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Monday, January 10, 2004 Volume VII Number 2
by Ken Kemp
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y now you know. We’re in transition. It’s been a long time, it seems. We bid farewell to our friends in our little country town around Thanksgiving. It was a bittersweet moment. Farewells are like that with people you love. |
And then we were officially welcomed about the same time in our new town. It was sweet without the bitter. Welcomes are like that with people you love.
But our living arrangements have been temporary. We’ve spent part of the week in a house with a For Sale sign out front for a couple of months. On the other end, we’ve been cared for in a first-rate guest room, pampered actually, with our suitcases at the ready and in full daily use.
In the rush to beat morning traffic, I’ve forgotten something. One week, I forgot my shirts. Another, my toothbrush. Another, my good shoes. Another, my glasses. Another, my blow-dryer. Yet another, my Dockers. (Thankfully, blue jeans were not a complete violation of the dress code.)
So, when we come “home,” we are returning to the land to which we have already bid farewell. After the commute, an hour and a half away, when we lug our stuff into the guest room, we are in the land that represents our future, but to which we have yet to “come home.”
So today, I wait. I wait for the phone to ring. We are deep enough into the escrow here to believe that our house is sold and we have set a move-out date. But we still have not heard if the offer is acceptable to the sellers in our new town. And in the interim, I’m left to contemplate the mystery of “home.” (Contemplation, as you well know by now, is a favorite pastime.)
House vs. home.
I’m learning the difference really, by observing Carolyn (my former business partner, Grandmother to our grandchildren, life-long companion and best friend) journey through this transition along with me. I can understand now why the creator of the Mars/Venus metaphor became wealthy beyond his wildest dreams with a string of best-sellers and a record breaking, trend setting seminar tour complete with a PBS series. He’s on to something. We men process change differently than our spouses.
For me, this thing is a transaction. It’s a career move. It’s a change of scenery. It’s a new challenge. It’s interest rates and fair market value and tax base and square footage and loan-to-value and comps. It’s location and commute distance and accessibility. It’s a negotiation. And when I think that way, it’s a house.
To Carolyn, it’s a home.
And you know what? She’s right.
A house is sticks and plaster and glass and stone and tile and counter-tops and wires and plugs and fixtures. Some houses never become a home. That’s one of those tragedies that should never be. But Carolyn, well, she’s not even thinkin’ house. She’s thinkin’ home.
You might say: house is from the planet Mars. Home is from the planet Venus.
House is that tangible, physical structure we occupy. Home is the intangible, non-quantifiable mysterious place we live. House is material. Home is sacred.
So we Martians, according to Dr. John Gray, need to pay attention to the perspective of our Venetian. Our Venetian needs that Martian view of things, too, no doubt. It goes both ways. That’s the nature of our attempts at dialogue these days.
Here’s the real stuff: we are separating ourselves from a house, but much more than that. It’s a home. It’s easier for me to rationalize, intellectualize, elucidate and explicate the whole thing. That’s what Martians do. Carolyn is not so readily persuaded by my brilliant reasoning. I understand better now why that is.
There are connections, powerful connections, to everything you see in our home. There are moments forever emblazoned in her heart associated with every corner, every wall-hanging. And the walls really do remember. When the Virgin Mary “pondered these things in her heart,” she was the quintessential Venetian in the company of great women throughout the ages for whom ties bind, bind in a powerful attachment, not easily severed and when necessary, always with some degree of grief.
Should it be otherwise? I think not.
So the new place, whichever it is, will be for awhile a house.
But it won’t take long. I know this woman well.
It will become our home.
Posted in Valley Center, California
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2005
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