Architecture of HomeFrom Sears to Frank Lloyd Wright, the physical architecture of home is constantly evolving.Is home a new luxury apartment, a farm or homestead, or a cookie cutter in a subdivision? Is your home lousy with pet hair or immaculately tidy? Is it an echo chamber or does it ring loud with the laughter of children. Does your family extend beyond the nuclear or is it a tight-knit group of three?Tell us what your home is built of. What makes a house a home?
They say a house stores history and, if that’s true, mine would have stories to tell. The kind of stories you stumble upon on a warm, sunny afternoon. The kind you park yourself on the front porch for, deciding to stay awhile to hear. The kind that make you laugh from deep in your belly and the kind that bring you to tears. I am the ancient builder of my life. My post and lintel foundation has been carefully crafted by those who have gone before me: a grandmother, a friend, a passerby. A small town, a sibling, a book passed from hand-to-hand.
You see, I call myself a city girl these days, but I’ll always be a rural kid at heart. Steering wheel waves and front porch smiles. Casseroles and morning coffee. My Kansas town raised me, a pillar of who I am today. I didn’t know how impactful that little house on the prairie had been until I moved away from it. When I was in my twenties, I got married, packed everything I owned, and moved to the city—the forsaken land of my people. I was nervous to live in such a big place where everything would be so entirely different. Colder, harder, lonelier.
The thing about building home is that it doesn’t happen all at once. It’s all these tiny, little pieces that add up over time. You begin with the foundation, the things that shape you: city band and sledding hills. Vinyl years and Tigersharks. Tree forts and bike rides. Start with the good bones and after that, you can slowly build out the pillars around you. You make different rooms where you can be a different iteration of yourself, switching back and forth between them. It wouldn’t be a home unless there’s at least one crumbling thing that’s always in need of attention. There’s a beauty in the things you surround yourself with: throw pillows and paint colors. Bookshelves and baubles. But what makes a house a home is the people you let into it.
Home in the city surprised me. It came with the barista down the road who worried when I didn't make my regular visit. It came with a watering of flowers because the neighbor passed by and "saw those plants could use a drink". It came with the dogs we walk every night becoming the stars of the neighborhood.
And I realized I had become the architect of my own home. I was, slowly, building something around me. A smile here. A wave there. A collection of people who, the more I got to know them, made my own house more beautiful to live in. I gained reason, rhyme, and meaning to my humble life in the city. An unconscious choice, built from a foundation of prairie life, to let my roots quietly plant down and grow, reaching out to the corners of my neighborhood.
I know every view from this home I’ve built: the sunrises, front porches, belly laughs and streaming tears. Where the deer and the antelope play, where the air is pure, where the zephyrs are free.
Some will say you can’t go back home, but I know that’s not the truth. Home is in the western sky, the Sunday naps, the still-warm cookies.
Home is on the range.
Home is in you.
Home is where you build it.
And, there’s no place like good bones.
