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SHARON RANDALL: Why a house is not a home Important to realize true shelter is much more than the roof over your head

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September 2, 2010

BY SHARON RANDALL | SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE

Tomorrow, I'm going to spend some time with an old friend.

The wonderful family that has rented my house this past year is moving on to its next chapter. So for a few hours, I'll have the place all to myself.

When you live in a house for nearly 40 years, you get to know it pretty well. I know every inch of it, inside and out. And I suspect, if walls could talk, it would say the same of me.

I was 21, newly married to a high-school basketball coach, when we scraped together a down payment to buy the place. We moved in with a bed, some dishes, a few boxes of records and a life that lay before us like a freshly plowed field ready to be planted, dreaming of harvest.

I barely knew how to turn on the oven. I would learn.

That house helped me raise three children. It sheltered them in its walls, warmed them with its furnace, entertained them on its basketball court and welcomed them home time and again from kindergarten, from middle school, from college.

When they were grown, their dad grew weary of battling cancer and died, as he had lived, like a runner finishing a race with nothing less than his all.

For a while, the house became my closest companion. I spent days walking through its rooms, going up and down its stairs, running my hand along its banister, opening and closing doors, looking for something I'd lost but couldn't quite name.

Gradually, in pieces that fit together like a broken mirror, I began to realize that what I had lost was not my husband or my children. You can't lose love. It burrows down inside of you. You carry it in your bones.

What I had lost was something much harder to define: A sense of who I was. Getting it back would be an adventure.

I began by saying "yes."

Yes to lunch.

Yes to dinner.

Yes to Paris, whatever.

Yes to being alive.

It wasn't as hard as you might think, but it took some work. It still does. Maybe it always will.

When I remarried five years ago, we remodeled the house, gave the old gal a face-lift, and she looked fabulous. Six months later, my new husband was offered a job 500 miles away.

I can't say I was eager to pack up a lifetime of memories and move out of the only place I ever planned to call home. But one of the better lessons life will teach you, if you live long enough and try to pay attention, is this:

A house is not a home. Home is the place you see in the eyes of someone you love. It's a shelter that allows you to grow and helps you remember who you are. It's the place where you know you belong.

So I said "yes" and started packing. Three months and a monster garage sale later, I rented the house to a family that would love it -- and take care of it better than I had.

I'm looking forward to seeing it tomorrow. I'll walk through its rooms, run my hand along the banister and smile when I hear the creak in the stairs.

I'll spend some time oiling the soapstone sink in the kitchen, pull a couple of weeds in the yard and maybe shoot a few free throws on the basketball court.

I'll give thanks for all it has meant to me, and for all that it means to me still. Then I'll give the keys to yet another wonderful family that will love it and treat it as their own.

When he is older, I'll take my brand-new grandson out on the court and teach him how to shoot a proper free throw.

I'll show him where his daddy fell out of the tree fort.

I'll tell him all the stories, big adventures, the funny things we did, good times we shared, all the ways we said "yes" to life.

Someday we might once again call this house "home." For now, it's enough to call it "friend."

Sharon Randall can be contacted at P.O. Box 777394, Henderson NV 89077, or at www.sharonrandall.com.




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