When my family first moved to Washington, my parents bought this house that we could settle down into during our childhood. They bought it specifically for my sister and I because the contents of the house suited our needs. There were four bedrooms, a spacious family room, and a bonus room for the two of us to play in when it got too cold or when it rained outside.
14 years later, we decided to move to another house across the city. When we packed up our boxes into the truck, I remember my mom telling me that the ones who were moving into our house also had two kids, but both were much younger than us. At that point, I realized that as we were closing one chapter of our life, another family was starting to open the same one. From the outside, it would be impossible to tell what type of household lived there because after all, the house was just a typical wooden-framed, two-story house.
Each house is just like that: on the outside, a house is nothing more than a building that at most shows your income level but on the inside, there are childhoods being lived out, adulthoods being fulfilled, and retirements being laid down. Each house holds a different chapter of someone’s life, but you would never know without being inside.
You can think of it as a word you find in a book or hear in a speech but don’t know the meaning to. You can only assume the word’s definition from its context, however without looking up the word, you would never know how much meaning and worth the word holds.
A house is merely a word, a home is the definition. A house doesn’t have any true value until someone buys it and creates their own meaning to it.