A Home is More than a House

A Home is More Than a House

It is an extension of oneself and should be cherished as such. 

When I was selling my house several years ago, I spent an inordinate amount of time decorating it so that it would appeal to the unknown buyer who would make it financially possible for me to move to the Poconos and retire. 

I simmered nutmeg and ginger on the stove every day to hint at baking and domesticity.  I placed huge, beautifully-illustrated tomes on the coffee table to suggest literary leisure as a way of life that came with the house.  I placed flowers in a white milk glass jelly jar in the middle of the kitchen table in a tribute to homeliness and an agrarian way of life.  I even color-coordinated rooms that had been thrown together color-wise for the entire time of my sojourn in the house. 

I was warned that all this was unnecessary, that the buyer would not be seeing what I was choreographing, but would see rather the ‘bones’ of the house.  Nevertheless, I persisted in creating this faux image in a house that had – in its original state - served me well for many years.  Because of [or despite] my efforts at simulating a lifestyle, the house did sell; the new buyers seemed very pleased with their purchase, and we moved on. 

I’m told that within six months, the buyers had taken it all apart and redone it in their own image.  My cross-and-bible colonial front door?  Gone.  Replaced by a dark oak door with a stained glass oval insert.  The dogwood tree and the hosta that my children called ‘the back to school flowers’ surrounding it?  Also gone.  The shed that had been custom-built as a miniature version of the house?  Dismantled and sent to the dumps.  The ivy that had been in large vases on the altar when I married, then planted around the front borders when we moved to the house, was pulled up and discarded overnight.

Given the amount of change that they imposed on it, I have to wonder what it was about the house that had caught the buyers’ fancy in the first place.  Since they had rejected the very things that made the house stand out from its neighbors on the suburban street, their selection was a mystery to me.

What lesson can I take from this?  I haven’t a clue.  Were I to attempt to sell another house, I would probably do the same things.  But I suspect that somewhere within the buyer in all of us is a need to make the house our own.  And only by eradicating those things that meant so much to a former owner can we accomplish that.

I wish the new owners well.  I only wish I had been able to bring with me a few sprigs of the ivy and a pot filled with hostas.  But, I will now have to make a new and different mark on my home in the Poconos. 

The things they discarded were remnants of my younger days.  My Pocono memories will be based on a different set of experiences.