An Ode to My Small, Old Home

In the era of McMansions, I appreciate modesty, intimacy, and things that last

My small, old home. Photo via realtor.com.

By most definitions, the house where I spent my holidays was a “dream home.” It was sparkling and sprawling, and all the furniture matched. Electrical outlets were strategically positioned wherever you could possibly need one, overhead lighting created just the right ambience, and the walk-in closets were large enough to dance in.

Outside, the impeccable lawn was fed by automatic sprinklers and maintained by landscapers who visited once a week. There wasn’t a weed in sight. All told, the house was a lovely place to gather with family for a week. I gave it five stars on AirBnb.

But I have to say, it was nice to come back to my small, old home.

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My family has occupied our home for ten of its 117 years. As one might expect of anyone or anything that is over a century old, our house gets grumpy from time to time. Something is always leaking or rusting or flickering. The floors sigh under our weight. The windows no longer fit in their frames.

Nothing matches. A decade-old hardwood floor, installed by the house’s previous owner, stretches through the living area and then abruptly stops at the kitchen, where he must have run out of energy, or money, or both.

There, another wood floor begins, a much lighter and much older one, the wood slabs square instead of rectangular. They are etched with stories and scratches that sprawl and snake like varicose veins.

The very back of the kitchen leads to a bathroom that looks like the afterthought it was — added on when indoor plumbing was installed sometime in the early 1900s. In the morning, while I shower and my son brushes his teeth and my daughter does her hair, the small room is sultry with the closeness and heat of human bodies.

Our furniture is a hodgepodge of Craigslist and estate sale finds. There are a few items that we hauled across multiple state lines from my grandmother’s house. There’s also my children’s bunk bed, which used to tower in the corner of the bedroom that my sister and I once shared.

They are all solid pieces, each slightly deformed in their own special way. Our dining room table bears the scars of a hot muffin tin that was laid on it by a babysitter who didn’t know better. The handle is missing on my top dresser drawer. The bar that once kept me from falling out of my top bunk has been duct-taped in three places.

But the only items of furniture I consistently regret are the intermittent Ikea and Wayfair purchases. There was my children’s dresser that took half a day to put together and half a year to fall apart. The red loveseat that glowed with newness for a couple weeks before devolving into shabbiness with astonishing efficiency. And the rickety black desk I hastily purchased when my stepson moved in, which works okay as long as you don’t lean on it.

I take no pride in these items. There was no care put into creating them, no joy in purchasing them, and no delight in assembling them. They were made to look pretty on websites and in showrooms, made to tempt us with their low prices and gleaming finishes, and ultimately made to meet an untimely demise.

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I grew up in a small, old home — not quite as old, but perhaps a bit smaller, than the home I live in today.

Everything in my childhood home creaked. We had upstairs neighbors who made the ceilings creak. We had creaky doors and creaky floors. In the mornings, my sister and I were often serenaded by the melodies of hard plastic rolling on and bouncing off hardwood floors. The boy who slept in the bedroom directly above us liked to start his day with a hearty game of pre-dawn whiffle ball.

The walls of our home were crowded with our artwork, the mantles with our lumpy pottery. Nearly all the furniture I grew up with is still there now — the sofa where I curled up to read books, the dining room table where we gathered nightly, the piano on which I stumbled over chords and around which we sang on Christmas Eve.

My husband, who moved more than a dozen times as a child, feels less of a connection to a particular home, but he does look back fondly on his days in the “Avenues” of Salt Lake City. The Avenues were where he and his mother shared various one-bedroom apartments, where he could feel her warmth next to him at night.

They left the Avenues eventually to pursue The American Dream, renting a succession of suburban houses, each one larger and further away from the city than the last. He remembers the loneliness he felt in a shiny, spacious townhome that overlooked a desolate field of debris. In the morning, he could no longer walk with friends to school. At night, his mother was no longer next to him but in her own bedroom down the hall, and she felt a million miles away.

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Did I always appreciate the intimacy of my childhood home? Not really. Even as a small child, I sought out solitude, arising in the semi-darkness of the early morning to snatch a few moments to myself.

In high school, everyone was always in my business, and I couldn’t stand it. If I wanted to have a private conversation, I had to resort to shivering on the deck or closing myself in the hall closet. And of course, as soon as I emerged there would be all sorts of questions about who I was talking to and whether or not it was a boy.

I still feel that way sometimes in my current home. Wherever I am, there is either the presence of humans, the sound of humans, or the evidence of humans — damp towels, dirty socks, discarded snacks.

But physical proximity breeds emotional intimacy, for better or for worse. And I would argue that it’s mostly for the better. I have well-to-do friends who believe that their social status necessitates sprawling, gleaming homes — much like the AirBnb where I spent my holidays. Their homes might be beautiful by some standards, but I find them cold, impersonal, generic.

These families can easily escape to solitude, but they also default to it, shutting themselves away behind different doors, often on different floors.

Our small home, by contrast, squeezes us together. It also squeezes us outside, into the front yard and onto our street, where we mingle with neighbors, where my children climb trees, and where they join other kids to traverse the length of our block on bikes, scooters, skateboards and their own two feet.

We have a small backyard where we eat dinner when the weather permits, but we spend far more time out front. To survive the Covid winters, I splurged on a heat lamp, which allows us to sit on our front porch year round. And oh, do we sit on that front porch. My kids play chess there, I sneak out there for my Solitary Thinking Time before dinner, and my husband and I collapse there after the kids go to bed to catch up on our respective days and lament the state of humanity.

Whenever I pass through wealthier neighborhoods, I am struck by how empty they feel. Listless almost, devoid of human activity. A bike commute once took me along Blackstone Boulevard in Providence, Rhode Island, which was flanked on one side by massive, opulent houses. In the summer, the street was eerily quiet. Ostensibly, there were humans in those houses, but they were shut away, ensconced in their own private spaces. There were no children in the lavishly landscaped front yards, no adults on the immaculate porches.

My office was in South Providence, a much poorer neighborhood, and there, the fire hydrants spewed water into the streets and hordes of children splashed and squealed.

I feel no warmth in the neighborhoods and living spaces so many Americans consider “desirable.” I prefer the buzz of human activity and the squeals of children.

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Is it too much sometimes? Oh yes. Have I ever felt a pang of jealousy upon beholding a friend’s expansive granite countertops? Sure. Do I sometimes fantasize about replacing our weathered kitchen floor? Absolutely.

But I also know there will come a day when my husband and I find ourselves puttering about all by ourselves, and the rooms that once felt stifling will suddenly feel cavernous. We’ll sit on the porch and wave to neighbors and reminisce about all the stories etched into our walls and floors and furniture. Maybe our grandchildren will one day climb the tree in our front yard.

Our culture encourages us to value privacy over human connection. To value space over intimacy. To value newness over things that last.

But for me, our small, old home has everything I need.