Home Sweet Home

I am sitting on the large verandah of what is likely my final home, reflecting on the meaning of "home" and what I’ve learned about how to make a house a home. After twelve moves in the U.S. and abroad (North Carolina, Peru, Bolivia, Ghana, Nepal, Washington, DC; Bangladesh, and Tanzania), I returned full-circle to North Carolina, the state where I was born.

In the North Carolina cities of Durham and Beaufort, and our nation’s capital, Washington, DC, we searched for a house that spoke to us. Overseas we were provided housing; our family’s task was to make it a home. How did we do that and what did it ultimately mean for the quality of our life? I am flooded with memories as I think about each of the places we lived. What made each one special? How did we shape a house to feel like home in a foreign country?

Since retirement, I’ve thought about these questions as a map for my memoir. I’ve longed to write about our experiences living abroad in six countries, as well as what it felt like to return to America after living abroad.  This would give me opportunity to revisit the treasure trove of letters and photos I kept from each country and think about how our focus on creating a comforting safe haven helped us to navigate unchartered waters in each new culture.

I thought about the question, “What makes a house a home”? I also asked others to share their perspectives about what makes a house a home. I’ve gotten some interesting responses, and with their permission, I share their opinions.

 My friend Lenore, is a real estate broker. She says she can tell whether it’s a house or a home within seconds after entering. She told me a story about her dad’s promise to his newlywed, Carolyn, a concert pianist. “We will have a grand piano even if we have to eat off it and sleep under it.” Music made their house a home. The kitchen was also an important place where her dad, Bob, cultivated his pie baking skills. Lenore concluded, “Home is where you can nurture your true self, kick off your shoes and be yourself, find your own voice and flourish. A home becomes a scrapbook of your experiences.”

Another friend Heidi, provided a brief, poetic response, “A house is a box; a home is the present inside. One is void, the other filled with treasure-food, art, music, warm blankets, laughter and love.” My friend, Ruth, told me that a home is where she feels safe.

A younger friend, Katie, penned a poem that celebrates the messiness of life in making a house a home. Here’s a verse:

A home is dynamic; a house is still

A home is warm; a house is vacant

A home has personality; a house is a template

A home is the heart; a house is the body.

Another person told me that a house becomes a home with plants, art, and books he loves. The concept has different meaning to each of us. It’s worth thinking about what that is, and then bringing it to fruition in your personal space.

My neighbor, Sunny, believes that energy defines a home. “You can feel that lives are lived there. The occupants’ treasures lovingly tell their story. Toys strewn across the floor, books open to the last page read or plants hanging in the windows. I am not speaking of clutter… but of telltale signs of life being lived. Homes have an energy that draws you in, makes you want to look into the corners, at the pictures on the shelves. You immediately sense that you will feel comfortable sitting there for a while. A home brings a feeling of comfort.”

She went on to say, “A house may be extremely well appointed with decor, design and cleanliness yet offer no energy. No feeling of wanting to linger. It may be pristine yet not lived in. My aunt had a stunningly beautiful house that was once featured in Architectural Digest. It had some of her personal treasures yet offered no feelings of home. Marble and cold surfaces, furniture nice for looking at but not sitting upon, white carpets that showed footprints. After she died, my uncle stayed in his bedroom, uncomfortable with the formal living spaces, afraid to make footprints on the white carpet. I encouraged him to redecorate the space with comfortable pieces of furniture. He and his caregivers began using the living room, watching TV, having lively conversations and laughing. Within a few months, the energy completely changed in that formal room. It was lived in. They made it a home.”

Ruefully, I was a bit baffled by my kids simple and pragmatic answers to the question. Chas said that a home is where his computer is. Bronwyn told me that its where her dogs are. While it’s true that these are their most essential possessions, they were also having a little fun with me. I’ve often heard them tell others the many ways their dad and I helped them adjust to so many moves and created homes abroad they look back on with great sentimentality.

As I age, I think about the precious quantity and quality of time, and how little I have left. What should I do each day that holds most meaning. Since retirement, I have written essays on many topics that start with an occurrence or thought pulled from daily life that arouses memories and connections to my past. I describe that as a living memoir. Threading experience, present with past.

I have written a great deal about the seaside, historic community where I currently live, the importance of friends, and the home we have carved out to settle ourselves for the final years. But if I knew that I had only six years left to live I would slowly delve into the six boxes that hold bulging file folders on each overseas country we lived. I would write about those years with this archival material-our homes, the people that we met, and, yes, the adventures. I look at those boxes and know it is time to condense the contents for my own satisfaction and as a legacy for my children. I want to remember what mattered in my life as I explored the world, anew, in Peru, Bolivia, Ghana, Nepal, Washington, DC, Bangladesh and Tanzania. Did my work matter? Did my life? Did my obsession to elevate the importance of making a house a home mean as much to my husband and kids as to me? Or was I just throwing an anchor for myself in order to navigate the unknown? Perhaps, but also, in the effort to make a house feel like hone, there’s a larger message for living. Maybe I’ll figure it out by the time I conclude my story.

Before I open the boxes that will reveal my family’s life abroad, I shall first remember and appreciate how our first two homes in Durham, NC, helped my husband and me launch our life as a family. Over the next twenty-five years we moved from house to house, striving to make each one feel like home, a place we could live our best lives. Our first two homes set the stage.

2913 Monroe Avenue House, Durham, NC 1977–1981

 Recent photo of the Monroe Cottage, not as charming with recent changes, and rose-colored memory

Christmas holidays 1976, a year into our relationship, Charles and I were on a whirlwind tour of Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia where he had traveled and lived after college graduation. Prior to the trip, we decided that, upon return, we would set up household together. We started looking for a house to rent but found nothing that suited us and was affordable.

In the highlands of Peru, I came across a stone amulet that symbolized a rural home and essential animals—sheep and llama. Locals referred to these small stone carvings as encaychus (offerings) to Pacha Mama, Earth Mother, in exchange for her blessings: I offer you my house and possessions in exchange for your protection of them. It spoke to me about what we do to protect what we love and what we give for that protection. 

A variety of these amulets are important to the Andean culture. We saw “encaychus” representing llamas, sheep, swaddled newborns, weaving tools and looms, fertility, and astrological symbols. The stone-carved houses and farms are called chakras. I saw one large chakra that represented an entire village. Traditionally, these stone carvings are wrapped in a prized woven textile and buried. Once a year they are dug up, re-blessed in a special ceremony, and then re-buried. I thought that buying one might bring us luck in finding a house to rent once we were back home. As our Peruvian trip came to a close, I purchased a newly carved chakra in the market. Apparently, the spell was cast because, back home, we landed the best house ever. The little stone carving has blessed the kitchen windowsill of every home in which we have lived.

After we returned to Durham from Peru, we put an advertisement in the newspaper describing us as a nice and conscientious early childhood teacher and public health graduate student looking for a place to rent. I received a call from a woman who said she “might” have something and we should meet her at the house on Monroe Avenue, close to the neighborhood where Charles grew up.

The house was located on a quiet dead-end street. I could immediately see that it was an idyllic setting for launching our life together. The owner warily showed us around the house and shared her story. She was in her sixties and married to a man in his eighties. They lived in an historic farm house with a great deal of acreage and upkeep responsibilities. Once her husband passed, she dreamed of living in a tiny cottage with no upkeep, so she bought this one several years prior to our meeting. She furnished the house with a card table and four chairs and met friends there to play bridge. Rather than owning a house for an occasional bridge game, she decided to rent it if she could find someone who suited her. It was evident that she loved the cottage and was reluctant to rent it to strangers.

At first sighting, we fell in love with the picturesque cottage built in 1951. It was freshly painted a smoky taupe with maroon Bahama shutters, nestled in a patch of tall pines, surrounded by a wooden split-rail fence. The front yard was carpeted in pine straw; no grass to mow. A prior owner was an interior designer and the 830 square feet interior oozed with charm. The seagrass-papered walls cast serenity on the living room and hallway, which led into a kitchen, bursting in color with orange, green and yellow flowers on wallpaper and drapes. One bedroom and bath, plus a small room for a dining/office area. One wall of the kitchen was all glass. Its doors opened onto a deck, and beyond that was a sunken brick terrace surrounded by a privacy fence. Tiny, but gorgeous—an interior decorator’s toy house.

As the owner showed us the property, Charles pointed out some needed repairs and dead tree branches that he could take care of for no cost. Then she found out that Charles’s dad was a Duke psychiatrist as was her retired husband. She was sold on us and began to discuss price of rent.

Before we went any further, Charles told her that she needed to know that we were not married. She looked at him, paused and said, “I’m much more interested in your housekeeping habits than your bedroom habits.” As it turned out, in years prior to moving to Durham, she had worked for the Masters and Johnson sexuality research lab.

We lived happily on Monroe Avenue for three years. It was the setting where we “played house,” hand-fed a squirrel who came to the back door each morning, and hosted our wedding party in the back garden.

If asked what makes a house a home, I would have said this: It’s a place where I feel loved. It’s a pretty place, a backdrop or stage-set for the life I want to live. A kitchen that makes me feel like a chef, a private porch and garden for reading a book or dreaming, an environment in which we were pleased to welcome friends. A place to shelve books and a repository for Charles’s Peruvian textiles and a few pieces of antique furniture I had begun to collect. It doesn’t have to be exquisite by monetary standards but a place that has structural aesthetics, a canvas on which to create.

2203 Sprunt Avenue, Durham, N.C. 1980–2010

Two years later I was pregnant with daughter Bronwyn and felt the need to build a nest. The cottage was too small. It was time to look for a place to buy. I was working fulltime to establish a public school-based early childhood center and in the evenings taught a class for childcare workers at the community college. Charles, a graduate student with more free time, was tasked to look for a house. He found one that he liked because it had an adequate space for his work textile restoration. As an aside, he said, “What I really need is a house with a 1950’s bomb shelter to secure my textile collection.” He also fancied a darkroom and a woodworking shop. We went to see the house and it didn’t thrill me. It was cramped by houses to the right and left; the house looked like it was holding its breath. I shook my head, “No.”

Charles then suggested that we drive by another house in the same neighborhood that had just come on the market that day. It was a brick Cape Cod-styled house perched on a hill with a massive tree in the front. I could see myself sitting on the screened porch, reading a book with a cup of tea. The porch looked out to trees and a gorgeous English garden of an elderly woman neighbor, Rose Spearman, I would come to adore.

Rose Spearman (above) holds a forever-dear place in my heart. In the afternoons when newborn Bronwyn screamed with colic, Rose would walk with her in Rose's beautiful garden. As a preschooler Bronwyn enjoyed tea parties with Rose drinking 7-up fron Rose's childhood tea set and wearing a broad-brimmed red hat on the mossy brick patio.

There was adequate space between this house and the one on the right, which was forested to its right. There were only two houses on the block, both framed by gardens and trees. It was picturesque.

We contacted the realtor who showed us the house the next day. I liked the layout, especially the greenspace views from the kitchen windows and through the double glass doors that led from the dining room to the flagstone screened porch. I would have bought the house for the porch. The porch had a screened door that opened to an enclosed back garden. I pictured a brick terrace and a fountain, which Charles installed a few years later, mailing each carved stone from Bolivia, back to Durham. A very colorful story, as are most of Charles's projects (obsessions).

We were both sold on the parts of the house that spoke to our needs and dreams. Charles even added a secret room (vault) for his textiles, that Chas finally discovered at the age above from a set of cryptic clues his dad provided.

The Sprunt Street house taught me that a home is a structure that smiles at you upon your arrival and beckons you to a niche where you can read, plant flowers, cuddle a child, talk to a friend and listen to birdsong. A dwelling with space for a family to carve out their individual interests and to gather at the end of the day to cook, eat together, and read stories before sleep.

From this home we launched our life abroad and returned to it each summer from foreign lands to replenish our roots. We loved our adventurous lives in Peru, Bolivia, Ghana, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Tanzania, but could not wait to spend two months at our Sprunt Street house in Durham.

Our two children made friends, attended arts and science programs, played in the park, decorated floats for Fourth of July, spent weekends with grandparents at Kerr Lake, and with cousins in the “country” who taught them to play outdoors like wild things. A home to carve out identify as Americans and North Carolinian's.

We spent each summer in that house and upon arrival reclaimed an instant social network.

I developed two life-long friendships. Elizabeth, a midwife, delivered our first born, and her daughter, Sara, used to say, “I was there for your birth, Bronwyn, ‘cause I was in my mom’s tummy.”

And there was Sally who greeted me each summer with this re-introduction to life in America. Those welcome words, “Deborah, this is what you need to know,” gave me the nutshell briefing of what was in and out, what to see and do, and well-researched summer programs and best camps to send each child. She fed me glorious meals at her table while the children played like puppies.

Still friends after all these years!

Sally’s husband, George, was one of the mavericks in internet development and testing. George gave each of us a Gmail address. He said, “You don’t know what this is or what it is for but you will thank me later.” We did, of course.

One year, an American friend living abroad recounted this story upon return to post after their summer vacation. She said, “We arrived in Connecticut and spent the night in my parent’s house. The next morning my daughter asked, If I go downstairs, do you think that woman would give me a glass of water?” That woman was her grandmother. This was the moment my friend realized the importance of establishing and creating a home where memories are compiled and there is a common reference for looking back on a frenetic life to that one spot that’s always the same. Here the family unpacks their suitcases and invites family and friends to visit and make memories together. For many expatriate kids, pre-internet, the ritual of summer vacation was guessing how many old friends from previous posts they would see in transit at the Amsterdam International Airport.

 Our Durham summer house allowed our children to develop close relations with their grandparents and great grandmother. On left, kids with grandparents at Kerr Lake. Middle photo, my dad teaching basket weaving to Bronwyn. Great Granny Myrtle Hensley Bowen greeting newborn Chas.

Even as adults, our children hold a place of reverence in their hearts for that home on Sprunt Ave, which provided the one wonderful constant in their lives. Joyfully, Bronwyn had the chance to live in the house, again, for three years when she was a graduate student at Duke. When we finally sold it in 2010, we were all quite sad; it was like cutting off a piece of ourselves.

As each of us proceeds through the stages of life, we are inevitably faced with moving and resettling due to jobs, sizing up, sizing down, and finally to accommodate the needs of an aging body and mind. At each step along the way, life is richer, and choices improved, if we take time to look back on what mattered most in the places we lived throughout our life, and take those lessons forward.

My thoughts wander to the months I lived in an unpainted farm house in West Virginia, during a semester off from college. Though my stay was brief in the broader scheme of things, both the place and time remain very dear.  Perhaps it was my first reckoning with what makes a house a home. Why do I have fond memories of a ramshackle abode with the barest of furnishings?

First, my companion, Tom, and I had a sense of mission and purpose.  He was a VISTA volunteer and I worked in an early education program for really poor children. So when we returned home, we felt satisfaction from helping others less fortunate, a job well done.

There was a front porch, which almost always pops up when I think of core elements of home. There was music and harmony… Almost heaven, West Virginia, life is old there, older than the trees, take me home country road. Looking out over the fields, the serene landscape provided a deep sense of belonging. Beyond basic food and protection, I was learning that I need natural beauty, a sense of purpose, a loving connection, conversation, and some form of art, be it music, drawing or books. The intangibles of home. The West Virginia home was little more than a shack but it taught me some important life lessons. A home is not a glorious collection of “things,” but a place where you return for solace, validation and unconditional love.  

This brings my thoughts a step further to homelessness. Being without a home must be like losing an organ. My heart aches for those who huddle under a bridge or in a forest thicket, sleeping on whatever they scrounged from dumpsters and second hand stores in frigid temperatures. From them, we can learn the absolute essential elements of finding home.

There have been efforts to arrest homeless people and move them to shelters, often lined up on cots in a church basement or gymnasium. Invariably, they leave these warm shelters and institutional food to return to homeless encampments that have become family. Here they have the ability to share a meal around a campfire with chosen friends and then retreat to the privacy of their makeshift shelter. The freedom of choice, to have privacy as well as a shared community who know and look out for each other.

I’ve read about experimental approaches for addressing homelessness in Oregon and Washington state. The approach is to construct a community of tiny one room homes with a front porch and two rockers set on landscaped lots with soft lantern lighting and curved paths leading to a shared kitchen and community space. This housing enables formerly homeless people the opportunity to move together with the same community to an attractive verdant setting that provides the key elements they desire. A working model that reveals some of the core aspects of coming home.

In my elder years, I may not be homeless, but forced to recognize how to live my best life with what I have or can afford. I may not be granted the luxury of a garden, so I will look for a place with south-facing windows that provides sunlight for a jungle of houseplants. No room for bookcases but is there a library nearby? Which pieces of furniture have a story to tell and must go with me? Most importantly, I will look for love within a community of people who share my values and passions and an interest to know what mattered to each of us along life’s journey.

Memories of home will surely be central to the final stories that each of us tell. For home really is where the heart is, a repository of memories and the relics of our life.

Written by Deborah Llewellyn

January 31, 2026

WWW.deborah-llewellyn.com/blog

Deborah.llewellyn@gmail.com

'”Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roamBe it ever so humble, there's no place like home…”

                                                John Howard Payne 1823