It always took work to get me out of the house growing up. There was no place I’d rather be than curled up beside our fireplace with a book and cup of tea in the winter—or outside on the swing (with that same book) on a summer’s evening. Home was my place of rest, my sanctuary.

And our home really felt like a magical place: Mom has always had a knack for creating cozy, beautiful spaces. It was surrounded by rosebushes, with old books on the shelves, brightly lit rooms, hot oatmeal and coffee for breakfast on cold winter mornings. A friend recently told me, “Your house always had a peace about it that I envied.” It’s a peace that I believe had a spiritual dimension to it, as well as a physical one—which makes it only harder to replicate.

Yet there came a point when I realized that my “home” was no longer the home I grew up in. Though I’ve been in Virginia for over six and a half years now, the transformation has been quite recent. There was a time when I would have still called my parents’ 1930s brick house in Idaho “home.” Not on purpose—it would just slip off my tongue. “I’m visiting home,” or “we’re going home for the holidays.”

My husband and I have now lived in Alexandria for two and a half years. In that time, we’ve found our favorite coffee shops, met neighbors, walked our dog along numerous trails and streets, frequented the local farmers’ market. We’ve planted a garden, painted the kitchen, decorated a little nursery that’s soon to be filled with a new life.

And as I sit in this quiet room—sunshine spilling across wood floors, breeze wafting through open windows—I know. This has become home, a place of rest and joyful living. So it makes me wonder: when does a place become a “home”? How does that transformation happen? There seem to be a few things that have built this change:

First, a home is a place where you build a rhythm. It’s a place in which you spend enough consistent time to build a presence, a pattern. The more you commute out of your place of residence, the less chance it has of becoming a home. You have to invest yourself—time and body—in it. You have to understand its seasons.

I always think of the passage in The Return of the King where Sam is reminiscing to Frodo about the Shire. He says, “It’ll be spring soon. And the orchards will be in blossom. And the birds will be nesting in the hazel thicket. And they’ll be sowing the summer barley in the lower fields… and eating the first of the strawberries with cream. Do you remember the taste of strawberries?” Sam knows the Shire, its patterns and rhythms, to the point where he can predict them without being present. There is always a piece of him there, embedded from years of service and love.

There have to be whole days where you seep in a place’s presence, bury yourself in its projects, take in its colors and character. It has to be a place whose ethos you come to know and love through regular living and investing. A place where you scrub the floors, fill the kitchen with smells of cooking and baking, spend hours poring over books or work projects. The more time spent in that space, the more you develop a sense of its character, its feel. You discover what it needs in order to more fully develop its potential, in order to reach its form (if it’s alright to use a Platonic idea to describe the decorating and building of a home).

Second, you have to seek the good of your home—and the good of the land surrounding it. This often means giving up something: time, energy, most often money. It means investing in your local community, discovering its cares and concerns. It means getting to know your neighbors, at least a little, and seeking to offer them community (and to accept that community in return). It means taking care of the leaky roof, shabby yard, dying plants. It means weekends of raking leaves and planting trees, repairing roofs and replacing windows. It means town hall meetings, sometimes, or researching the local elections before you go to the ballot box. It means cultivating a sense of pride and warmth toward your neighborhood, your town—along with a healthy understanding of its weaknesses and flaws.

It is, in a sense, the art of “husbandry”: an art described by Wendell Berry in one of his essays as “the name of all the practices that sustain life by connecting us conservingly to our places and our world; it is the art of keeping tied all the strands in the living network that sustains us.” It’s not just about productivity, fame, or profit—husbandry is about building a web of life within a place, cultivating it and helping it flourish.

Which connects to the third point or idea: that a home must be full of life and living things. A sterile house—wiped clean of earth and plant, animal and person—seems to be lacking a feeling of “home.” There’s something about the house that’s got dust bunnies in the corners, a cat or dog curled up in a spot of sunshine on the floor. Or the house that’s spotted all over with ivies and ferns, pots of herbs and grasses.

Yet even better is the house that nearly rattles with the sounds of laughter and joy—with the chaos and clamor of people, old and young. With the sound of people breaking bread together around the dinner table, reacting passionately to Sunday football games, punctuated with the sounds of children laughing (or screaming), the pitter-pat of their eager feet. It needn’t be a perfect house, or an immaculately kept house. The house that’s lived in, and full of life, reverberates with love and joy in a unique way. 

As Shauna Niequist puts it in her book Bread and Wine, “What people are craving isn’t perfection. People aren’t longing to be impressed; they’re longing to feel like they’re home. If you create a space full of love and character and creativity and soul, they’ll take off their shoes and curl up with gratitude and rest, no matter how small, no matter how undone, no matter how odd.”

Finally, a home must be filled with stories and memories. This goes back to the idea that time spent in a place is vital to building a sense of home. One of the reasons Idaho was “home” for so long was because it held my most deeply-cherished memories: my grandmother reading aloud to my sister and me until we fell asleep. Great-grandfather telling stories about his childhood, driving a four-horse team and digging ditches, of his wife’s beautiful singing voice and immaculate hospitality. Christmas evenings spent reading Grimm’s Fairy Tales by the crackling fire. Nighttime stargazing with my sister and father. Playing “Narnia” with my brothers, hiding in the big wardrobe in one of the spare rooms. Working on math homework in my dad’s office, or helping my mom can peaches late in the summer. Simple things that built a fabric of memories and belonging.

In Marilynne Robinson’s Home, protagonist Glory considers an important memory from her childhood—a ritual that characterized her early days:

How to announce the return of comfort and well-being except by cooking something fragrant. That is what her mother always did. After every calamity of any significance she would fill the atmosphere of the house with the smell of cinnamon rolls or brownies, with chicken and dumplings, and it would mean, This house has a soul that loves us all, no matter what. It would mean peace if they had fought and amnesty if they had been in trouble. It had meant, You can come down to dinner now, and no one will say a thing to bother you, unless you have forgotten to wash your hands. And her father would offer the grace, inevitable with minor variations, thanking the Lord for all the wonderful faces he saw around his table.

These are the memories that turn a house into home.

The memories are still being built here. It’s a new home, at least to us, and we have countless stories to uncover. But arriving home from work to the smell of my husband’s freshly baked bread or sweet rolls, to a happy puppy who covers my face in kisses, to flickering candles and a thick book full of mystery—these are the little things that have slowly built character and belonging here. Harvesting jalapeños and rosemary from the garden, hanging new pictures, growing a regular rhythm of guests and visitors: as we fill this place with new stories and new lives, I know it will continue to delve its roots deep into our hearts. It’s possible to have secondary homes, and Idaho will always be that for me—with its own sense of peace and joy, its own set of rhythms. But this place, too, has become home, and it’s where I feel my new stories and memories brewing.

Link : http://www.theamericanconservative.com/olmstead/when-a-house-becomes-home/