Blog Master G

The following guest post comes from Jonty:

Homes enjoy a unique role in our everyday lives. On the one hand, they are
inanimate objects (usage: house), and on the other, they are also a very
singular abstract location (usage: home). The process by which a house
becomes a home is embodied a very intimate and mundane set of experiences.

I will project my own history onto Gabe and Jen’s new home buying
experience.

At first glance, you walk through and come to develop an affinity for the
building, structures, landscaping and architecture. You like the way that
light dances on the glass. You think the room is adequate and the location
is convenient. On a certain day, you assume ownership of this new house, and
that’s when you roll up your sleeves and dig in.

You explore the place where the refrigerator used to be. Look how messy it
is back there. The kitchen cabinets will hold your food. but they have those
OTHER PEOPLE KOODIES. In fact, now that you really start to think about it,
so does the rest of the kitchen and the bathroom. How can you poop there?
Shower there? Get undressed and walk on the tile floor there? And have you
seen the basement? Surely, some evil apparition calls that place home. You
are CERTAIN of that.

So you break out the Clorox, Lysol, Pinesal, and every other cleaning agent
you can think of. You scrub, scrape and clean away all the koodies. Then you
lay down a fresh layer of shelf paper in the kitchen cabinets and you feel
ready to go. Perhaps to a lesser extent, you perform this clean sweep
throughout the rest of the house.

Of course, I have no scientific backing for this, but I am convinced that a
tiny part of our brains and olfactory nerves are able to smell the lingering
scent of THOSE OTHER PEOPLE who used to live there. Following the cleansing
process, that scent is gone, and we are somehow placed in a “neutral” mode.

So then you set to bringing in all of your belongings. the boxes, bags,
trunks, plains, trains and automobiles.

THIS HOUSE IS NOW YOURS.

You then spend the next few weeks unpacking everything and somehow in the
process, this place becomes more than your house. It becomes your home-and
when you come home from work, you’re home. It’s great.

The light still dances on the glass, and it tickles your face to wake you up
in the morning. Your room is a little cramped now that you have unpacked
everything, but somehow it’s the perfect size because it’s YOUR room, and it
could be no other way. The location is not just convenient. This is the
place you come home to every night, and that’s the Chinese place you get
dinner from sometimes. The hardware store is just down the road, and before
you know it, you have every back road and side street memorized. It’s like
you’re going home on cruise control sometimes. You plant a garden in the
back, and you look forward to mowing the grass in the front.

And when you come home.. You’re home. And it’s great, because you’re home.

Congratulations, Gabe and Jen A_nderson.

Love,

Jonty Yamisha