A House Remembered

          Recently I returned to my hometown where one of my previous homes was on the market.  I arranged a ‘walk through’.  This gray stucco bungalow was home to my first marriage and the raising of our children.  It was in a neighborhood where parents of similar values were also 'growing up' with their children.  The children went to the same school making friendships easy and natural among the families.  Celebrations and fun times brought us together - as did caring and helping each other in the tough times.

          As I entered the house, all the memories of ‘living’ there flooded back.  Every cell of my body was alive with remembering:  the hard work and love we rubbed into every corner, the many people who joined us for a visit or a long stay, the patterns of the day, adding children to our lives, the tasks and joys invited by each season, celebrating birthdays and the holidays, the struggles of life.  All brought smiles and a sense of completion.  This house was about motherhood and shared parenting.

          Caught up in memories and old times, I decided to drive by all the homes I had lived in.  My childhood home was located across from the elementary school.  Once gray with white trim, I noticed on this visit that it is now blue and the front of the house has a new bay window. Once again stories came flooding in to join me.  Years earlier my father and I had the opportunity to walk through this home when it was up for sale.  I remember that he was amazed that so many of the built-ins he designed for our family’s needs were still in place.  I was amazed by how small the rooms and the backyard seemed to be.  The life I remember living there was so LARGE, how could it all have fit into these spaces? This house was all about growing up - learning who I was as a member of a family, as a girl, and about living in the world around me.

          When I was in high school my family built a home high on a bluff overlooking the Cedar River.  This serene location provided a calming place for the tumultuous years of questioning oneself, the dating scene, the learnings associated with first jobs, and taking off for college.  These were also the years of my mother’s battle with cancer which changed our family structure and way of being. This house was a place for friends to gather – overnights, boy/girl parties, and bringing home a ‘date’.  This was also the home of an emerging independence- a readiness to leave home and strike out on my own.  This house was about realizing the responsibility and importance of my own journey and seizing the opportunities.

          Not only was this town a place where I grew up, it was a place I returned to after working in another state as a single professional woman.  My stay was intended to be temporary so I rented an apartment in the upper floor of an old house - reminding me of Mary Tyler Moore’s apartment!  Within months I met my husband - we married and began a life together in this very same apartment.  In this space I learned how two people can 'live life' so differently.  Assumptions about simple everyday tasks (Oh – so this is how you clean up the kitchen.), decisions on how to decorate our mutual space (But this is from my family), and ways to entertain (You expect me to plan it all?) were suddenly noticed which produced new conversations and compromises. This little apartment provided the space for many negotiations and new ways of living together from that time forward.  This place was about learning to create HOME with another. 

          Before long the apartment did not provide enough space for our expanding lives.  We wanted more space to live – a dog, a yard! A two story, built in the early 1950’s, became our first HOUSE.  While only in this house for a year, it taught us how to be a homeowner and what was involved in meeting the needs of a house.  The walls required painting, the kitchen counters were replaced, and the out of control yard demanded a disciplined plan and execution. The hours spent after work and on weekends belonged to ‘the house.’  This house invited my repair and caretaking skills a chance to show up, be exercised, improved, and frequently to be questioned. 

         

  As I continued to drive around my hometown, noticing what was familiar and what was different,  I found myself in front of the last house that I called home in this community.  What is the perfect house for a newly divorced woman?  One that provides grace and healing! I was consumed by the consequences of leaving my marriage, challenged and impassioned by my work, and awakened by ‘this time in life’. The rooms of this house hugged each other, natural light entered in just the right places, the 1930's design brought smiles and joy. This house welcomed me into a safe space to reflect and ponder. This house held my ‘becoming’ into the second half of life.

        Truman Capote wrote in The Grass Harp, “If you sweep a house, and tend its fires and fill its stove, and there is love in you all the years you are doing this, then you and that house are married, that house is yours.”  Each of the houses I have lived in has been well tended and well loved. I have cared for them and they have provided a space for me to learn and grow myself awake. Right now I am living in my 15th 'home' while contemplating the next.  Each house has held a growing season of my life. Each house has been a marriage of sorts - a give and take, for better for worse.  Each house has truly been mine for it has held the stories of my becoming. For them all - I am so grateful.

        And now I wonder about you and your HOUSES and HOMES.  What stories do your houses have to tell?? In what places have you lived the seasons of your life?  Do tell!

Check out the new Spatial Impact website that focuses on church spaces. 

(www.spatialimpact.com)