(This is a repost, most of it, of a post I did in March of 2012 when hardly anyone was following my blog. I think of my dream house periodically, maybe adding a thing here or there, and decided I wanted to repost it with one original photo and a few more. What is the house of your heart like? Where would it be? I’d love to hear about it in the comment section if you have the time. I always like to hear from you.)
The house of my heart has:
I enter the land of no internet tomorrow as I board the plane to visit my parents in Arizona. Of course there is internet, but to get it, I have to go to the nearby library or a Starbucks which I’ll do, but not for long each day. This will be family time and I intend to enjoy it. I’ll be blogging every day but won’t be able to get much reading done, so apologies in advance. The almost-two weeks I’ll be there will fly by all too quickly but will be fun, even while I’ll miss Bill.
For those of you not familiar with Friday Fictioneers, a weekly photo prompt serves as the springing-off place of a story of 100 words. Sounds easy, but it ain’t necessarily so. You’re welcome to join by going to the home page or just read any other stories by clicking on the link at the end of mine. Warning!! It’s very addictive.
My story this week is non-fiction. We sold our house at the end of August and, in a week, moved from the home we’d lived in for 28 of our 29 married years. When we put the house on the market, I emailed the realtor once about something at “our home.” He told me to think of it now as a house, not a home, that you sell a house. “Home” has an emotional connection it’s best you to try to avoid when selling. This story springs somewhat from his wise words.
copyright Dawn at Tales from the Motherland
A House is Not A Home
We found it accidentally shortly after our marriage. Light streamed in through over-sized windows, sixties-hued carpet concealed hardwood floors, the kitchen sported forest-service green linoleum. It seemed as if we could never fill the space.
Over twenty-eight years, we chose furniture, gloried in the light, decorated, planted, mowed, set up bird feeders, fostered pit bulls, hosted friends, enjoyed two daughters. The space filled with laughter, learning and love. House morphed into home.
When the movers left, light shone in, floors glowed, the paint was perfect. Memory-filled house, no longer a home, waited emptily.
We drove away.
We didn’t look back.
“If you want a golden rule that will fit everything, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”
William Morris (British craftsman, designer and poet, whose designs generated the Arts and Crafts Movement in England. 1834-1896)
I took William Morris’ stricture to mind recently when looking for a new shower curtain. This is the result. Not only does it make the bathroom look great,(and it wasn’t more costly than most of the alternatives), it gives me pleasure every time I see it.
I hope you have things like this in your life. If so, take the time today to enjoy them. If not, keep your eyes and heart open for them.
The house of my heart has:
• a library, where all my hundreds of books are on shelves so I can see them and easily access them without digging through boxes in the attic. The library has chairs that invite me to curl up and read, plenty of light (both artificial and natural), maybe even a window seat. It will probably have my laptop, a printer, etc…the technological minutia of today’s day-to-day living, a wonderful desk to store interesting pens, pencils and markers and gorgeous paper (plus stamps for things that still will be sent “regular” mail.)
• a porch. A big porch. A place with outdoor furniture where I can sit in the morning with my cup of tea, greet the day (or my neighbors or both), or listen to all the sounds that make up silence in the way that all colors make either white or black, depending if you add all colors of light (which will make white) or all colors of paint (which will make something approaching black.) A place where, if my house is near other people, I can see them, talk to them, invite them over, set food and drink out for them and get to know them.
• a clothesline. I want my clothes to smell like sunshine in the summer and my towels, sheets and pillowcases to invite noses into them. My dryer will appreciate the break. Not convinced of the fun of hanging things out in winter and breaking ice off them, though.
• large windows, suitably insulated, easy to open to welcome in the scents of summer, beautifully framed indoors by some sort of “window treatments” and on the outside, by real shutters that I can reach out and close at night, French-style. Provencal colors would be lovely for them. The sun will pour into the house on sunny days, into every room, nook and cranny.
• a large kitchen that’s the heart of the home, maybe a kitchen-dining room. Either way, I’ll be able to look outside while eating, gazing at the garden, trees, fruit trees and flowers. In the yard of my heart, there will be flowers to bring inside and food to eat. There might be chickens, both for eggs and for their ecological effect. There will also be a kitchen garden outside the patio doors, a patio with a grill, pots filled with herbs, chairs around a table, protected, when needed, by an umbrella.
• ceiling fans in all the rooms, solar panels, skylights, and a solarium as well as a green house. There’s a wood-burning stove that heats much of, or all of, the house. The gutters end in rain barrels and the garden has a drip system. In one corner, you’ll find the compost pile.
• green roofs. Or maybe not, since after having a flat roof with water problems for a time, I swore our next house would have roofs so steep the crampons would be needed to work on them. But green roofs intrigue me as do straw bale homes, adobe homes and homes built partly into a hill.
• if not a basement and attic, then plenty of storage space. A pantry and/or a cellar.
• a dog, probably a rescue pit bull, to act as official welcome-er.
Whatever it has, the house of my heart will be filled with love, friendship, a sense of peace and community, good food, two or three-hour meals with friends and family and the love of God. The house of my heart will be a home as well.
(Thank you for permission to use the lovely photo [on the right] of a Provencal home to Barbara van Zanten-Stolarski of Europa Photogenica, unique photo tours to unusual places, at www.europaphotogenica.com.)
This, that and the other thing 