The Cover of a Home

As I was brushing my teeth this morning, I found myself wandering my apartment, making little mental notes on what still needed to be done to make it “home.” Those little things that are always needed to reflect myself and my husband’s personality, to give people a chance to know us better when they step inside my house. There are the dolphins in the bathroom, swimming across the shower curtain and leaping out of the ocean in a picture on the wall. In the office is a cardboard stand featuring Altair the assassin from the game “Assassin’s Creed” that I acquired from a former workplace. Wolves and mountain lions stalk the hallway walls, opposite the family photos where everyone poses and smiles.

All of these things are what makes my home feel like me, and this made me wonder how that reflects itself in literature. One of the staples of a good book is the description of where that person is, how that person lives, and one of the best ways to do that is to describe their home. The sprawling, mysterious mansion in Great Expectations. The small, Southern home of Scout’s childhood in To Kill a Mockingbird. The New York townhouse in Catcher in the Rye. Or even the small shed that Bird lives in in Angela Johnson’s Bird, an adolescent African-American novel. All of these books describe the character’s home, from the color of the exterior to what kind of flooring to the pictures on the walls. A reader can’t truly feel the setting until they can see it, one of the most basic “Show don’t tell” principles. All of these great novelists and authors know this, and use to extensively. Even for those without a true home, the architecture is mentioned and marveled, like Notre Dame in The Hunchback of Notre Dame or the opera house in The Phantom of the Opera.

As I made all of those little mental notes this morning, I realized that yes, our home already reflects us. Half-finished, still haven’t quite made up its mind as to what it’s going to be. Perhaps the end result will be set in stone and absolutely lovely. More likely, I will revamp it entirely once it’s finished, only to re-do it all over again. What is your home? Finished and polished and a perfect picture? Or messy, half-done and a little frenzied?

Leona Urbansky