Home Sweat Home.
That’s what the wall hanging said.
It was obviously crocheted by someone living in a home without air conditioning or by a fabric artist who eschewed spellcheck.
Coming home is the best part of most vacations.
Home is that place where you keep all the junk you might use one day, but probably not.
Home is where you can eat over a sink, yell for no reason, laugh at things you probably shouldn’t be laughing at, and use a toilet you trust won’t embarrass you.
I was visiting with a friend who was telling me that her offspring had no intentions of ever owning a home. An apartment offered all that was needed by that young person without the added responsibility of a home.
An apartment, a condominium, a houseboat, a tree house, a shouse, a barndominium, a tent and a house are all homes.
A shouse combines a shop and a house. Originally referring to the conversion of existing barns, a barndominium often describes a type of home built to resemble a barn on the outside.
A boat is a hole in the water that you pour money into. A house is what you take out a second mortgage on to buy the boat. And a third mortgage is what you obtain to put in a swimming pool, so you will have a place to use the boat.
My wife and I are perched where we are because a friend wanted to buy a place in town. We wanted to buy her country place. Agnes lived at the place in town that the woman living in our place wanted to buy so her old place could become our new place. We had to wait until Agnes moved. Sadly, Agnes moved the hard way. Agnes, whom we loved, passed away. She’d been my Sunday School superintendent. She called me several times a week to talk about the Minnesota Twins and her favorite comic strip, “Dennis the Menace.”
The house shuffle took place. We moved to where we still reside today.
It wasn’t long before we had a dreaded sewer backup problem. I hired Les to come and find the septic tank. That was another problem. He used his excavation superpowers to dig up the entire building site. The neighbors thought we were searching for gold. Les found a drain field and pipe, but no tank. We put in a septic tank at a price only slightly lower than what we paid for the house. It turned our hovel into a make-believe mansion.
We needed to drill a new well. I won’t elaborate on that. It is a deep subject.
There’s been some remodeling, otherwise known as breakfasting with contractors.
New windows were put in at a cost slightly higher than the septic tank. I can see more than I have time for by looking out those panes of glass. The entire world is out there.
If our houses didn’t have windows, we’d all spend more time outside, looking around. That might not be a bad thing, but we’d go through many more indoor light bulbs.
I thought about getting the windows from Acme Corporation. Wile E. Coyote did a lot of business with Acme. The deliveries were prompt. He ordered 126 different items from the Acme catalog, which included anvils, dynamite, dehydrated boulder, invisible paint, do-it-yourself tornado kit, rocket-powered roller skates and instant wind.
What Wile E Coyote should have ordered from Acme was a rotisserie roadrunner.
If Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck and Company offered houses in their catalogs, maybe Acme would sell windows in theirs.
If Acme doesn’t offer windows for houses, perhaps they have a device that prevents any car window from being rolled down in a car playing music at ear-shattering levels.
What have I learned from owning a home? Three things.
Dr. Seuss was right when he said, “Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory.”
A home houses memories.
When you install air conditioning, you can take down the “Home Sweat Home” wall hanging.
That’s two. I learned three things. The third one is that homeowner has “meow” in the middle.
That’s right, homeowner has a meow in the middle.
That must mean something.
Photo by Al Batt
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