Roll the Bones: Home is Where One Starts From

By Chris Nelson

T.S. Eliot once wrote, “Home is where one starts from. As we grow older, the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated, of dead and living.”

It is a cold, quiet dawn in downtown Denver. I stand on the cedar porch of my new house, black coffee warming my hands, and as I look at our 1939 stone cottage surrounded by old-growth trees, a teardrop slowly rolls down my cheek, finally understanding the broken-hearted joy of Eliot’s words.

I turn to the house and whisper, “What do you think, house? Do you want to be my home?”

All my life, that’s all I wanted a home. But after moving ten times and living in five states, I had given up the idea of ever settling down. I told myself I wasn’t made to have a home, that I was destined to keep rambling down strange new roads, forever searching for something I’d never find.

The only real home I’d ever known was the one I grew up in an 1886 Victorian in the southwest suburbs of Chicago. It had hardwood floors, stained-glass windows, and an unusually deep yard. My mum remembers, “Your dad and I always wanted a Victorian. We were from the era of TV shows where all the happiest families had wraparound porches. We were suckers for that.”

When I was two, my parents bought that house sagging, creaking, and downright falling apart, but with a strong foundation and handsome bones. My grandfather, a retired electrician and Second World War veteran, took one look at it, grimaced, and said, “You bought a porch and a staircase, didn’t you?”

He wasn’t wrong. My grandpa rewired the entire house himself and was paid in roast beef sandwiches from Arby’s. He had spent years at sea as a Chief Electrician’s Mate and later helped install fibre-optic cable across the Midwest. He’d come out of retirement because his youngest daughter had bought a beautiful basket case, and he was determined to make sure it wouldn’t burn down.

“Every project we undertook involved dreams, stress, success, and failure,” my mum says. “But they all brought us closer.”

For twenty-five years, we worked on that house as a family. As a kid, I mowed the grass, raked leaves, and shovelled snow. As I got older, I learned to sand, stain, and paint, helping to turn the attic into a liveable space and repair the wicker furniture on the porch.

The hardest house project was the koi pond my dad decided to dig one summer when I was in high school. He impulsively borrowed a friend’s backhoe, cratered a four-foot-deep hole in the backyard, and left me to line the pit with river rocks and pebbles. The pond leaked constantly and needed daily refills from the garden hose, but it didn’t matter, because my dad knew my mum loved it.

“Working on the house was how your dad and I built our relationship,” she once told me. “It was one thing we shared completely, and we never stopped working on it for all of our lives together.”

Three years after I moved out of the house to start my career, my dad was diagnosed with cancer. Eighteen months later, he was gone.

“I sat in our bedroom in the dark,” my mum said. “The home I loved so much had turned back into a house a lovely house, but just a house. It wasn’t our home anymore. Your dad was my home. Without him, I doubt I’ll ever feel ‘at home’ again.”

A few months later, she decided to sell it. It was the first time I’d seen the place since the funeral, but the reunion wasn’t comforting because my grandfather was in the hospital with a severe infection and passed soon after, followed by my grandmother only weeks later. Within six months, my mum lost her husband, her parents, and her home.

As T.S. Eliot wrote, “As we grow older, the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated, of dead and living.” My mother has been wandering ever since, searching for something to anchor her again. In a way, I was doing the same, but no longer.

This new house is a continuation of my family’s story. It’s where I’ll share dreams, stresses, successes, and failures with the people I love, just like my parents did, and when I ask them for help on housework, they will get roast beef sandwiches in return.

It’s where my fiancée and I will build our life together, piece by piece, day by day. We’ll fix the leaks, plant the garden, argue about paint colours, and laugh about it later. It will bring us closer together.

This home is where we start from.