On Keeping a Home & Having a Home to Keep

Image Credit: Sylwia Bartyzel

I can’t imagine many people would describe me as a classically feminine woman. Yes, I enjoy nurturing my animals and the people I care about. Sure, I wear makeup and jewelry; I even sport a dress now and then. But I don’t want to experience pregnancy or birth, and I have a recurring nightmare in which I’m about to be married; that’s the whole nightmare: me anticipating my wedding and my impending marriage. Words can’t express the overwhelming relief I feel when I wake up and remember how very single I am.

I do find great joy in homemaking though. Cleaning, organizing, and decorating my home makes me happy. I enjoy making my home as cozy as possible; and when I have the time, energy, and money to do so, I like sharing my home with loved ones. Pinterest is the only social media app still on my phone for exactly these reasons. Scrolling the platform’s cleaning, organizing, recipes, home decor, and plants sections reminds me of the days when I’d flip through my grandma’s Better Homes & Gardens and my mom’s Ladies’ Home Journal with the enthusiasm of a 1950s TV housewife.

Even when I’m utterly exhausted from a week of working two jobs, I can hardly wait to shower my home with love and care on the weekends. Recently, on the eve of a holiday weekend, I fell asleep clutching my cat’s paw, gleefully thinking: “Tomorrow, I’m going to clean like a mother fucker.” And clean like a mother fucker I did.

Spring has fully sprung where I live, and all the ritualistic deep cleaning vibes this season typically brings has me thinking about the particular joy of keeping a home and having a home to keep — the privilege of it, even.

My community, along with much of the American South and the lower Midwest, has been devastated by spring storms over the past few weeks. Flash flooding, high winds, and extraordinarily powerful tornadoes have consistently hammered the region since mid-March. Hundreds of people in my area — and surrounding areas — have either lost their homes or witnessed significant damage to their homes. Local college students who call dorms their home have been displaced. Entire trailer parks have been decimated. Roof and siding damage is widespread among even the most fortunate of us.

In some cases, people have lost much more than the dwellings they call home: they’ve lost their loved ones; they’ve lost their lives. So far, me and mine keep getting lucky, and I hope it stays that way; but with each fresh storm warning, I wonder if all my hours of homemaking might be swept away in an instant. If I, or someone I love, might be swept away in an instant.

Humans aren’t the only animals who spend time and energy managing the appearance of their homes. Burrowing owls have been known to decorate their burrows with everything from plastic toy parts to cigarette butts to aluminum foil, among other things. Pigs have been observed decorating their homes with wildflowers and other plants. There are other animals who appear to have particular home decorating habits also. To be alive on planet earth, it seems, is to keep a home.

I’ve never owned a home, and as a chronically low-paid millennial, I don’t know if I ever will. Nevertheless, it concerns me that climate change is expected to negatively impact the housing market in the near future. In the U.S., anticipating rising sea levels is already a prudent choice for any person who’s considering buying or selling a house in the Sunbelt or most coastal communities. And as fires, earthquakes, drought, and hurricanes drive more and more people away from the coasts, increased chances of flooding and severe storms in inland regions must be taken into account during the home buying process. Meanwhile, changing landscapes and weather patterns, as well as ever-growing human encroachment of wildlife habitats, is making it harder for nonhumans to keep their homes.

As someone who was born and raised in tornado country, my tolerance for storms isn’t low; but this spring feels different. It seems like the storms are hitting harder, faster, and closer together. I know where in my home to camp out in case of a tornado warning: my bathroom. I keep a battery operated lantern under my sink, and there’s a fully-prepped “go bag” next to my dresser. My cats’ carriers stay on my porch in case we need to flee in a hurry. Still, when faced with potentially losing the home I love — the home I love to keep — I’m finding there’s only so much peace that preparation can bring.

Over the last decade, I’ve often found comfort in the fact that humans are so adaptable. As a species, we’re pretty good at figuring out how to survive, especially when we work together. I don’t know how humanity is going to stop the world’s richest and most powerful people from rendering the planet we call home uninhabitable, but I can only hope we’ll find a way to do so; or, in lieu of that, I hope we’ll find a way to survive their recklessness and our failure. I hope that, collectively, we’ll find a way to keep our home and love the home we keep.