Home - 047
Photograph from "The Golden City" series by Mimi Plumb
At Home
Last week we celebrated our first anniversary living in our house.
This is the 12th place I've called home. In apartments past, all it seemed to take was a fresh coat of paint and a trip to IKEA and everything starts to feel mine.
Like home.
But this house is different. We've spent hours and hours looking at furniture and mirrors, carpeting and art. I've fixed cracks and leaks, painted rooms, ate meals, and hosted guests.
Only in the last few weeks I've noticed it's just starting to feel like home.
Why has it taken a year plus?
This month I'm thinking about home. What makes a house a home, looking for and finding the right one, and the cycles we repeat.
Come on in.
Take your shoes off.
Make yourself at home.
The Smell of Homehome
In college, when I would fly back to visit my parents, I was going home.
College is temporary, so it makes sense that where I live isn't home.
But I haven't called Chicago home for more than half my life. I'm comfortable there, and have loyalty, but it doesn't feel like my home anymore.
Here’s the thing. When I go back to my parents house, it smells. Not bad. It just, y’know, has a smell.
My recent theory is:
When I stop noticing the smell, I'm home.
What is that smell?
It's all my stuff– the yellowing pages of my books and unlit candles.
It's last night's dinner.
It's radiator heat and age that has seeped into the carpet and floors.
It's the hint of pine that my jacket brings inside and grass that tracks in with my shoes.
It's my deodorant, detergent, shampoo, moisturizer and hair pomade that, when I think about it, are all unique to me (what are the odds that someone has the same exact combination?).
And it's my friends and family who visit and leave some of theirs behind too.
My house smells and I love it. (Yours does too.)
I love it most of all because I don't notice it.
And that makes it feel like home.
Finally.
Illustration by Mason London
Who Wants a 10?
The most entertaining app for a thirtysomething is definitely Zillow.
The house hunting game can be thrilling.
What can $400k get you in Illinois? What can $2M get you in Manhattan?
Since spending all of our money on this house, we still dabble.
We go to friends' houses and then look up how much they paid. We drive by newly renovated houses and imagine doing that to our house. We look at newly listed properties and gawk at fireplaces in the bathroom and garages turned into tiny houses or art studios or fully-decorated bars.
As I look at some of these, I find myself playing by familiar rules.
In my dating years, one of the rules I had for myself was "never date a 10."
(Like a surface-level, should-be-on-a-magazine-cover 10. Someone that people cross a room for.)
In my head, these 10s have impossibly high demands because they can. Everyone wants to please them.
Therefore, they also never had to develop personality, opinions, interests, or hobbies. Hot but boring.
My favorite people– my wife being at the top of the list–have dynamic personalities, strong opinions, and varied interests that make spending time with them endlessly fun, engaging, and interesting.
The longer I settle into my own house and compare it to the others, I'm actually drawn to the imperfections, details, and the character of our house.
I love the old herringbone pattern in the hardwood floors. I love the little throughway to the kitchen at the bottom of the stairs. I love the airplane bathroom-sized powder room off the kitchen and the tree in the backyard that looks like a leaf fountain.
It might be that I'm justifying the fact that I never could get a 10.
But in my experience, the people who do get a 10– in a partner, a job, or a house– are expecting an 11.
It's not that a 10 isn't desirable.
I just prefer a little more character.
Amateur Home Schooling
#Adulting is the idea that simply by performing a collection of tasks, we can be mature functional adults. The self-deprecating term makes us seem like we're still figuring out what it means to be an adult.
It creates distance from all the other "actual" adults who seem to have learned how to do this already.
But no one learns how to be an adult in school.
As a millennial and a former child, I know this makes great conversation fodder.
We wish we had learned:
budgeting and taxes instead of trigonometry.
car maintenance instead of Shakespeare.
navigating relationships could have been central to, y'know, the subject of social studies.
And now as a parent, my job is to teach all the things my kids will never learn in school.
Things like resilience, emotional intelligence, self-knowledge, confidence, empathy, generosity, creativity...
So whether I like it or not, I'm homeschooling my kids.
Literally, I need to teach two people how to live a good life.
...As if I have it all figured out already.
That's the challenge of parenting: I have to teach while I'm still figuring it out myself.
Maybe the lesson here is that I have more figured out than I think.
That #adulting is just naming that we feel like a fraud because we're still learning.
But everyone else is, too.
We don't get the privilege of learning everything and then teaching afterwards.
We're all learning on the job.
Trying to Become Handy
Home used to be just a place to put my stuff.
Now it's a whole new list of tasks and responsibilities.
When we bought it, we took on the job of keeping it alive.
To keep the house alive, I'm learning to become more handy.
Taking apart the drier or flushing out the steam boiler, planting flowers and weeding, assembling furniture and fixing leaks.
I'm actually enjoying it.
One, I get to figure out the problem, understand the mechanics and learn something new.
Two, I get to use my hands, which in the age of knowledge work and screens, is rewarding in itself.
Three, I'm saving money by doing it myself.
Fourth and may most importantly, I'm seeking to be more useful to my family.
If we're going to be here for the next 30 years, a lot will change.
We will change. And in keeping it alive, our home must change with us.
Some days, I want to be done:
I want to be finished with all the work.
to have a house that once and for all is clean and will stay clean.
I want to be settled in.
But we'll be here for the next 30 years, so what's the rush?
__________
Our work continues.
Thank you so much for reading and thinking about my Email Refrigerator.
I appreciate that you've taken some time with me this week.
Feel free to respond with any thoughts this brought up. Or share with a friend who might enjoy it.
Last and most importantly, {{Firstname}}, don't forget to vote.
Our collective home needs your voice.
With gratitude,
Jake
If this is your first time getting the Email Refrigerator and you want more, sign up here.
Read all the other Email Refrigerators here
Not sparking joy? No hard feelings. Just opt out here.