Recently I moved from a four-bedroom house on 2.5 acres in a rural neighborhood into a two-bedroom apartment in an older home in the middle of town.

The apartment offers a dramatic change from the house. Here, for instance, a constant stream of traffic flows within 15 feet of my living room windows. I’m within an easy walk of my church, my favorite coffee shop, the grocery store, and if I push myself, the library. On my third morning here, I had to chase off a crazy lady spouting obscenities on my front porch, and at least two or three times a day fire trucks, police cars, and other emergency vehicles come barreling past the apartment, red lights flashing and sirens blaring.

Yet despite the radical change, the apartment already feels like home.

Home, home – there’s a word with a beauty all its own. No synonyms – lodgings, quarters, place of residence – can replace it. Walls, a roof, and all the amenities – a refrigerator, a stove – make a house or a residence, but what we bring to that place transforms it into a home. Our personal belongings, however spare or few, and the people we love who live with us are the magic behind this metamorphosis.

For example, all around my new house are the books, hundreds of them now ensconced in cases, that I’ve loved. Every wall and corner of the living room contains paintings, pictures, and other objects that mean little to others but much to me. The bookcase-desk to my right, for instance, belonged to my mother; I can still see her sitting there, writing letters or paying bills. My dad painted the two watercolors on the bookshelf directly behind me; an elderly neighbor years ago gave me the chalk drawings, handsomely framed, on the opposite wall; my father-in-law, a World War II infantryman now more than 30 years in the grave, brought home the battered Japanese bugle sitting on the fireplace mantle.

A score of other objects in this room alone, large and small, are a part of my history. The very carpet beneath my feet came from the bed-and-breakfast my wife and I operated before her untimely death 21 years ago.

Add my ownership of a key to the front door, and this place is now home.

In the first episode after the pilot of the television series “Little House on the Prairie,” Pa (Michael Landon) and his daughter Laura (Melissa Gilbert) exchange these thoughts:

Laura: “And I’ve decided something.”
Charles: “What’s that, Half-Pint?”
Laura: “Home is the nicest word there is.”
Charles: “One of the nicest, that’s for sure.”

Laura’s correct. Home is one of the nicest – and one of the most profound – words in our language. Repeat it aloud a few times, and home sounds like Om, which some eastern religions use in prayer and consider the primordial sound that created the universe.

Essential to a home are a key, a lock, and a door. With exceptions – I’m thinking of the poor mentally-ill lady on my porch – most of us from adults setting off to work to children off to school put on a mask when we sally forth into the adventures, delights, and troubles offered by the world. But on our return home, with the door closed behind us, we are free to discard those masks and come closer to our true selves.

In his 1910 essay “No Place Like Home,” G.K. Chesterton looks at this concept:

…the home is the only place of liberty. Nay, it is the only place of anarchy. It is the only spot on the earth where a man can alter arrangements suddenly, make an experiment or indulge in a whim. Everywhere else he goes he must accept the strict rules of the shop, inn, club, or museum that he happens to enter. He can eat his meals on the floor in his own house if he likes. I often do it myself; it gives a curious, childish, poetic, picnic feeling. There would be considerable trouble if I tried to do it in an ABC tea shop… For a plain, hardworking man, the home is not the one tame place in the world of adventure. It is the one wild place in the world of rules and set tasks.

So, my New Year’s wish for everyone – my family, friends, and you my readers – is that your home is or becomes a place you treasure, an oasis providing refuge, rest, comfort, and freedom, a kingdom all your own.

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This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal. 

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