On the everlasting imperfection of a home
Dent in the wood floor. Dust. Another dent in a different room. Now a dent in the wall not the floor.
Helpless to fix it because how do you fix a dent? Replace a floor board? And no one can come fix the home, because of coronavirus. But let’s be real, it’s been two years since we moved in - wait, two and a half - and we haven’t gotten the electrical system rewired this whole time (and that was supposed to be a priority). Who are we kidding? We were never going to fix any of this for another ten years or until something breaks.
That’s the thing about homes. We idealize homes. Dream homes. Home is where the heart is. All of that is true and yet when we have imperfections, we question whether those are lies. They are not. Ultimately those ideas have nothing to do with a dream home’s manifestation, there will always be dents - or if not, dents-to-be. A perfect home has nothing to do with a perfect house, though we often conflate them.
And given the second law of thermodynamics that all order trends towards entropy, or chaos, even a perfect house is a mirage, so I advise one to not be bothered by that dent in the floor, dent in the wall, or loose screw in the chair (but maybe fix that one).
I will close with a beautiful quote from A Man Called Ove, written by Fredrik Backman:
“To love someone is like moving into a house," Sonja used to say. "At first you fall in love with everything new, you wonder every morning that this is one's own, as if they are afraid that someone will suddenly come tumbling through the door and say that there has been a serious mistake and that it simply was not meant to live so fine. But as the years go by, the facade worn, the wood cracks here and there, and you start to love this house not so much for all the ways it is perfect in that for all the ways it is not. You become familiar with all its nooks and crannies. How to avoid that the key gets stuck in the lock if it is cold outside. Which floorboards have some give when you step on them, and exactly how to open the doors for them not to creak. That's it, all the little secrets that make it your home.”