I love being at home. I love being surrounded by the people and things I love. While cleaning this weekend, and that does not come to pass often because I am rarely at home during the day, I dusted and cleaned a thousand mementos, pictures and keepsakes that I've saved or collected over the years. Each one brought a new thought to mind about the person who gave it to me. I have a lot to treasure and a lot to take care of.
My home is not the typical home. I live in an antique house built as a barn in 1830 in a town called Sprinklesburg. Sprinklesburg became Newburgh, and the land grant given by James Madison began to take shape as a fine house, my barn, two slave houses and a tobacco barn. At the turn of the Nineteenth Century to the Twentieth, my house was turned into a duplex and for nearly sixty years, it had family after family living in it. In 1959, it was remodeled as a one family home by a family named Missy. The Missys added a mud room, a bathroom and a bedroom sans heat and then sold the house and the house was passed from person to person until Terry and I bought it in 1974.
What I originally liked about the house was the way the house lives. There are two front rooms - the original living room and the dining room - both with fireplaces. Behind the two front rooms are a kitchen and what we call the downstairs library or the transition room because we added on 800 square feet to create a real family room and one must pass through this "transition" room to go from old house to new house - there is one step down.
Upstairs there are three bedrooms and a master suite - five rooms altogether - and two full baths. The smallest bedroom is tiny at 13x13, and the largest is 20x20. There are dormers and walk in closets with windows. One of the rooms is a library with wall to wall books.
The bathrooms are very small and sport tubs, showers, sinks, commodes and a small built in linen closet. Simple simple.
The kitchen is antique, and I've kept it that way. There is a small built-in with a sink, a refrigerator parked in what was once a closet, and a stove in an alcove, but all other furniture is antique. The floor is real brick. The kitchen is small, but large enough for a rocking chair that catches the light from a large window. There is a window over the sink.
The floors, with the exception of the brick kitchen floor and the family room floor are hardwood. I am an area rug person and not a wall to wall carpet person because I have cats. Most people would say the house is charming. But it was not always charming.
When we bought the house nothing worked. Not a toilet would flush and there was a hot water heater sitting in the back yard. The kitchen was so filthy, we scraped rather than cleaned, and the bedrooms were not much better. The downstairs bathroom had been used as a cat box and five floors had been eaten way by cat urine.
We didn't have a lot of money to spend in the early days, and we had to do a lot of make-shifting and doing without and waiting. There were times we closed off bathrooms, waited on plumbing, went without air conditioning, plugged holes in the roof and ripped carpet out and lived with unfinished floors, but little by little we've cleaned and re-papered and painted and added on the new addition until the house lives like a dream - still too cold in the winter, but we're working on it.
Now, when much of the work has been done, I think it's all been for a good cause. I wanted a constant place with character where I could rear my kids. I wanted a place where they could explore and grow and walk to school and to things of interest all on their own. I wanted a place that would go up in value and not have to be ditched at some point because the neighborhood was dying.
I wanted a place where my husband and I could grow old and enjoy our memories and mementos and visits from our grown children and grandchildren. I wanted a place where I could grow a garden that had purpose and would be an outlet and a craft. And I knew that just having the building and the land would not be enough. Anyone can buy a home and live in it for a few years and then move on. That's what my parents did - seventeen times in seventeen years - and that's not what I wanted. I wanted an "always" place.
I wanted a place that I would never mind cleaning, never mind painting, never mind spending the day re-arranging furniture or changing a wall arrangement. These are the things that should delight us domestically because they have the purpose of helping us to build our lives and create great memories.
Along with the house, the way we lived and still live contribute to our "home." Our home was always open to our children's friends, to slumber parties, late night last minutes, and a big breakfast the following day. We encouraged our children to develop interests and goals that they could take with them when they left. I am still picking up pieces of my son's nuclear accelerator from my bedroom carpet twenty years later. We always ate at 6:00 p.m. - and still do every evening. Dinner preparation has always been a big part of our life - it's a "count on" thing that creates an understanding that we care about ourselves and our time together. The sun goes over the yardarm here at 5:00 p.m. every evening - always has - always will. We love to walk by the river - it's still there even after all these years, lol. I love to visit the downtown stores. We take interest in our neighbors, our old friends, and the children of our old friends. We are good neighbors even now that we are probably the oldest couple on the block. At one time we were the youngest.
And the constancy and development of building what we have built allows us to be better at doing what we do for a living. Our own foundation helps us create a stability and rock hard foundation for the children in our care at school - and that's how it should be. Life matters, and teaching this to children is not hard when you spend a lifetime making it matter. Building a home and increasing it's joy is the goal.
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