Home is Who You Are

This is how I grew up: in a medium-sized red house on almost five acres of land with a field in front of the house that stretched all the way to the road and a swamp to the left of the house that stretched all the way to the pond and a yard in back of the house that stretched all the way to our neighbor's house, which you couldn't see at all from ours. In other words, this house stood like an island in a sea of grass and water and woods, no other houses visible from any part.

The house itself was just the right size for us. Alison and I each had our own small bedrooms, room for a bed and a desk and a bookshelf and a chair for sitting. My parents had a bigger bedroom. There was one bathroom upstairs that we all used; there were never those moments sitcoms are so fond of when one person was in the bathroom and the rest of the family was lined up on the other side of the door in pajamas and hair rollers, pounding to get in. Downstairs, there was a living room, a family room which served as an entryway, a den, a kitchen, a dining room, another bath. There was a big basement where laundry was done (note passive voice to indicate not by me) and where my mother had set up a big crafts room for us with a big table in the middle and shelves all around for art supplies.

The yard was what was big, luxurious about this house. We had a pond, in which sunfish could be caught, a swamp, in which mud could be harvested, a vegetable garden, a swingset, a playhouse the likes of which I fear I can never recreate for Lily and Annika, although I know that I will try. In the suburbs, the rules are different, or at least they seemed to be back then before the age of the mega-mansion, these houses going up with nine bathrooms, au pair suites, intercom systems for people to talk to each other from floor to floor. Outdoor space was why people were there in the first place. That, they were unwilling to sacrifice.

This is how I live now: in an apartment that will have, soon, I hope, a bedroom for the girls to share, a small playroom, a bedroom for us, a kitchen, and a main living space which will serve as a living room and dining room both. If we are all home, we are often in the same room. An intercom system would be ludicrous; a loud whisper could be heard by anyone in any room. The apartment is in a building with six floors, three or four apartments on each floor. There is a basement with laundry machines and a roof deck with a little garden on it, and a table and chairs. There are buildings on either side: another apartment building on one, a church on another.

There is no yard at this apartment. There is, instead, New York. There are parks in every direction, and some trees on our block, but what there really is instead of yard is people. People everywhere: in our hall, on our floor, there is a Yoga-practicing couple in their fifties who want the building to start composting. There is a gay couple with a tiny white dog who wears dazzling outfits. There is a young woman just transferred here from San Francisco who wants to help plant the roof garden. On our old floor, there is Richard and Sylvia and Laurent and Paul and Brant, Vanessa, Blake and Miles. I knew all of them better after a month of living in this building than I ever did the people who lived across the street from us when I was growing up.

Suburban living and city living are different. I would not trade my childhood of open space and skipping stones and jungle gyms and mud pie parties and hide-and-seek amidst the haystacks and lying in the hammock thinking up bad poetry for all the square footage in Manhattan. But now, it is the people I crave: the sound of voices in the hallway, the bounce of the basketball of the boy below us, the chords of his older brother's electric guitar, the back and forth across the hall with the children of our neighbors, the friendly encounters in the elevator, the homemade dog biscuits left on our door mat by Sadie and Scout's not-so-secret admirers.

The way you live, the space in which you live, affects the way you think, the way you feel, in ways both bad and good. For all the breathing room, air and sky and grass of my childhood, there was loneliness and real isolation, a sometimes feeling--onset mid-adolescence--of being trapped. For all the companionability and vibrancy and hustle and bustle and warmth of my urban adulthood, there is claustrophobia, an occasional desire to flee. But I wonder how my sense of self was formed in open space, and how this self felt drawn to such an other place once left to its own devices. A person cannot live, each day, in two places at once. A person has to choose.

But a person is also all the places she has ever lived, will ever live, the sum of her experiences. And different environments meet different needs at different points in a lifetime. But I do think it is worth thinking about the kind of space you crave, and why. I think it often says quite a bit about who you are and where you come from. And I think the trends toward suburban living and urban living at different points in history say quite a bit about who we are at large at certain points in time. More, more to come.