How to See a Home

Kala Shute

2018

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In elementary school, the teacher tells you to draw pictures of your house causing these structural images to come to mind like the kitchen, the family room, your bedroom, the yard where you and your siblings play. It wasn’t until I was older that my memories and adventures turned the skeletons of my vacant house, into the heart of my merry home. Walking into the house, seeing the pale, lifeless walls, glancing at the empty room, weighing the heavy appliances with your eyes and imagining each and every possession to fill each cold space. My address was where you found me and the 4 digits of black paint on the curb filled the first line of my elementary school “my house, my city, my world!” project. There was the tall brick box that held the wood and fire to heat the house when the warmth escaped the season, found in front of the ugly green couch all lumpy and torn, stained and broken. The kitchen was home to endless dirty dishes and dinner seats left empty by busy students, rather filled with boxes of dishes from the “old house” that were never unpacked, and using paper plates instead; The laundry room, yet another hollow chamber of chores, where corners were prone to collecting dust and how the handyman became a “frequent flyer”. The grass grows with yellow patches, the toys get dirty, and the play structure begins to rust in the humid summer air behind the house; Lastly the “don’t touch it!” room, where the “grown-up” furniture filled the smallest space in the house, and where mom slept after a long day at work.

As each year passed, repeating my family's holiday traditions, meeting new people, growing closer to my friends, learning from my experiences and looking back on each and every memory, I began to see my house told the stories of my life. My address was my childhood, the location of my growth and development of my family, my memories, my good and bad times. The fireplace was where marshmallows caught on fire, where the crackles of wood teased Santa's arrival, and where the redness on my cheeks from crisp, cold nights were healed; The green couch was the magic spot where I teleported to after falling asleep in the car, where the new kittens dulled their claws, and where I called it a night after completing that damn biology paper; The kitchen was a factory of warm scents of pumpkin, sugar, apples, cinnamon, and where the spilled flour exposed our little footprints on the floor, after learning to lick the spoon of course.  The laundry room was where mama got the warm towels to wrap me up in after my bath and where the fresh scent of downy drifted me off to sleep in my blankets, where I learned to fold and that white and red don’t mix; The yellow spots were the aftermath of a good day on the slip n’ slide or leaving the blow up pool out for too long, the green grass pillow for my head when I looked at the stars. Mom’s bed was the coziest, monster free zone, where I spent my sickest nights getting better even if she got sick the next day. A house is like a human, it has a skeleton that holds it up, but it can’t be alive without a heart and a soul.

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"Home is the nicest word there is."

-Laura Ingalls Wilder

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