Sometimes it’s hard to tell exactly when a house becomes a home.
But sometimes you know exactly to the moment when it happens.
The house where our kids grew up was in Schaumburg. It was ten years old when we bought it, so it had already been somebody else’s home, and as my wife and I toured it during their open house, we wanted to see what would make us feel that this house could be home to us.
For me, that happened when the owners took us into the attached garage. As they opened the door from the family room, I noticed a pencil sharpener hung on the wall right next to the door, the kind where you grind the handle, and the wood and graphite shavings collect into a receptacle that needed emptying once in a while.
It was the kind of pencil sharper that hung on the wall of every classroom I attended growing up, and although pencil sharpening was a thing of the past because mechanical pencils were already the rage, this pencil sharpener was the nostalgic symbol of the writer that I hoped to become.
When I saw it, I felt like I was home.
Twenty-seven years later, when we sold that home, that pencil sharpener still hung on the garage wall, and when I told the couple viewing the house about that story, they too fell in love with the house that would become their home.
When my wife and I bought our new house in Huntley in 2003, our kids were already grown and living in homes of their own. We spent a couple weeks every day at the house before we moved in — painting walls, hanging drapes, installing cabinet pull-out shelves.
And then, when it came time to move our furniture in, our son Dave showed up to help. And as he wheeled a hand-cart with some heavy boxes on it, he lost control of the load and it tipped into the wall, etching a small scar in the drywall.
He was devastated, of course, and he cursed himself for ruining our perfect new house.
“Nonsense,” I said to him, and I meant it. “It’s not a house anymore. Now it’s a home.”
Because a house is not a living thing until it has stories to tell about itself.
My wife and I also built a log-cabin vacation home on a small strip-mine lake in Wilmington, Illinois, and because we built it with our own hands, it had homey stories to tell about itself right from the start. We owned it for about fifteen years, and when we decided to sell it, we showed it to a young couple with a daughter who was about fifteen years old.
As we walked around the property, we came to our little sandy beach at the waterfront, and I said, “Of course, this beach has a secret that only the owner of the property can know,” and we moved on to tour the rest of the site.
The couple loved our house, and they bought it on the spot. We drew up a handwritten contract and signed it.
The daughter, who had been silent throughout the tour, said: “So if we’re going to be the owners, do we get to know the secret about the beach?”
I laughed and said, “Oh! Right! Come with me.”
I took them to the shed and gave everybody a badminton racquet, and I pulled out a shovel and led them to the beach, where I shoveled a heap of sand on each racquet. “Go ahead,” I said, “sift it out.”
They shook the sand through the racquet strings, and what they found atop the strings was dozens of exotic coins from around the world—some of them thick or thin, hexagonal or octagonal, some with a hole in the center.
See, I had been a youth soccer coach in countries like Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Germany, Austria, France, England, Hungary, Australia, Iceland, and the like. And everywhere I traveled I collected small foreign coins worth not much more value than imagination might imbue them with. Before the Euro became the common currency, you could change paper money as you traveled from nation to nation, but not coins. And since the coins became useless as currency for the duration of your visit, I collected them for a different purpose altogether.
I brought them home and dumped them into my sandy beach. Then I told my grandkids that an international pirate had traveled the world gathering his booty, burying his treasure right there, on my little beach in Wilmington, Illinois.
Of course, the pirate knew to the very kroner, mark or forint how much he had buried, so although the grandkids were welcome to dig it up and bury it again, they could never take any of it away or throw it into the lake. If they did, the pirate would come to make things right, perhaps in horrible ways.
And so, kids, feel free to come and visit Grandpa’s beach and dig for treasure as often as you like. But leave the treasure in the sand to dig again the next time you come.
Of course, they were eager to visit as often as possible.
When I told that story to the young couple buying our lakefront property, their teenage daughter’s eyes lit up. And so did the couple’s eyes, because you know how it is with teenage kids, who are looking for every excuse to break from their parent’s control. But if their daughter could find a fun way to bring her friends to their vacation home to share some quirky adventure…
Well, that’s just the sort of thing that turns a house into a home, isn’t it?
TR Kerth is the author of the book “Revenge of the Sardines.” Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com.
