I’ve spent the week cutting open boxes (and have done so without managing to slice a thumb or poke an eye, both of which I count among my patchwork of bodily blotches). Cutting boxes is preamble to peeking inside, seeing what the movers on the other end decided to toss in to a box marked “Misc.” and finding, oh, a dog food bowl (for someone else’s dog! since the person for whom you are unpacking does not have a dog) and a dog comb (or three) tossed in with the napkins, placemats, and, while they were at it, the tongs and spatulas and various accoutrements from the kitchen junk drawer.
The essential coffeemaker still has not surfaced. And the only boxes left are the ones marked “books” or “clothes” (there are many, many of the former, a whole wall in fact of so-marked crates, enough to hide behind—a rampart of corrugated cardboard—should the enemy decide to storm the castle). It is supreme sacrifice and occupational tribulation to do this work sans caffeine. But so it goes in the domain of motherdom.
You might say I’m chest-deep in moving season here in my teeny-tiny world. Boy 1 is moving—finally—into the wee shingled abode that will be his professorial outpost down where Hoosiers hail. And, come Sunday, Boy 2 is also headed south, parking himself in the old rectory of the only church that somehow survived the incendiary path of the Great Chicago Fire (how’s that for an address of some historic heft?).
All of this is to say that—save for the fact that our household population is being slashed by half, from the summer’s height of four, to merely the pair of us—I am in a bit of my glory. At least when it comes to the wee shingled house, with the wide front porch and friendly folks on either side. That’s the one we’ve dubbed the Hoosier House, seeing as it’s spitting distance from the golden dome that rises from the prairie in South Bend, Indiana, where the professor is sinking down his roots.
Playing house is what this is, a grownup iteration of my childhood’s deepest joy and wonderment. I’ve been playing house as far back as my brain cells carry me. I started out constructing a village for a lady bug (complete with winding lanes and gardens, and of course a church with steeple), and moved quickly on to outfitting shoe boxes with my best, best friend Martha Hackney. We made houses for our dolls—elaborate cardboard houses, the more rooms, the better; the more intricately appointed, all the better still. Whole summers we whiled away making tables, chairs, and beds (kitchen stoves and sinks, as well) from cardboard cut and folded, then we’d upholster with squares of felt, and whatever scraps I could find in my mother’s sewing basket.
My domestic height was the wee log cabin I got one Christmas; found it planted amid the woodland grove in our backyard when I was told to look out the window to see what had dropped from Santa’s sleigh. Night after night, I outfitted my one-room house in my dreams, a veritable little girl on the prairie, and by day I’d dash to my corner of the yard and stock the shelves and set the table, sweep the floor, and set a jar of weeds (aka my centerpiece) on my so-called kitchen table. I was besotted with my rough-sawn bliss.
Home has long transfixed me. The idea of it, as emphatically as the nuts and bolts of it. I am, I readily confess, a homebody of the highest order. Though apparently I’m fickle and can make myself at home even in a hotel room.
Maybe it’s a deep-down yearning to figure out my place in the world. Maybe it’s simply a severe case of myopia, and as long as the edifice in which I traipse is one I know by heart, one where at every turn I bump into a relic of the past, I feel safe in this topsy-turvy, too-often-cruel, cruel world.
I come from a curious line of domestic curators: my grandmother’s house was close to magical to me. Clocks chimed and clanged resoundingly, and from every wall of every room it seemed. A secret back staircase enchanted, and led to a suite of rooms back then they called “the maid’s quarters.” (Young girls looking to escape the Kentucky hills crossed the Ohio to find their way in Cincinnati—Queen City, the City of Seven Hills.) And then there was my interior-decorator uncle whose jewel box of a historic home in Louisville’s Old Town might have been mistaken for a museum of finery gathered round the globe. He’s the uncle we knew to be a bachelor, the one who trekked to India and Thailand, to London, Paris, and Rome, and came home with wild tales and treasure troves, as chief buyer for the grande-dame department store in the town so named for the tragic king, Louis Seize.
My own mother, being of minimalist disposition, dispensed with all the frippery and froufrou. She was meat-and-potatoes practical, and had no need for fleur-de-lis, brocade, or dangling-crystal chandelier. (God’s glory for her was in the woods or prairie, where she romped amid the tallgrass and scanned the sky for birds.) Her decidedly austere persuasions did not deter me; more likely, they made me all the more intent on making home a pinpoint on the map that soothed the deepest, driest parts of me.
Home to me is the one place where we seed our dreams, root our jangled souls, and somehow miraculously find the stuff to face another day.
And if I can make that happen for the pair I’ve borne and brought into this world, well, then I’ll declare a day unearthing the contents of a cardboard box a day more than worth all the double-pumping of my heart, the frazzles of my hair, and the nicks and cuts now emblazoned up and down my shins, my arms, my hands.
Home, it seems, is where I’ve been lost and found.
What does home mean to you? What do you find there? And how did you get there?
I cannot let this somber, somber day pass without bending my knees, and dropping to the holy ground, pouring out my heart in holy prayer. A soul I love—will always love—lost her papa on this day, when the North Tower of the mighty pair collapsed. For her, for every someone who’s lived the last quarter century with a collapsed place in their heart, I hold you tight this day, and pray that love—that mighty, ineffable force—cocoons you today and every day you bear the grief of inexplicable loss. And for the souls of the 2,977 who perished in Lower Manhattan, Shanksville, and Arlington, Virginia, might we lift up this dark, dark day by bringing any shard of light to where shadow falls among us.