Home is where your people are
not your stuff
Today’s piece is part of a new series including , , Michael Mohr of , , and me. In the past, we’ve written about trust, fatherhood, recovery, and work. This week, all of us wrestle with what home means to us.
When my daughter Em was a little over a year old, my dad mentioned that we might eventually need one of those lift systems with a track on the ceiling in our Sonoma, California home. He started launching into how we might remodel our hall bathroom to accommodate the system and how, by relocating the neighboring laundry room, we could expand the size of the bathroom.
That’s when I cut him off.
“I don’t even want to go there yet,” I said.
I knew Em had cerebral palsy then. I just didn’t understand how severe it was yet.
I’m the one who brought up the idea of remodeling the bathroom, but I was thinking of something more typical. Like, y’know, new floors, vanity, fixtures, lights, mirror—that sort of thing. The thought of tearing down and moving walls to make it more accessible for my toddler daughter hadn’t crossed my mind yet. And I wasn’t ready to contemplate the possibility at the time.
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I grew up in San Jose, California but the city doesn’t feel like home. I suppose you could call it my hometown since I lived there with my parents for the first 19 years of my life. And yet, I haven’t lived there in the intervening 27 years—or really ever had the desire to. It’s a large, sprawling city, ranked #13 in population in the U.S. with just under a million people. When people who are familiar with the city find out I grew up there, they always ask, “Oh yeah? What part of San Jose?” But it doesn’t have the character of San Francisco with its cool-sounding neighborhoods, so I say, “In the corner near Cupertino and Saratoga.” And they say, “Oh, cool.” Then we typically move on to some other more interesting topic.
When I think back to the home my family spent the most time in during my childhood, I think of the tri-level house in the back left of a cul-de-sac less than a mile from where I went to high school. I remember when my parents bought the house it had carpet that might’ve been popular in the 70s and there were pee stains on the walls from the previous owners’ blind dog. Nothing so bad that a good professional deep clean and some new carpet and paint couldn’t fix.
I don’t recall how many years we lived there, but it was long enough that I can still remember minute details—enough of them to have used the house as a memory palace before. Thinking about the place right now doesn’t make me homesick, though.
If I visit it again someday, I won’t feel nostalgic for the house itself. Memories about the house would probably amount to me saying things like, “Looks like they took down my Space Shuttle wallpaper mural,” or, “This is where the grandfather clock used to be,” or, “Here’s where we had that 55-gallon fish tank.”
The memories that would truly bring me back and make me feel more emotional are the ones tied to people and experiences.
I can still picture the scenes:
I’m in the family room where we’d watch TV at night. I can smell the buttery popcorn and hear my dad saying, “Well…,” and trailing off, which meant it was time for us to go to bed.
It’s October 1989 and I’m throwing pop-flies to myself with a baseball in the cul-de-sac when the Loma Prieta earthquake hits. I see our next-door neighbor’s faded yellow car shaking and hear the squeaking of its shocks. And I see my mom’s frightened face as I run back to the house to be with my family.
I’m on our front lawn where my high school friend Colin and I are mowing down a square patch of grass to practice our golf swings. I remember how much trouble I got in for doing that.
I’m looking at the backyard with the kidney-shaped pool where we had dozens of parties with friends and family. There’s the waterslide where my baseball buddies would dare each other to go down it backward. There’s the diving board where we found the egg that was missing from the Easter egg hunt behind one of its legs…a couple of months too late. There’s the basketball hoop where I became so adept at the corner jump shot that I could make it while staring my one-on-one opponent in the eyes. And there’s the bush where I saw my first opossum and ran into the house declaring that I just saw the biggest rat I’ve ever seen in my life.
Sure, it would be fun to go back there and check it out again sometime. But I don’t need to. These memories originated from that particular place, yet it isn’t what’s most important about them. All the memories I care about are in my head already. And I can visit them whenever I want.
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The feeling of home is more about the people you share it with than the structure or the stuff you keep inside of it.
The walls of a house feel solid but they’re not really. A house is just a collection of things like wood, sheetrock, paint, tile, insulation, wires, pipes, and countless other materials all screwed and nailed and glued together in a particular way. The floor plan is contrived. The layout would’ve been completely different if some other architect had drawn up the plans instead. It can all be changed—for a price, of course. And, if you want to get really existential, it’s all temporary anyway since human civilization will cease to exist eventually. But I digress.
The people who make a place feel like home don’t have to live within your house. They can be your friends or family who live in the same town.
Part of why I don’t pine for San Jose at all is because there aren’t many people I’m still in touch with who live there. Although, coincidentally, a high school friend who apparently reads my writing and I haven’t been in contact with for decades reached out to me just yesterday (hi, Billy!). I’m pretty sure he doesn’t live there anymore either.
I’ve never felt more at home than I do now.
It’s not because I bought the house I live in (my wife Allison bought it before I met her). It’s not because we added solar, or remodeled our kitchen, or re-painted the exterior.
It’s because I’ve made new friends here. It’s because I share my house with the people I love most. It’s because I know I’m not moving anywhere else anytime soon.
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A couple of months ago, we had a neighbor who does architectural drawings over to see if he could come up with some ideas for remodeling our primary bathroom. It currently has a bit of a weird floor plan that has always felt like it could use the space better.
Allison was talking to him about some idea she had for it when she paused. She turned to me and said, “I didn’t talk to you about this beforehand, Lyle, but I’m wondering if we should also have him look into redoing the rest of this half of the house to make it more accessible.”
Em is six years old now and she’s getting heavier and taller. “They grow up too fast” is a cliché for a reason. The future my dad had seen so clearly five years prior has been coming more into focus for us for a while now. Part of me still wants to avoid it. I want Em to be the little girl I can pick up and carry anywhere. But when it comes to getting medical devices approved and paid for by insurance, it helps to get ahead of when we’ll really need them.
A few weeks later, he walked over to our house and rolled out one of those giant pieces of drafting paper. The floor plan was drastically different than what we came up with in our non-architect brains. Walls will be torn down and moved. The hallway will be widened. The entrance to the garage relocated.
We’ll start with just the primary bathroom first since it can be contained to just that area. But once we start moving bedroom walls, the rest has to be changed to make it all work.
No matter what the final product ends up looking like, it’ll be much different than what I would’ve envisioned before Em was born. We’ll make it look and feel like our own, but the main point is to make it more functional for her and us as her caretakers. The outside walls of the house won’t be moving, we’ll just be changing things on the inside.
But the one thing that won’t change is who lives here. And that’s what will make it feel like home.
More from our series on home:
Home Is The Native Soil Of The Heart by
Nothing said “home” to me more than an empty house by
Home: A Place or a Feeling? by Michael Mohr (
)A Homecoming by
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Really amazing details in those memories (I know I'm echoing Rick). I think that what you describe is true for a lot of Americans who live in places with little intact forest or public land. There's nothing about a particular house (unless it's truly unusual) that draws us back, but 100-acre farms and national forests have that power.
I'm also struck by how different this essay might have been if you'd written it right after your divorce? My conclusions would have been the same as yours just two years ago. In fact, that's why I moved to Pennsylvania to begin with: a willingness to redefine home according to my immediate household.
Really love how you use the malleable house -- the potential to reshape the house to fit the people and their particular needs -- as a concrete illustration of your theme!
Beautiful. And I so know some of the feelings. Reach out if I can ever be of support regarding the CP stuff. I remember so much of what you describe from back when Andrew was young. I’m here if it helps, Lyle.