A home is not a home unless it was someone else’s home first, your mother’s and her sisters’ and her parents’ home, built from a log cabin kit in the mid-1970s.
A home is not a home unless it’s in the middle of nowhere in Texas, up 20 miles from the Gulf Coast, where at night you can see the blinking lights of a nuclear plant’s reactor domes next to the blinking lights of windmills stretching for miles and miles of farmland. A home is not a home unless those lights sit on the horizon under the Milky Way—because a home doesn’t have light pollution, it has clear open skies—and over the heads of the sleeping cows in the pasture.
A home is not a home unless it has bedrooms that have earned names over the years – the Computer Room (now the Bar), the Sunflower Room, the Pink Room (full of creepy dolls), Underella’s Room (because a home is not a home unless it is haunted by Underella, a ghost of unknown origin which several cousins will convince you is ready to interrupt your dreams).
A home is not a home unless it has pictures of all the grandkids and great-grandkids and various long-dead relatives lining the walls of a hallway thinner than a bowling lane. A hole is not a home unless that hallway now features a hole in the wall of unknown origin after your cousin’s husband’s bachelor party.
A home is not a home unless the décor is pretty wild all the way around, come to think of it—a jackalope and a deer head and a stuffed bobcat all displayed prominently in the den. A home is not a home unless the stuffed bobcat has a story that involves your grandfather accidentally hitting it with his car.
A home is not a home unless you spend Christmas and Easter and Thanksgiving and pretty much every other Sunday in its walls and on its lawn for the first 17 years of your life. A home is not a home unless you’ve laid claim to a “spot” for opening Christmas presents, and that spot is on the floor up against the stone wall of the woodburning fireplace, directly the den from your grandfather’s old barber chair that your uncle’s claimed for his own spot.
A home is not a home unless you can still picture it covered in snow—“eight inches! We got eight inches!”—during the freak storm on Christmas Eve in 2004. A home is not a home unless you’ve seen the confused look on the faces of the cows who have known nothing but humid Texas heat and are now staring at a six-foot-tall snowman.
A home is not a home unless it’s surrounded by dewberries—which are definitely not blackberries, as anyone from Matagorda County will tell you, and which thrive on the barbed-wire fences dividing up the ranch. A home is not a home until you’ve tasted Nanny’s dewberry cobbler with vanilla ice cream and wondered if this was what heaven was like, which it might be.
A home is not a home unless you and your cousins commandeer the kitchen island every Christmas/Easter/Thanksgiving, with you sandwiched between the two older boys, looking up to them (physically and metaphorically), trying to eat more dinner rolls than them, trying to impress them.
A home is not a home unless you and your parents and your sister moved in with your grandparents there for four months when you were in middle school. A home is not a home until you’ve slept in 80-degree inside temperatures because your grandfather had lung cancer and was constantly cold. A home is not a home unless you’ve completely slept through an ambulance coming in the middle of the night because your grandmother was worried that your grandfather was dying, even though the sirens were blaring all up the driveway (and Papa would live for a couple more years after that).
A home is not a home until you have your high school graduation party there and your mom and dad put together a video for it and you have to sit in silent embarrassment while “You’ll Be In My Heart” from the Tarzan soundtrack plays over pictures of your childhood, even though you’ve never actually seen Tarzan all the way through and have no emotional connection to the movie or to Phil Collins. A home is not a home unless more than a decade later you realize that wasn’t the point.
A home is not a home unless it’s played host to “The Mother’s Day Incident” a decade ago, after which your mom’s oldest sister and her brood stopped coming around to holidays. A home is not a home unless all the men in the family walked outside during The Mother’s Day Incident and stood around a truck and talked about their own trucks. A home is not a home unless that’s the best the men in the family ever all got along.
A home is not a home unless the pictures in the bowling-lane-thin hallway change after the house is bought by your aunt and uncle after your grandmother finally moved “into town” and your aunt and uncle take down most of the pictures of you and your sister and replace them with more of your cousins, and yet it still feels like your own place.
A home is not a home unless some relative of your cousin’s wife gives your aunt and uncle a bizarre bearskin with bright crimson stitching that now hangs over a wood beam in the den and looks out of place even next to the jackalope and the deer head and the bobcat.
A home is not a home unless it’s where you went when your grandmother died, driving down through tears and rushing into the arms of your mother. A home is not a home unless the family gathers there on that day despite it being March 2020 and nobody knows if we’re allowed to hug because of this COVID thing on the news and nobody really cares either, because Nanny was dead.
A home is not a home unless you’ve defiled it, unless you took your dog out there for a “restful weekend” and drank so much you passed out on the lawn sitting against a tree looking at a star fixed in the sky. A home is not a home unless you snuck into the Bar (neé Computer Room) multiple times every holiday past the age of 21 so you could drink more than anyone else. A home is not a home unless your cousin’s husband had too much to drink at Thanksgiving and argued vociferously about guitar solos and then passed out on the couch and you were glad because that meant nobody was worried about how much you were drinking.
A home is not a home unless it’s seen the worst of you and still welcomes you through its gate and past the cows and up the driveway. A home is not a home unless you’re truly nervous to take the girl you love there because you want her to love it just as much as you do, but she’s from a big city up north so you’re afraid she won’t like it.
A home is not a home unless you leave loving her even more because she was so excited to take pictures with the cows.
