In Other Words: Some Thoughts About Home

By Chuck Keller

Lately I have been refreshing the interior of our home. Patching holes. Filling cracks. Sanding. Painting. Culling possessions. Upgrading. And that got me to thinking about home. This old house has been in my wife’s family since 1935 so there’s a lot of emotion tied to this place, but does that distinction make it a home? 

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that “A house is made of walls and beams; a home is built of love and dreams.” Most people would agree with that but that love manifests itself in many ways. Like every other home, ours is full of items that hold memories. I have many of my father’s carpentry tools and I swear I can feel his spirit when I use them. So many items are imbued with a memory, a story, our story. 

During family visits we hear the stories of what happened in these rooms – the adventures, the mishaps, the laughter, the love. It’s good to have a place for the family to anchor their emotions. We enjoy being the keepers of family history, but we still want to put our stamp on the place.  

Our yard is populated with special event trees and plants – a Mother’s Day magnolia, a live Christmas tree, and even a cherry tree which was a gift from the birds that we feed throughout the year. We have irises from family farms and flowering plants shared by neighbors and fellow gardeners. The outside is as loved as the inside. 

Home is where we can relax, be ourselves. We can disconnect from work and the “outside” world so we can connect with those we love. We can be silent or we can talk or we can sing but we feel safe and loved in our home.  We want our guests to feel the same. Home is where our people are.  

You know that if you lived in a neighborhood long enough then you call houses by the residents’ names. In our neighborhood, we live in the Keller home. It’s not the Smith house or the Jones house or any other name. People know us and know where we live. We have earned that after forty years of caretaking.  When you walk through your childhood neighborhood you identify places by who lived there and that carries a lot of information. It’s as if the past lives in the local atmosphere. 

In To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout, the narrator, referred to a neighbor’s house as the “Radley’s place” and that carried the weight of years of memories and experiences with those characters. These objects are imbued with the spirit that we confer on them – good and bad. And when someone new moves into the neighborhood, well, it takes quite a long time for those references to change. For instance, we have a new family living in the Wilson home down the street. 

But home is a bit more complicated than just a structure. It is also the surrounding area – the neighborhood, woods, schools, parks. We feel a strong connection with those places and things as well and they contribute to our feeling of home. My wife always laughs when she relates the story of how she froze her tongue to the metal banister behind Johnson elementary school. It was just like that holiday movie. Or when her family recalls how my father-in-law rescued two men who crashed their small airplane in a nearby yard. There’s a chink in the plaster wall at the bottom of the stairs because our dog thought was funny to toss her bone down the stairs to smash with a resounding thud against the wall.Memories carry through time and connects us to place, people and emotions.They are extensions of our home.

At some point we stopped feeling like we were visiting. I’m not sure when it happened. We now have roots. Being part of the community helped to make this house our home. We stepped out of the comfort of our home to be involved with school, church, and community organizations. We support local businesses. We cheer the successes of others and try to help others with their struggles. And they have helped us.  As I went through years of cancer treatments, the community spoiled us with affection and attention. I am not about to let them down.  Our involvement widens and deepens our connections. Making our community better makes our home stronger. 

Sure, this house sits on just a tiny piece of a great big planet and it’s not terribly remarkable in any substantial way, but it is our home.

Like the seeds that float the air in spring, we too hope to land somewhere fertile enough to grow strong and old. That’s home.