It feels good turn a house into a home

It feels good to turn a house into a home. To take these walls and roof and floors and fill them with the things we have collected. It feels good to tilt our wine glasses against the lingering light as we lean back in the deck chairs, migrating to the living room couches when the sun pulls its last rays behind the Flatirons and the cool air is too cool against our bare skin. It feels good to have the bedroom doors open and the water running as the bathtub fills and someone shouts, “I can’t find my keys” and two voices run into one another, shouting back, “they’re on the kitchen counter, next to the stove.” It feels good to turn a house into a home.

It feels good to unpack boxes, crowding shelves, hanging paintings. It feels good to sit on a leather stool, twirling pasta onto a fork, wiping down sticky counters and emptying a bowl of vegetable cuttings into the compost bin outside the kitchen window, half listening to the conversation of three friends stepping one another up and over and through the turns of daily life. It feels good to turn the pages of a book while someone downstairs strums a guitar and her voice carries up the stairwell, sweet and lilting with only the crickets and the stars for accompaniment. It feels good to turn a house into a home.

It feels good to have these people moving around me with their warm, sweet energy and the sound of their bare feet on these wood floors and the opening and shutting of doors and always the laughter and maybe sometimes the tears, but always the sense that we are here, together. It feels good to turn a house into a home.