A house isn’t just bricks and mortar

By William Mckenzie

One of my favorite magazines is the September 1984 issue of The Atlantic. The cover story is about “The American House.” As I’ve moved over the years, I’ve toted around my copy because it reminds me how a house creates a sense of place.

I have no poll to back this up, but it seems like people break down into being a “place person” or not. I confess to being in the former camp, strongly so.

Being rooted in a place means being shaped by the stories, sounds and sights that are peculiar to that place. Some find that claustrophobic, but a connection like that can be an anchor. The influences of a place travel alongside you, no matter where you go.

That was why it was so difficult helping my mother move out of her house of 45 years this fall. My brother and I grew up in that home on Fort Worth’s West Side. We played football with our friends in front of it most Saturdays. We watched our dogs romp in the backyard. And we grew from boys to men under that roof.

I still see my brother’s older friends occasionally consenting to let us younger ones play football with them. I still see where our bird dog dug an escape hole under the fence. I still see where I said goodbye to my mother as I headed off to live in Washington and my brother drove off to graduate school.

That house has always been a magnet for our family. It was our home.

So when it came time to say goodbye, we swallowed hard. The walls represented so much more than bricks and mortar. They formed a place in our hearts.

We are hardly the only family to experience a transition like this one, especially as the multitude of baby boomers help their parents navigate their senior years. And, step-by-step, letting go became more natural.

Wonderful last memories

Part of the reason was my mother had a good place to go. And there had been wonderful last memories there, like watching our young twins experience their own joys.

There’s a pond near our house, where I often took the kids to play on Saturday afternoons. On our last visit, my emotions were getting the better of me.

Then, I saw our young daughter marching like a band major around the other side of the pond, as oblivious to the moment as a 5-year old should be. The strutting bandleader’s brother soon caught up with her, and they raced back to me, happy as larks. Their joy seemed a fitting bookend to the pleasures my brother and I had in that same place.

A large body of literature is created around the idea of place. In one way or another, Walker Percy, Flannery O’Connor and Tom Wolfe have done that. Something in the success of their works relates to the need in our psyches to belong.

I’m already attached to the stone house my wife and I share with our children. We’ve been there almost nine years, and we love the neighborhood, watching our children run like demons through the front yard.

So already I’m putting down another set of roots. I’d like to think they will help form our kids’ sense of place.

I’ve thought about that as I’ve watched them kick balls out front, hang their art along the hallways and get ready for school each morning. Will the memories, sights and sounds peculiar to their home form part of their identity?

In writing that Atlantic piece, architectural critic Philip Langdon reported on the widening variety of home styles prevalent in the 1980s. I’d like to think that a home is about more than the architecture. It’s about the people who live there and the stories they create.

In our case, a sense of place will travel with our family wherever we go.

X William McKenzie is an editorial columnist for The Dallas Morning News. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.