make it home, and home’s what Vanessa’s running away from.”

We all do a little of both, all the time, in the details of our lives.

•  •  •

Rear Window, acrylic on canvas by Cary Reeder. (Used by kind permission of Cary Reeder)

“Even when you are not there it stays and waits for you.”

—Cesare Pavese, in The Moon and the Bonfires

My happiest moments at 88 Bellerive were in the backyard. The blossomy pink crabapple tree, the eccentric and interesting tulip tree, the roses, the honeysuckle climbing over fences, the weigela and forsythia fringing the edges. The baskets of sandwiches, frozen Cokes, and Snickers bars that my Aunt Mary used to lower from the upstairs back porch. The hammock where I lay in the shade and read. In the yard I was free from my grandmother’s sharp tongue, so that was where I felt safe.

Now, Andrew and I live in a house that has been lived in and loved for more than a century. The heights of kids who grew up here are marked on the doorjamb, and there is a big yard where I find myself planting what I remember from childhood. When we travel, I am eager to return; I can already hear the click of the deadbolt sliding back; feel the little hip-check shove I have to give when Midwest humidity swells and sticks the door. With sweet relief, I climb into our bed, the left side of the mattress shaped to my body, and scrunch my pillow just so. The next morning, we will eat our eggs at the sunny table, and I will write at my wooden desk, and in the evening, we will slouch on the billowy couch and, tired from travel, binge junk TV.

What makes a home homey? I like a scatter of books and magazines, myself, and a pair of felted slippers halfway under the sofa. A kitchen table big enough for friends who drop in. A fireplace. A quiet nook where you can read or think undisturbed. A small, sunlit space in which to write.

A young friend who just bought his first house is facing its first minor, albeit pricey catastrophe. I start an email meant to be reassuring and find myself writing: “This will end, and then you’ll only have to worry about the yard and the gutters, the leaves, the drainage, the leaky basement, the leaky roof, the furnace filter, the window screens, the dusty ceiling fans….” The list bubbles on, my soothing email twisting into a prophetic ribbing. We pour crazy amounts of time, money, and energy into a house we have purchased. That is what makes it ours and makes us love it, the way a rescued pup you nurse back to health or confidence always owns a piece of your heart.

Or am I just being sentimental to rationalize the outlay?

“I need to stop at the hardware store and get a power washer nozzle,” my husband announces one Saturday morning. I perk up like a terrier eyeing Snausages. “Great! The birds have iced the fence, and the patio needs—”I break off, realizing that he is talking about his beloved historic site, not our old house. Try as I might to convince him that our chores are historic preservation, they never spark the same joy.

Private sphere, public sphere. For centuries, a woman’s place was inside the house, doing the house’s work. The result measured her skills, virtue, and selflessness. For the “man of the house,” home was only sanctuary, never a proving ground.

All this is cisgender and old school, of course, and supposedly over. Yet women my age still experience a secret thrill every time a male partner starts the dishwasher, changes the bedlinens or scrubs the floor unbidden. “It’s foreplay,” therapists tell husbands playfully. And though mine cleans far more thoroughly than I do (if company is coming), he is as carefree as a college kid, while I, cooking and tending and fussing, am the housemother.

•  •  •

“Lots of places mean no place at all.”

—Cesare Pavese in The Moon and the Bonfires

When I close my eyes and think of past homes, I do not see brick or limestone. I see the hissing, clanking steam radiator below the window of my dorm room, making it toasty to study perched on the deep sill. I see the cornflower blue kitchen counter of my first apartment; the Art Deco peach and black tile in the bathroom of our first house; the fireplace the previous owners put into our current kitchen.

“Home is an intimate place,” writes humanist geographer Yi-Fu Tuan. “Enchanted images of the past are evoked not so much by the entire building, which can only be seen, as by its components and furnishings, which can be touched and smelled as well.”

In his memoir, Who Am I?, Tuan describes his “imitation Tiffany lamps” and alphabetized CDs. “How calm and sweetly reassuring they are! They seem to say, ‘We will always be here for you.’ And that’s one thing that can be said about the house and its material objects. They remain in place, they are stable. They are an anchorage in the midst of life’s unceasing change.”

Which may be why we all came to hate Marie Kondo.

Patina, oil on canvas by Cary Reeder. (Used by kind permission of Cary Reeder)

Traveling the world to interview women who grow and sell coffee, Jen Roberts has set up temporary living quarters nearly 100 times, unpacking eucalyptus and musk tea light candles from Target, photos of her grown kids, her coffee scale and grinder, a corkscrew, her journal, a tiny speaker for music. Her props and comforts are homey, but they are not a home. After three years of wandering, she is tired of adventure and ready to settle—not “back home” but in Mexico City.

She wants a place for her books and art, a big table where people can come together and eat, a kitchen where she can store her favorite spices and utensils. On the road, she was always piecing things together, figuring out customs and routines, sourcing or making do. Now she can pursue hobbies, and friends will know where to find her, and her life will have a locus and an anchor.

•  •  •

“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”

—Simone Weil

Call her Eva, a pseudonym she cleverly chose to echo eviction. A trauma she is still unraveling.

In 2009, she had saved enough to buy a narrow, three-story Victorian house. It felt especially right because it was built in the 1840s, when her family came here from Germany. Eager to make her new home warm and inviting, Eva pored over Architectural Digest and scoured Goodwill, creating a happy mix of bright modern and family heirlooms. She knew she had succeeded when a friend visited from France and exclaimed, “It feels like home to me.”

Eva was single, and her parents were gone. The house gave her a place where she knew she belonged, a place where she could be vulnerable and entirely herself. When some everyday crisis knocked her off balance, she now had a soft place to land.

But then the crises intensified. In the space of two days, she was laid off from a newspaper job and received a cancer diagnosis. She had refused Cobra, which she says “earned its name” by costing $900 a month. She wound up needing four surgeries to beat the cancer. And in the downturn after the 2008 recession, finding another job proved impossible. “Try McDonalds,” friends urged. “Try Starbucks.” Places like that did not want to hire someone they figured would leave soon, so Eva wound up scrubbing toilets and walking dogs. Her savings drained away. The day before Thanksgiving 2013, the sheriff, city workers, “and the flying monkeys they hired to break down my back door” came and moved all her stuff out to the street.

In the eleven years since, Eva has moved again and again—first to what she dubbed “a crack hotel” near the airport, then to an apartment whose landlord turned out to be behind in his mortgage payments, then to a place that was sold and remodeled, nearly doubling the rent. During the pandemic, she says, “Everybody else was all ‘Ooohh, sourdough’ and ‘It’s wine o’clock!’ and I was like, ‘What shoe is going to drop next?’”

Now she is living in a rental that feels “half a notch up from either student housing or a storage unit,” and because it is scheduled for renovation and a rent hike, she has to move yet again. When I ask how all this loss of home has affected her, she says, “I worry that part of me is broken. There’s this untethering that happens: my home is completely, 100 percent in my head and my heart. People say things like, ‘You shouldn’t be attached to physical things anyway.’ But you look around and it’s all so fleeting—there’s no permanence, and I feel like I don’t fit in anywhere. The moment I let myself start to feel comfortable someplace, I get this gnawing reminder that it’s all going to be ripped away.”

What she misses most is not three stories of Victorian charm, but the ability to throw a dinner party. “I used to always serve two desserts,” she tells me, wistful. “Because it’s extra. I want my guests to feel taken care of.” A home not only contains, it welcomes. That is hospitality—rooted in “hospital,” a place where you heal.

•  •  •

Would the world be healed if everyone could live in the home of their dreams? Some would still choose what looks to the rest of us like no home at all. The polite new term is “unhoused,” which strikes me wrong. It sounds like a HUD failure, and maybe that is fair. But a house is not a home, and not wanting a house is a fair choice. For some, home is the open air and night sky, uncomfortable but free. No address, no expectations, no walls closing in. Is that a clinical symptom or leftover hurt from a series of failures? Maybe both. But to force someone to be conventionally housed? I would rather make it safe for them to live as they like. There have always been nomads and travelers. The difference is, they had the support of their tribe.

•  •  •

Whispers, acrylic on canvas by Cary Reeder. (Used by kind permission of Cary Reeder)

“Over-picturesqueness in a house can conceal its intimacy.”

—Gaston Bachelard

I start asking people how they define “home.”

“Home is created by love,” Jerry Garrett remarks. This is true but vague. What he says next, though, makes me reach for a pen: “Home has something to do with accepting what you have.”

Once you reach that acceptance, your home relaxes. Now it looks lived-in; there is an ease to it, a refusal to try for perfection. A home should be reasonably tidy but not sterile; its materials should forgive ink stains, juicy tomatoes, crayon on the walls, the scrabble of a dog tearing down the hallway. You should be able to live exactly as you like there—grow a tree in the living room or turn your dining room into a messy craft room. People who live in showhouses, or who are always gnawing on dreams of a bigger, fancier, more luxurious home … do not yet have a home.

Nor do immigrants and refugees who resist the new language and spend their time with other expats, eating the food of their former homeland, reading its news, and listening to its music. But who can blame them? Your home should be the place where you never feel judged, where you can cry or retch or fart or scream in orgasm. Home is where you get cooked for and cared for and put back together again. Except trad wives, who have to go to a spa.

•  •  •

In Waterloo, the little town in southwestern Illinois where we live, people who were born there are said to be “from home.” I quickly learned to apologize for confusing Porta Westfalica with Homecoming or the Pumpkin Fest with the Stubbornfest by blurting, “I’m not from home.” In a the modern blur of mobility, Waterloo’s cultural cohesion impresses me. So many residents are of German ancestry, and so many families go back five or six generations, that “home” means more than it does in the city. Or the suburbs, where “home” is a ranch or a bungalow, something to be renovated, upgraded, sold, or bought.

Americans enjoy their homes but seldom forget they are also investments—and status symbols. The Roma find home in a piece of music, a suitcase of treasures, or those with whom they travel. For the Osage, home is tied to the surrounding nature and extends across ancestral land. In Latin America, home has immediacy as a place of enjoyment, and private spaces spill into public. For Buddhists, home is a temporary dwelling and gathering place; for Britain’s landed gentry, home is a museum of heirlooms, rituals, customs, and outdated etiquette, all of it passed down for generations. And for global citizens or third culture kids, home is a state of mind.

The phrase “global citizen” appeals to me. I have made all my moves on a single Midwestern game board, each place suggesting a slightly different way of living or a tweaked set of priorities, never anything more radical or illuminating. Yet I have never felt loyal to this region.

I fancy myself rootless—yet the isotopes of my childhood home are locked inside the enamel of my teeth. A forensic scientist could take samples from my shoes and tell me how far I live from the coastline and what sort of lead laces the soil beneath my house. Like snails, we carry our homes with us.

•  •  •

I had the dream twice, years apart, and if I could lure it back, I would. In it, I discover that our house has another wing we never knew existed. I walk through, thrilled by all the extra rooms. What am I trying to tell myself?

“A home is a home,” observes Julie Beck, “because it blurs the line between the self and the surroundings.” If you dream about a house, it is assumed that you are dreaming about your psyche. The schema is perfectly Freudian: not only do you have an exterior façade concealing an interior reality, but you have the subconscious, subterranean, often scary basement where unspeakable things are hidden; the rational first floor open to visitors; the upstairs for sleeping and dreaming and prayer and sex; the attic with its cloth-draped mysteries and foglike swirls of dust, more spooky than sinister, its packed-away memories only in need of a good airing.

Our homes hold our energy, and our ghosts. This is why we always visit the home of some beloved writer, artist, president, or genius. Not the school that laid a solid foundation for their talent, not the studio or office where they did their most celebrated work. Their home. The place they brushed their teeth and showered and ate cereal and made love.

Where we call home reveals us.

And while it is a fine thing to hang a picture of your first home close to your heart, it is also a fine thing to live in a house you have made warmer and happier than the house where you began.

Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.

All works copyright © 2024 Cary Reeder at caryreeder.com