At first, a house is not a home, a house is simply walls with a roof. A house has to be nurtured with love and attention before it can transform into a home. A house’s main purpose is to provide shelter from the outdoors, but a home’s purpose is to make you feel safe and comfortable while doing so. The best thing to do in a house is to take a little bit of yourself and incorporate it into the house. Whether it be a family photo, a child’s drawing, or even move around the furniture to your liking. When you first move into a house, you feel like an alien, on unknown land. Spend as much time in the house to familiarize yourself, and immediately start making it your own. The most important thing in a home is the memories that are imprinted into its walls, like lingering ghosts. An empty house is like a hollow husk, and it needs to be filled with memories. They don’t have to be huge one, they just have to be your own. For example, waking up in the morning for the first time, inviting the neighbors over, or even making dinner for the first time. Over the years, you move on to the bigger, more important moments, like a marriage proposal, having your first kid, and having Christmas with the family. When you look around your house and remember these life-changing moments, that’s when you know that you have a home. Your home is where you feel the safest surrounded by these ghosts of the past. After so many years in a home, sometimes moving out is inevitable. It may be something good, such as a better job opportunity, or it might be something like a natural disaster or a horrible memory. Bad memories can ruin a home, and no longer make you feel safe, such as when someone breaks in. However, the wonderful thing about homes is that you can always make new ones. As long as you can still make more memories, anything can be a home. It can be a friend’s house, your parent’s house, or even a hotel or apartment. Any house, or building for that matter, can be a home, as long as there are memories.
