What a house means

In a few bursts over the last couple of months, I've been obsessed with house shopping. I grew up in a six-flat in the city, and so houses always seemed magical to me: a building set apart from any other, with a yard, stairs, and its own front door. It's different from an apartment, a duplex, or a trailer.

The houses that seemed most magical to me were old houses, which don't exist here in Bolingbrook. The historic district here dates to 1960. But the houses here still have yards, stairs, front doors, and interesting details like countertops, flooring, patios, etc. I was smitten for a while. And then I began to feel sick to my stomach.

I was looking for something that wasn't there. The real estate listings have all kinds of facts and information. But I think I was actually searching out meaning. A sense of identity -- spirituality, even! Place, home, self, safety, vocation... and those things just weren't there.

Home means more than a building. We are rich enough to have that luxury in our country -- this is not just shelter from the rain, a place to sleep, to cook our meals, and perhaps to make our living. I'm sure people in less affluent places also make their homes their own, but I think the home, here, is a canvas for the self in a dramatic way because there are SO many ways to spend money and time on furnishing, decorating, and making it "just so" and "just for us."

When I realized that real estate listings weren't helping, I found some books.

Clare Cooper Marcus wrote "House as a Mirror of Self." She says our homes are psychological expressions of who we are. (Duh.) About halfway through I got tired of all the "self self self" stuff. But her declaration that we have emotional relationships with places made perfect sense to me. She makes interesting observations about the strong influence on us of the places of our childhood, the emotional nuances of clutter, and that our possessions are crucial pieces of how we understand and define who we are, among other things. I recommend it, although it's got a definite Berkeley bias and a lot of feminist liberation undertones that felt a little dated to me.

Akiko Busch's book "Geography of Home" consists of 13 chapters on 13 places you'll find in most North American houses. It's charming and whimsical -- I especially liked her chapters on front doors and bedrooms. But she didn't dive as deeply as Marcus, and I find I don't remember many of her observations.

I'm in the midst of Witold Rybczynski's "Home: A Short History of An Idea." It's a fun history of how Europeans have inhabited the places where they've lived over the past 500 years or so.

Basically, I'm feeding my "house" bug on its own terms: self-identity, personal space, meaning. We've slowed down our home shopping. How does where we live shape who we are? A house that stands all by itself says something to the world, although we're so used to it, we don't think about it much. A house uses quite a lot of resources so that the family inside doesn't have to share space or possessions with anyone else. A house can become full of meaning, but it is also just a building -- with rooms, appliances, plumbing, wood, and plaster. It's not magical. Or at least not any more than any other place.

I guess what I'm getting at is: what makes us happy? I think I thought a house was another way to be happy. It's a way to be independent, to build equity, to have decorating freedom galore... but it's not a way to be happy.