Home Is My Best Investment

Saturday mornings I slip silently out of bed in the early hours and creep through the hallway past the kid’s bedrooms, down the stairs.  The house, much like it’s dwellers, is mostly asleep.  The wooden steps groan under the weight of my clumsy feet and the heater rumbles to attention from its late night hibernation.  Each room its own peccadillo, its own petty offense.  Much like its inhabitants.  The overly formal living room, or the underly formal family room.  The kitchen with its slab countertop smack in the way of any reasonable sort of traffic flow.  The foibles of a structure, of a family.  Of my family.  My home is my best investment.  It is the warm blanket that huddles us together on a cold night.  The walls are not just barriers but boundaries.  The skin that separates inner from outer.

Before

I have lived in other places before.  The home of my childhood comes back to me in dreams.  I wander through the basement and climb up the steps into the outdated kitchen.  Becoming cognizant of the unreality, I study each nook and cranny.  I remember the place where my father both lived and died.  From sanity to tragedy, and back again to something that can only be defined as after.  After his death, we remade his office into a bedroom and I moved out from the safety of the space I shared with my brother.

Before and after.  That childhood home stayed with me years after my mom remarried and we moved.  I revisit it from time to time.  Not only in my dreams but on the way through town when we happen to drive in that given direction.

The facade has changed

But not the memories.  The memories crowd and shroud.  Scream and laugh. They become the blueprint for my adulthood life.

And settle a few miles down the road in another red brick house.  My biggest outlay of cash.  Home is my most costly investment.

Home is my best investment.

Dollars and Cents

I cannot argue the economic voracity of shelter.  I cannot spreadsheet safety and comfort.  Sitting alone as the sun rises in the living, breathing entity that has become my life.  Outlined by a bunch of walls made of thoughtless stone and concrete.

Home is my best investment.  The place I brought my children from the hospital.  The walls I painted and the bareness that I adorned with art, and memories, and life.

The day to day monotony of our existence housed in a single series of rooms.  My daughter playing legos on the floor.  My son sitting at the table accidentally smearing his homework with leftover grease from the evening meal.

The broken, and cracked, and chipped nature of things that age.

I have Invested

I have invested in stocks and bonds.  Speculated on art and baseball cards.  Side hustled with writing and real estate.

Home is my best investment.

A selfish, non-liquid asset with scant returns.

A place to awake in the morning.  The soft hum of the beginning of the day.

Coffee in the kitchen on that slab countertop with my sons grease stained homework.  Overlooking the living room strewn with blankets and my daughter’s legos.

Before everyone wakes up.