September 8: "House," Home, "You Motherfucker"

In my adult life, I've lived in exactly six different houses/apartments.

I sometimes wonder about the difference between a house and a home.  Friends and relatives have let me stay at their houses when I've traveled.  I just spent a weekend in Calumet, staying at a nice hotel with a swimming pool. hot tub, sauna, and continental breakfast.  And I know that, if needed, any number of people would open their houses to me and my family.

But there is a difference between a house and a home.

Billy Collins writes about his house . . .

House

by: Billy Collins

I lie in a bedroom of a house
that was built in 1862, we were told—
the two windows still facing east
into the bright daily reveille of the sun.

The early birds are chirping,
and I think of those who have slept here before,
the family we bought the house from—
the five Critchlows—

and the engineer they told us about
who lived here alone before them,
the one who built onto the back
of the house a large glassy room with wood beams.

I have an old photograph of the house
in black and white, a few small trees,
and a curved dirt driveway,
but I do not know who lived here then.

So I go back to the Civil War
and to the farmer who built the house
and the rough stone walls
that encompass the house and run up into the woods,

he who mounted his thin wife in this room,
while the war raged to the south,
with the strength of a dairyman
or with the tenderness of a dairyman

or with both, alternating back and forth
so as to give his wife much pleasure
and to call down a son to earth
to take over the cows and the farm

when he no longer had the strength
after all the days and nights of toil and prayer—
the sun breaking over the same horizon
into these same windows,

lighting the same bed-space where I lie
having nothing to farm, and no son,
the dead farmer and his dead wife for company,
feeling better and worse by turns.

I know just a little of the history of my house.  It was built over 100 years ago, and it has seen a couple additions.  The original part of the house consisted of the dining room, living room, two bedrooms, and attic.  When indoor plumbing and electricity became a thing, a kitchen and bathroom were added.  We bought the house from my sister-in-law's in-laws. This weekend, I found out that one of the original owners portrayed a corpse in Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder.

But none of those details make a house a home.  A home is defined by the people in it, I think.  When I look back on my childhood home, I don't recall the kitchen or dining room or bedrooms.  I remember my siblings, parents, and grandmother.  They're the ones that made that two-story building into a home.

I've been in my current house now for around 25 years.  We've remodeled the attic into a bedroom.  Put in a new furnace recently.  Painted the dining and living rooms.  However, for me, home is my wife and son and daughter.  I'm typing this post in the room that my daughter slept in as a child.  My son is upstairs, playing online video games, swearing like a Marine drill sergeant.  My wife just went to bed in the room that used to be the nursery.  Every square inch of this place is filled with memories of my little family, good and bad, joyful and sorrowful.

And that is home for Saint Marty.

You Motherfucker

by: Martin Achatz

My son says it to his friends

like an endearment--You motherfucker--

full of the kind of admiration

Queen Isabella had for Columbus

when he returned from the new world

after seeding it with smallpox, or maybe 

the true wonder Pope Sixtus IV expressed

when Michelangelo brought him

into the completed Sistine Chapel

for the first time, Sixtus craning his face 

heavenward, crossing himself with palsied 

hand, muttering to the painter in Latin,

You motherfucker.

Photo courtesy of Abbigail Berry