I made a nostalgic tour of my hometown in late October this year. Getting to go inside of the house that my parents owned from 1962-1979 was a highlight of that tour. One of my childhood friends asked a logical question: “Why the fascination with the house on Little Street and not the one you lived in from age 4-16?” I couldn’t adequately answer and the question continued to haunt me.
I recently read The Longing for Home by Frederick Buechner and found some clues to why that particular house still holds my interest. What makes a house a home for me has to do with history—my own and that of the house. Buechner starts his book with the metaphor of time and tide. Time that moves us ever farther from shore into the depths and away to an unseen horizon and the tide that rhythmically returns us again and again to touch the shore from where we came.
My strong compulsion to return repeatedly to my hometown seems odd to a lot of people. I’m not sure I understand the draw either, but I know that my time there is a touchstone. I’m reminded of who I was and where I came from. My time there isn’t an attempt to return to my youth, but a simple review of my younger selves. I remember events when I’m cued by locations. I think “you foolish girl,” or “how brave,” or “I remember that stretch of loneliness.” The memories flash by and I attend to the previous versions of myself like you would focus intently on a grandchild with your face beaming affection.
The house on Little Street holds more memories of the person I was becoming than the house where I spent my childhood. There are memories in the Little Street house of my high school years. My wedding showers were held in that dining room. I took my babies back to that house. I helped host big celebrations. I watched my siblings grow up there. My parents aged. The house was the backdrop for so much change. It was always full and noisy and chaotic. It held all the people I loved before we all went our own ways.
My sense of home includes lots of people and moving parts, an energy fueled by relationships. There were four places that I lived in entirely alone: my first apartment after my divorce, the townhouse that I rented in North Carolina, the first house that I purchased on my own in Delaware, the house I bought in Texas before I re-married. They were houses—not homes—showcases that I put together like the doll houses from my youth. I slept there, cooked, cleaned and occasionally entertained, but not much real living happened there. Nothing was ever out of place. The rooms were always quiet. The houses could pass as model homes.
I knew even then that those houses were temporary stops on a particularly confusing journey during the ten years that I was divorced. I never really felt at home in any of them. I can remember rooms and furniture, but I can’t recall a single spot in any of them where I truly relaxed. A home, for me, has to hold relationships and witness change over time. It’s a place where you can be yourself—imperfect, incomplete and messy.
I think that the house on Little Street was special because it was old and home to the stories of multiple families. There was history before we moved in and decades of history after my parents left. I saw it as a container that reflected the history of the hometown that I loved.
My research revealed that the probable builder was a man who managed a window glass plant, directed a military drill team that toured Europe and homesteaded in Wyoming before selling the house. The next owner was a bank president who remodeled the house for his bride. They held cultural events in the house. His widow sold the house thirty years later to a couple who divided the house into apartments during WWII. They sold it to my parents who remodeled and then sold the house to a local doctor who again remodeled and expanded the footprint. He sold the house to a local dentist who lived there for 31 years. He and his wife are ready to sell again having recently retired. I wonder who will be next and hope that they care for the house. I wonder what new stories will happen there.
What makes a house a home? For me, it is a sense of belonging, of permanence, the promise of continuity, an accumulation of life, love. Buechner says it better: “…each of our stories turns out to be a story of us all, and the home we long for has in all likelihood been home to theirs whose names we don’t even know and will be home again to still others when the ever-rolling stream of things has long since borne us away.”
Time and tide. It gives me comfort knowing that my story is added to many within that house in that small town.