The difference between a house and home

 

This was my inheritance, but there are many caveats in calling this my inheritance.

It is not my inheritance alone, but ours, my brother’s and mine and the Gen- Xers in our family, who have all profited from the values and hard work and education of our grandparents and great-grandparents.

The inheritance was not this shack really, but a thin sliver up and down the hillside with 100 feet of shoreline, going up the hill 500 feet, totaling 0.94 acres. When we finally surveyed it after I became an adult, we found our neighbors on one side, incorrectly surveying themselves, had put the shack up on our property many years ago. They stopped coming up. They were out-of-staters. They let us grandfather the shack in, and later my brother bought their empty one-acre parcel too.

I have had many plans for this shack. I planned on making it my home the way I dreamed of a home when I was a boy. It is still a dream in my head, and then I see woodsmoke coming out of the chimney pipe, and spring beauties and bluebells in front, and, I guess, me alone, and not many others, and three pups…

When he was young James Egan dreamed of making this shack his home. Photo courtesy of James Egan

There is a distinction in English between a house and a home and sometimes the distinction can be difficult to explain or the words difficult to translate or interpret. For my Asian students who were studying English as a foreign language I would go to the blackboard and draw a square house with a triangle roof and a chimney on the roof and a window and the front door, and underneath that I would write in chalk ‘house.’ Then next to that I would duplicate the house, the square and triangle and chimney and door and window, then I would add some smoke spiraling out of the chimney and flowers under the window and four stick figures, two tall and two short to represent a family, and underneath this picture I would write ‘home,’ and I would encircle this home with a big heart. That is how I distinguished a house from a home for people to understand, and articulate.

This shack is not one of the places I write about in my writings; this is not one of the cabins in my stories. It does not play the role of a home.

This is not the trapper’s shack on the Flute Reed, nor my brother’s timber-frame; it is not the log cabin of my uncle’s upriver on the Flute Reed 2-1/2 miles; not the deer camp on the St. Croix Trail in the barrens, or the lake cabin on Cedar Lake or the chicken coop lake cabin on Big Lake.

It never was my home, not like the apartments in the big city, nor the rooms-for-rent in Asia, or the dormitories in Dublin or Minneapolis. Not like the houses in the suburbs. And certainly not the little old apartment on Lundin Lane when we were different people, and another family, enclosed by an oddly-shaped hand-drawn heart.