Home is What You Make It

“Home is What You Make It”

A home with old wood siding and a porch in a small town passed down from grandparent to child to grandchild, and an Atlanta one-bedroom apartment with green-painted walls and a rug placed over a small stain on a carpet; each of these sentences may give a sense of nostalgia or a provoked sense of “home.” Whether or not you have experienced them, you still feel the homeliness of someone's memories spoken out with a warmth of belonging. A person could amble on about each home they had lived in and each time you would know that it was a place they didn't just live in but a place they thrived in. Whenever an author writes about a home, you imagine yourself in a character's place, or when you move into a new building you always have the urge to make it a montage of everything in your life that you loved, compacted in a blank slate. George Eliot quoted in his novel The Mill on the Floss. “What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known?” and what is a home that is not known?

Many have heard the phrase “home is where the heart is” or some variation of it but none ever really think much about it even though the phrase is lived every day and in every way. When moving into a new home a first instinct is to decorate with what offers comfort to you, some people apply themselves to different aesthetics whilst others hodgepodge decore collected and gifted into a gift of sweet solace. I would bring up Marylin Monroe as a famous and well-known example, ever the sophisticated woman, she was known to decorate her home in majority white with a mix of art such as Goya (famous for the 14 “black paintings”) and Picasso (known for his venturous abstract art) and Spanish tile throughout certain areas. She had a certain affinity with staying true to herself in all areas of life which was also reflected in her decor, while her life was a sad one she had always made each place she lived a home where she celebrated her life. A home of your making will never, not be a home; it will always be and continue to grow and erode with your heart.

Of course, Monroe isn’t the only example of a famously known person with a specific decorating taste but now I’d like to pivot to the audience as a whole. Often we have stored ideas in our heads or have even perhaps saved Pinterest boards of pleasing-to-the-eye home decor. Self-expression has an impact on how we decorate any space in our lives, from a little trinket to a coffee table your parents gave you some-few years ago that you grew a personified attachment to. You can’t help but decorate without heart put into it and an idea of what makes your home a “home”. The beauty in this is truly the satisfaction it gives to living in a space of your own creation. That you know a place not just by address but by the love you had imbued within it.

I’d like to refer back to the beginning part of the George Elliot quote that prefaced the quote mentioned above shown in the first paragraph, “We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it,(...)” Home being what you make of it, implies that where you live is subject to change and shape with time. To be the creator of something so personal and wholesome as an area of dwelling. Home, in the most metaphorical sense, is where we belong and are valuable. Home has birthed the start of who you are and what environment you lived within and each new chapter of life, a new furniture piece or accompanying memory. We could never love “home” if we did not know it and “home” still exists for a person whether they see it or not, whether it's a place or a person, these things are true and live within everyone just as they live in a space or step outside of it. The value of a home is what was made by the individual who cared for and adorned it.