There was this story I read the other day, it reminded me of the border town I grew up in but was placed near a much larger city. Poverty mixed with wealth a block away. One side growing up with a dirt floor, the other decorative tile. It is not where we live that makes us.
The home I grew up in had space under the floor. It was a mobile home but it had heat, a cooler, carpeting, a kitchen and a lot of love grew there. It was our home. Does a home feel the same with a dirt floor? I am sure it is what you make it.
If the home with a dirt floor is all one knows it isn’t scary or odd to the people inhabiting it; it just is. The person who grew up with the dirt floor may wonder at the tiled floor; my gosh, it has to be swept and mopped. What a lot of work is added with a tile floor.
In some homes in India, the compacted dirt floors of their kitchens are smeared with fresh cow dung to fight bacteria. The kitchen is kept neurotically clean. The cook must bathe before entering the kitchen and no shoes are allowed. The women crouch on the floor near small ovens to cook their beautiful, spicy dishes. This is what they know, it is their home and they feel pride in it.
The home my mother lived in as a small child had a dirt floor. She took us there to show us. Her brothers and sisters all slept in one room on the dirt floor. There was a kitchen with a dirt floor where my grandmother cooked their meals. This was not in a third-world country, this was in Michigan, United States during the great depression. My Grandfather eventually built a solid basement across their property some 200 feet away. The family moved into the basement when it was finished. The old house with the dirt floors became a chicken coop. I still remember many happy family gatherings in my Grandparent’s basement. A house was added to the top of the basement and it still stands to this day. My Aunt who is almost 90 lives there now.
A home is what we make of it whether it is built of sheet metal or bricks and mortar with stucco thrown on top for good measure. I used to look at the disheveled housing across the border and wonder at the people living there. Those homes seemed to be built one on top of the other and seemed to be thrown together with anything the people could find; shipping pallets, used lumber, bricks, mortar, and leftover pieces of fencing.
I felt sorry for those people living there in those ramshackle homes but now, looking back, was it my ignorance? They cook their meals in those homes, they make their families in those homes; a lot of love grows there. We are not our homes after all, we are what grows inside of those homes.
