when a house is a home
Your house doesn't have to be a beautiful weatherboard thing with hens on the front veranda to be a richly loved family home.
If you look at popular magazines about living in the country, you might think that rural Tasmanian houses are all historic stone or weatherboard idylls. But that’s not quite the case. Many of us have houses of much less auspicious fabric which we are deeply attached to.
When we moved to Tasmania I took out a subscription to one very well-known Australian magazine showcasing country life. Over the years I became frustrated with the images on the front cover, which seemed increasingly formulaic. There was always a veranda with wicker chairs, throw rugs and a dog, maybe a couple of hens. Then a graphic designer showed me how the hens were photo-shopped in: you could tell because the shadows were wrong, she said. I cancelled my subscription after that. It was the final straw: cheated by chickens.
Our house has wicker chairs on the front veranda and throws rugs inside. But for the seventeen years we’ve lived here it has also had terrible rose pink carpets and sun-damaged black and white vinyl. It has felt like someone else’s house rather than my own.
Our house is not weatherboard or historic stone built by convicts. It is around half a century old, made of anonymous brown brick. It squats a little way back from the road rather than being well-placed in an idyllic landscape. But it has good bones. Wide hallways. Large rooms. An outlook across paddocks. It faces north and is warmed by the sun all winter.
For my kids, it’s their childhood home and the attachment to it is deep and visceral. They have swung from the trees, written their names in wobbly pencil on the walls, laid in bed gazing out of their bedroom windows, projecting their dreams over the top of what they see there.
During lockdown we realized how much we valued it. Our house became our sanctuary.
Many years ago when I lived in a city, a work colleague whose sister was an architect lent me a book about houses and what they can mean to people. The book was a series of drawings by people of their childhood home, intuitive sketches or paintings drawn from the subconscious and depicting the feelings and memories conjured. There was loneliness and trauma as well as happiness. The images were interpreted in the text by a psychologist. It was a fascinating but troubling book.
Why did my colleague lend it to me? We were renovating our house at the time so perhaps I was talking about house and home. Perhaps she thought I was about to inflict a grim childhood on my as yet unborn children. I’m unsure.
What I found unsatisfactory about that book was that it didn’t tell you what to do about all the unhappiness, how to move on from it and create a space which held and nurtured you.
Luckily I had a couple of small but illuminating books about feng shui. Some people sneer at feng shui, and consider it mumbo jumbo. I think of it as a language or a philosophy, a way of thinking about the space we live in which makes us feel better. As a philosophy, it has been relied on in eastern cultures for thousands of years. Chinese people were creating homes of harmony and balance while some of us were living in mud huts. When I dip into my feng shui books I come away feeling inspired and often make some small change which ripples outwards and moves me forward in other areas of my life. That’s how feng shui works; it gets your chi moving.
The fabric of a home becomes part of our story. In our Brisbane home, which was a weatherboard house, by daughter crawled as a toddler along the polished timber floors bringing her ‘leggy Teddy’ with her. Leggy Teddy travelled clutched in her hand, the back of his head sliding along the floor as she moved from room to room, his body and legs trailing along behind him. It made the fabric on the back of his head smooth, and kept our floors polished.
In this Tasmanian house, my kids’ rooms have charted their stories with different paint colours, wardrobes rebuilt to accommodate clothes and possessions, toys stowed in top cupboards as they have moved from childhood to their teenage years. The living room, once strewn with lego and cardboard box fortresses, is now an emptier, more adult space with chairs for lounging and scrolling, and the all-important dining table for gathering at. When I look at the stairs now, I picture my son vacuuming them in advance of his girlfriend coming round.
My kids tell me they can’t imagine living anywhere else. Part of me thinks it might have been good to have made one move them, so that they can get that under their belts with our support.
Too late.
You don’t have to have children to form a visceral attachment to a home but I happen to have done so. I found this poem by Jenny Hegland of the Good Listening Project which reflects that with simple and searing honesty.
Check out the Good Listening Project, a quietly astonishing movement which sees poets listening and bearing witness to health care workers and then creating poetry to reflect their experiences. This validates and nurtures them and there are many testimonials about how profound this feels.
If I could create a poem or a picture of my Tasmanian house, it would be as the place I’ve cradled and raised my children: a house as an extension of a mother’s arms. Different places in the house mean different things to me: my side of the bed a sanctuary at the end of the day; my cosy, well fitted-out office facilitating my work and creativity.
While we were running our property as a farm, we had no time to work on our house. But that has changed. Now we’re doing the work we promised ourselves we’d do when we moved in. New flooring throughout, fresh light paint, carpets in the bedrooms which are soft underfoot and easy on the eye. We’ll live with choices we have made, which reflect ourselves back at us.
While the fabric of the house will change, other things will stay the same: less tangible but still significant. The way the sun falls through the windows of each room, lighting up how we pass through the day. My bedroom curtains opened just a crack to allow the dawn light in. Low winter sun slanting through the living room windows and making the floors a heat sink to warm us. The setting sun blasting its last hot, slanting rays across the sofas so my daughter and I can knit together in the peace of the evening.
In his book Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck writes about the road trip he made across the United States with his poodle, the eponymous Charley. Before they set off, he kitted out the campervan they would travel in, Rocinante, creating a small but perfect space for man and dog. Images show it to be a warm, timber-lined capsule with just enough kitchen, just enough seating, and a table for his typewriter and for Charley to sleep under. There’s a black and white photograph from the time in which Steinbeck is showing the van off to a neighbour.
Steinbeck said of his trip, ‘A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.’
The same sentiment could be applied to a home. No two houses or homes are alike. Every home speaks of the lives and people within it, and embodies the occupations, dreams and attachments of those people in its bricks, timber and chosen fabrics.
You don’t need hens on your front veranda, real or photo-shopped. It doesn’t matter what your home looks like or what its walls or interiors are made of. What’s important is that it feels like yours, and contains all the love and nourishment for the soul you wish for.
Those darn cheating chickens! I shall never look at *that* magazine the same, ever again. And as someone who is currently house hunting on a despairingly low budget, this was a timely reminder! Thank you.