Home Sweet Home

For Christmas my sister gave the family photos from her wedding this past summer. My father received his in a frame and on Christmas morning we considered where the photo should be hung. Sitting in the living room, we were surrounded on two sides by blank walls, plenty of space to hang the photo.

“Maybe over there?” my dad indicated one of the blank spaces.

“Maybe,” I shrugged noncommittally.

After a while my dad said, “Or we could wait until Meredith comes out at Spring Break and let her tell us where to hang it.”

Immediately I nodded. “Yeah, good idea.”

My sister has this innate ability to decorate a home. She knows on which wall a photo will look its best. She knows all about curtains and the accompanying hardware. She can pick out paint colors for an entire house in about forty-five minutes. It is in her; she just knows what looks good.

This is an ability she inherited from my mother. I have never known my mother to prevaricate when asked how she wants furniture set up, what paint color she wants, or what drawer any given kitchen gadget should live in. She doesn’t wonder about such things; she knows.

The annoying thing about both of them and their innate homemaking ability is that they are always right. Any space they touch immediately feels more like a home. And any home of theirs that I have ever entered also has that feeling: this is a home. Wherever my sister has lived has felt like her; likewise with my mother. As their child/sibling I find this a great comfort. Walking into the house of my mother or my sister, wherever that may be, is like going home. These places are reliably clean, beautifully decorated, comfortably furnished, smell nice, and contain a cozy element of some kind, generally a dog to snuggle with.

My dad spent the majority of his adult life living in houses owned by other people, namely the various churches to which he was appointed as pastor. Parsonage living is an experience, to say the least. A parsonage is part of a pastor’s compensation and is to be treated as the pastor’s private residence during the duration of their appointment. Despite this, a parsonage never truly feels like a private residence. Depending on the congregation, this may be for any number of reasons. People may feel that because it is a church owned house they are at liberty to stop by at any time without giving any notice. (Incorrect.) When the pastor is seeking repairs to something in the home, they may question why the repairs are needed. (Because an open septic pool in the front yard seems dangerous for a family with young children, or any family for that matter.) Old furniture donated to the church often ends up in the parsonage as “new” furniture for the pastor’s family. (Thank you, we’ve been dying for a sofa upholstered in brocade that smells like the 1970s.)

In general people are not as bad as all that and they leave you to your own devices, but as a resident in a parsonage you’re never quite at full liberty to use the house exactly as you please. It can be hard to feel at home. We did manage to make the best of parsonage living and we always had what we needed, but the result was that when my dad retired and bought his first home, he had no idea what his sense of style was. As he says, his style had always been OPS: Other People’s Shit. And it’s true! He lived in a parsonage and between the church-provided furniture and the furniture inherited from family, he never really bought anything for himself. A new, empty house posed quite the dilemma.

Enter Meredith. Over Thanksgiving in 2021 Meredith flew in and within hours had ideas for curtains, paint colors, furniture distribution, and so on. She talked to our dad to get a feel for what he wanted (and what he didn’t want) and took it from there. Dad and I just took notes and did as instructed, painting walls and woodwork, replacing switch plates and taking down ceiling fans. So it came to be that when Daddy officially moved in June of 2022, the house was already feeling quite homey.

To be fair, though, there are major pieces of the homey feeling at Dad’s house that has nothing to do with the color of the walls. Dad’s kitchen is always clean, as are the bathrooms. The temperature is always comfortable. There are always clean towels and beds made with hospital corners (although they would more accurately be called Navy corners from Dad’s time at SUNY Maritime). In the mornings there is coffee and cereal and some kind of cut up fruit. The furniture was primarily inherited from family and the previous owners of the house, and the clock on the living room wall ticks loudly, just as it did when it hung in Nana and Pop-pop’s house. All of these elements together make the place feel like home; like Daddy’s house.

Despite living my thirty six years under the influence of these people, I’ve never been very good at making myself a home. For me it’s more like cultivating a habitat or building a nest, if I’m honest. Ever since high school I have made my mark on a space by flinging about laundry with reckless abandon, leaving items in piles instead of putting them away properly, rarely making the bed, and allowing dust bunnies to build up until they would more accurately be termed dust tumbleweeds. My perennial joke is that I can always make myself comfortable with just some torn up paper towels and a water dish in the corner like a hamster.

I have lived in my current apartment for almost six years. Over that time the furniture has gone through several configurations and I’ve even swapped my bedroom and my living room. Both Mom and Meredith have visited and helped to get me set up (i.e. cleaned the place, made curtains, given me ideas for organizing). I am exceedingly grateful for their assistance because although I am an adult human, I just don’t have it in me to decide where the photos should hang or what cabinet the blender belongs in.

But some things about my apartment are pure me, incurable no matter how much advice my family bestows. I make my bed fully only on the days that I change the sheets. I straighten things occasionally so they don’t fall off the bed, but otherwise I am content to crawl under the unmade heap of blankets. There are piles everywhere: mail, books (both read and unread), coins to be sorted into my collection, personal documents that need to be filed. Tchotchkes abound and are covered in a gentle coating of dust, because moving all of the tchotchkes to dust seems like the biggest waste of time to me. While the bulk of the laundry gets put away these days, there is always a stack of clean clothing on top of my dresser. Primarily the pile is made up of the clothes I intend to wear soon, but I also tend to leave my bras stacked up there as well, because stuffing them into their designated drawer just seems mean. Nothing looks so defeated as a bra stuffed into a too small drawer.

I vacuum regularly and keep the kitchen and bathroom clean. I don’t let dishes sit in the sink overnight except for on Fridays when I give myself a little break from dishwashing. And I do sometimes dust, but not nearly enough by the family standard.

For all of these reasons, my apartment feels different than the other homes in my family. For a long time it was where I lived, but didn’t feel like home. Until recently.

Last week I was driving home from my most recent visit to my mom’s house in Iowa. On the second day of the trip I was feeling sad for a variety of reasons, mostly the end of the holiday and return to normal life. The sadness was strong enough that it broke through the stubborn wall built up by the Zoloft and I actually cried through about a quarter of Ohio. As I drove and wallowed in my sadness my thought was, “I want to go home.” And what I meant was that I wanted to be at my home: my apartment with its dust and industrial carpet and stacks of clutter. I realized that trips to Daddy’s Cape Cod, Mom’s log cabin, or Meredith’s little box of a house are now truly more like a vacation than going home. At their places I feel safe and loved and welcome and I love that. But home to me is now my place, a home I built by accident having made no real attempt to make it feel like anything other than “where I live for now”.

I have a television in my living room, but most nights I watch tv on my computer in my bed. (I know it’s bad for my sleep. I don’t care.) I set up the computer on the pillow next to mine facing my side of the bed so that I can see it straight on when I lay on my side. (Picture it as if I were enjoying a pillow talk conversation with my husband, gazing adoringly into his face only instead of a face, it’s a screen, and instead of a conversation, it’s an episode of Breaking Bad.) This is how I was set up last night when the cat jumped up on the bed. As only cats can, he gingerly walked right into the middle of the nest I had made for myself and settled in, curling up between my chest and the computer. He was soon asleep and I followed not long afterwards, nestled safely in my home on a little side street in South Orange with my little roommate by my side.