Lexie Pusty wins contest: “There’s No Place Like Good Bones”

Lexie Pusty  is one of the winners of the Library's "Architecture of Home" Essay contest.

 

We love the way Lexie Pusty evokes the emotional essence of the word "home" and of how she integrates her sense of self into the concept with her language and imagery in her essay "There’s No Place Like Good Bones."

 

Of herself, she writes: Lexie is a writer living in the suburbs of Kansas City with her husband and two dogs. When she's not writing, she enjoys getting outside, working on fiber arts projects, and obsessing over music from the seventies.

 

Our contest prompt:

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.