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Illustration by Catherine Chan
What is it about houses? Do they ever truly leave you? Even when you think you’ve left them for good, they somehow manage to creep into your dreams, waking you with the longing you never knew existed.
They tug at your heart, making you wonder if you brought the key to it with you or left it behind. Those houses summon you at the most unexpected hours of the day. No matter how content a home you live in, every time adult life taunts you, a part of you yearns to return to that warm childhood house and snuggle up in that little bed you shared with your siblings. The house you couldn’t wait to grow out of is now a refuge-giving memory.
Then there are houses you were hesitant to move into but which became your sanctuary over time. Houses that teach you responsibility and make you pay the bills. Houses where you learn to do chores, cook, clean and do laundry like clockwork. Where you learn to become a host and cherish relationships. Even though you know you’ll eventually leave, you keep loving these houses for the love and learnings they gave you. When you do leave, those houses don’t leave you. They cling to you like misty memories that make you let out a deep sigh when you see the rain fall on an icy December night, the first snowflake of winter or the cold and sleepy sunset of an October evening. Those houses live in you.
And there are houses that you build while building your family. The houses whose every nook and corner you have measured. The house where your firstborn slept their first night. The house that witnessed a baby taking its first step, throwing its first tantrum, eating its first meal. Whose furniture fulfilled the criteria of being stain-proof and washable. This house has a wall dedicated to measuring your children’s height and the other walls are smothered with crayons and punctured with numerous tiny holes from the birthday banners. How do you move out of these houses? And even if you do, the house comes along, and you carry it in your heart. These places make you feel like you left a piece of your heart behind when you left the town.
But our houses weren’t always ours. They belonged to someone before us and probably to someone else before them. They will belong to someone else after us. Somebody will call them their own; the wall with your proudly displayed DIY artwork that haunts you in your dreams will hide behind a bookshelf. The corner where you watered a giant planter and stained the floor will hold a tiny cat bed. Someone will be making their memories in your haven while a piece of your heart still flutters in there somewhere.
The other day, I walked down a street in my neighbourhood and saw some precious houses that were probably built by the town’s first settlers. People who came looking for a peaceful life leaving the known behind. The name plates still carried the dates those houses were first established to shelter their families: 1865, 1902 and 1914. I wondered how many hearts were still fluttering in those houses and if someone somewhere far away was still thinking of the countertops inside or the trees in the yard that their children once climbed.
Houses shelter and nurture you in exchange for a little piece of your soul. They exchange their keys with yours. They provide for you in return for a tiny place in your heart where they could creep into now and then as some faded memories. Those misty memories that knock on your door as an unannounced acquaintance on a Christmas Eve. That’s what I love about old houses: You can never take them out of you. Because they were never just houses, they were homes – the homes you made from those houses.
Prabhjot Kaur lives in New Westminster, B.C.