Dwelling Place

The damp gray days of November make me appreciate my snug little house, the cozy place where I am grateful to dwell. That word, "dwell", is delicious. It evokes images of fairytale cottages with golden lit windows, and the smell of warm bread, and a hearth. Home. It makes me feel secure, and deeply content, the way the cat looks when she's burrowed into a pile of my wool sweaters on a narrow shelf in the closet. It's a good word, even if it is sometimes co-opted by the upscale housing market, and furniture-lifestyle stores like Domicile (which I like to pronounce Italian style, for maximum snootiness).

You don't need money to dwell. You don't need 900 thread count Egyptian cotton sheets and handplucked eiderdown comforters. It is entirely possible to dwell in a trailer, or a cabin, or a yurt furnished with castoffs from Goodwill. It is impossible to dwell in anything furnished with molded plastic. (Thus my dismay with Dwell the magazine, a publication concerning itself with mid-century modern architecture, a style which leaves me cold as one of Harlow's monkeys).

I've always been sensitive to my living space. Once upon a time I lived in the second ugliest house in Raleigh. It was just up the street from the first place winner, a lopsided shack down at the bottom of the hill, where the rainwater festered and pooled. Its original shoebox shape had been accessorized by small, alarming protrusions emerging from random walls like warts; thin, chopstick-like stilts propped up a sagging second-floor porch, shingles peeled like sunburned skin from an uneven roof, and the small, overgrown front yard was graced with a toilet in lieu of a birdbath. The sort of house that made me wonder, uneasily, if my tetanus shot was up to date.

But my own house was ugly enough. It had the usual quota of cockroach infested cupboards, cracked linoleum, and well-intentioned but amateurish "improvements", like an enclosed porch that turned the back bedroom into an airless tomb, and a paneled garage-office carpeted with what looked and felt like putt-putt turf and smelled urgently of mold. And it had mean little windows, divided just at eye level by a thick horizontal bar, the kind of window that slants open mere inches, and begrudgingly, as though reluctant to permit the release of any stale air. I slept in this house. I paid rent for the privilege. But I did not dwell there.

My little house now is small, and snug. It has high ceilings and big windows. It looks out, this time of year, on brown trunks and yellow leaves. It's furnished, as are most people's houses, with a mix of the worn and new. It is not magazine ready. Let's hold off on the photo shoot. But it is home, and it is where I dwell.