How does one define the word home?
Webster’s defines the word as “one’s place of residence; the dwelling place of a family; a benevolent institution providing a dwelling place for persons without homes of their own.”
As a child I identified home as simply a place – the blue two-story on East “N” Street, with my room in the back left corner decorated with sky-blue paint and rainbow wallpaper. Even once my mother sold my childhood home the same year my husband and I purchased our own first home, I wasn’t particularly sentimental about it. After all, it was a place, a thing – replaceable. I had grown up and moved on from the rainbows and long-buried pets, no problem.
It wasn’t until the past few years, as my husband and I had to face the reality of losing the home in which we were raising our young children did I really begin to think about home as more than a thing, more than “four walls, a roof, a door, some windows.” That defines a house, you see.
But a home?
A home is the sum of all who live there and all they do.
A home is the laughter around a kitchen table alit with the glow of incandescent lights hanging above a classic board game.
A home is the color red on the wall, carefully selected not based on the latest musings of the “it” interior designer of the moment, but on the impact and emotions stirred in the person who chose the color.
A home is the mundane tasks of washing, cleaning, and balancing the checkbook, and more importantly the person performing them, simply because they love the other people benefiting from their chores.
A home is people.
A home is family.
A home is marriage.
A home is finances, and children, and homework, and scheduling, and gardening, and games, and chores, and laughter, and disagreements, and making up, and breathing in and out every moment, trying to savor it before it disappears into the fog of memory.
Home.
This blog originally started out in 2010 as a record of our journey through losing our “four walls, a roof, a door, some windows.” Now it is about the real meaning of Home: family, marriage, finances, and everything else that goes into the mixing bowl of making a Home.
Welcome to Home.
