Ebony's Pearls

Pansy
Originally uploaded by nodigio

http://www.newsweek.com/id/110733/page/2

I have a different view of a home than, apparently, most Americans. Perhaps it’s because I grew up in another country and lived in a house that was occupied by several generations of my family. They didn’t own it, but they’d been leasing it for over 200 years, and expected it to stay in the family for at least as much longer. Thanks to WWII, my grandparents outlived all but one of their children – my mother, who married and moved to America, and then stayed until she died. The house my family lived in for a couple of centuries is now occupied by someone else.

But I still have the same feelings about a house. You buy it not just for yourself, but for your descendents. It’s not a “showcase”, it’s a place to live and grow. There needs to be room for several generations in the family to live there, both separately and together. The land needs to provide a portion of your support – through food crops, medicinal plants, or luxury crops like specialty herbs or flowers, or through rents, or through some sort of home-based business. All of the adults in the house work towards supporting the household, either through employment or taking care of the people living there and the property.

Although I’ve spent most of my adult life moving around (college and work), I want to set up a family estate where my children and their children after them will live. It’s a dream because America isn’t geared towards people staying in one place for long. Work forces many people to move every few years whether they want to or not. It’s hard to make roots when you keep getting transplanted, when houses are seen as disposable commodities and not generational investments. There are many people who change houses more often than I update my wardrobe, and with far less thought.

I’d like to have a family estate, a place where my family lives all under one large roof – with places for us to be private and places where we can gather together. I imagine it set up in “suites”: a sitting room, bedroom, and bath for each adult, and bedrooms with shared baths for the children, a large kitchen for cooking all our meals (either all at once, or in shifts, depending upon schedules), a large dining room where the entire family can gather for special meals, a large room where the whole family can gather for special occasions away from the dining table, a couple of small parlors where family members can gather or get away from other family members, a library, a kids’ playroom (maybe 2, one for the smaller and one for the teens), and outdoor entertainment/garden areas.

I can see it set up as a “C” shape – the adult wing and the children’s wing joined by the communal space in the middle. Mine being a small family, there’d be 4 adult suites, balanced on the children’s side with 4 children’s rooms, 2 guest rooms, and the 2 children’s play rooms. The middle would house the kitchen, the laundry room, the formal dining room and family room, the library, and at least 2 smaller parlors. The “C” would enclose the outdoor entertainment area with grill and patio furniture.

Of course, if I’m not doing as a heritage, I wouldn’t need all that. Just a kitchen, a bathroom, and one large room for everything else.