Architecture of Home
From 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?
Childhood Home
I was born in the US a few years after my parents immigrated. My childhood home was a mint green ranch with a large walnut tree in the backyard. My parents planted this tree when I was around a year old and bestowed it to me. My sisters and I each owned a tree. Mine bore a lot of acrid green balls that eventually turned black and would stain your fingers and make it really hard to mow (or so my dad told me). My middle sister’s tree was a stout evergreen, which I found fitting since she was born in the winter. My oldest sister’s tree was the tallest, and to this day I have no idea the type, but that tree shaded my mom’s massive garden where she grew onions, tomatoes, carrots, bell peppers, etc. We also had a random strawberry patch tucked away in a nook of our backyard that I would hungerly watch as the little berries turned from white to pink to red.
My house had a long skinny basement with orange/brown carpet that my middle sister and I would use as our playground for all things imaginary. For a long time, we pretended we were ice skaters (Kristi Yamaguchi was big deal in our household) and we put on music and made skating sounds (tsssssss tsssssk, shhooooowwwshSWISH!) as we pretended to spin and jump and collect all the pretend flowers on the pretend ice. We always tied for gold.
I grew up poor. The “free lunch” kind of poor. I didn’t realize I was poor until one day my oldest sister pointed out to me and my middle sister that “of course we’re poor! You guys get free lunch!”. Of course, I argued that we were not in fact poor! “We have a home for goodness’ sake!”. So, it was around this time I discovered how we got our house.
When my parents moved to the US, they rented the top floor of a run down, gray house in a rough neighborhood. I should point out that both my parents are highly educated but took a leap of faith to come to the US for a better chance for their daughters.
We ended up with my childhood home because my godfather (a doctor), who also delivered me and my middle sister, noticed that we lived in bleak conditions. The details of this story are a fuzzy because I was less than two years old when it all went down. Essentially though, my godfather bought my childhood home and allowed my dad to make interest free payments, and eventually my parents bought the home from him. This immense act of kindness allowed me to grow up in a safe neighborhood with a lovely childhood home.
The kind of home where little girls pick strawberries in their backyard. The kind of home where little girls pretend to be ice skaters in their basement with orange carpet. The kind of home that was visited often by amazing folks who rallied behind my parents and offered them a true home away home. Because as cliché as it sounds, home is where the heart lies, and my heart lay under the canopy of a walnut tree, knowing I was surrounded by people that showed true compassion to a young, immigrant family, just doing their best in western Kansas.
