A Home For One -- By: Evelyn Bence

Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 05:3 (Summer 1991)
Article: A Home For One
Author: Evelyn Bence


A Home For One

Evelyn Bence

Alone. Whether I liked it or not, it was my physical state, the moment the moving van, empty as my still-unplugged refrigerator, drove out of sight I stood in what would become my living room and scanned the tops of brown boxes which had been packed and then rolled three hundred miles, just, it seemed, so I could unpack them.

A lease, hidden in one of the boxes, declared me the sole inhabiter of these three disheveled and cold-looking rooms.

Suddenly I regretted having signed an agreement which included the prohibition of furry pets; I wished a cat were rubbing against my ankle, reminding me that I was remembered and needed—here and now.

Taking a survey of the premises, I walked to the kitchen, the bedroom, then I returned to the kitchen, where I boiled water in an open pan. Surely a cup of hot coffee would set my hands a-working, and some semblance of order was the immediate goal toward which I threw my efforts; in larger terms, the task ahead of me was to make a barren apartment into a home.

Home. What does it mean to someone who lives alone? Countless sermons, seminars, and songs, which define the word in terms of people, make one’s own rooms and furnishings seem less than adequate, less than deserving of the warm word. But the Thorndike Barnhart Dictionary defines home as a “place where a person can rest and be safe,” and, in her book Once My Child... Now My Friend, Elinor Lenz says that “Home, for adults, is a place that they have created for themselves and that reflects their tastes, and life style.”

As I unpacked boxes, placed dishes in cabinets, and hung pictures on walls, I re-created a place that reflected who I am. As I declared the space mine, it started to define me.

In his book, A Place for You, Paul Toumier suggests, “One becomes a person only if one really has a place. ... And that place is no abstraction. It is ... the fireside, the photographs on the mantelpiece ... the books on the shelves, all the little details with which they have become familiar,” and he wonders if “the relationship of people with places is not more stable than that with their fellow human beings.”

The ability to transform three empty rooms into a place that seemed more mine than did a room in my parents’ house hadn’t been naturally endowed. Seven years before, when I had moved my carload of earthly possessions into two tiny furnished rooms, I had sworn I would never own anything that wouldn’t fit inside my Vega.

Who or what I was would never be defined in such permanent and material terms. I was temporary; home was someplace I’d left and someone I would some day find. In the words of Emily Dickinson, life itself was “over...

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