thoughts at the antique store
making a house a home
Making my way through the antique store, I check my phone again, referring to the list in my notes app of the pieces I am looking for. Accordion rack. Copper pots and pans. Vintage spice jars. Wooden shelves.
Sweat from my iced coffee drips down my wrist, and the flickering fluorescent lights start to give me a headache. I feel my heart rate start to climb. I can only stand to be in places like this for so long before the lack of windows, fresh air, and the feeling of old germs crawling over me instigate a swift departure.
So far, my little cart is empty. I’d seen several pieces that I admired, but I didn’t need them. Well, actually, they just weren’t on my list; I technically didn’t need anything in this place. My husband and I had recently purchased a house, and since then, I had fallen into a malaise over the house feeling like just a building, instead of our home. Pinterest-fueled images of beautiful houses flooded my vision, though the desire to beautify wasn’t solely correlated to my use of social media.
I had a feeling this was caused by a few things:
Being in my second trimester, the nesting urge has set in swiftly and urgently. There were days I would be plagued with a feeling of directly negatively impacting my child if I did not clean, organize, sort, and decorate. As if my son’s life depended on our house being cute when he arrived.
Something about being a housewife fills one with the incessant urge to indulge in retail therapy. I thought back to a conversation with a friend of mine who is married and currently unemployed, in which she expressed the same desires. “I feel like I always need to be buying something!”
Now that the house was ours, I felt compelled to make my mark upon it. Perhaps, I thought as I considered a cute set of vintage canisters, this is why credit cards were such a big hit with upper-middle-class housewives in the 1950s. The cannisters were a bit pricy, and besides, I had my grandmother-in-law’s mushroom cannisters from the seventies waiting for me when she passed. Not that I wanted her to pass just so I could aquire some vintage canisters, I quickly reassured myself, my conscience having been flooded with guilt at the mere thought of her passing.
We couldn’t afford for me to buy everything I wanted to create my dream home; I would have to settle for practical essentials and perhaps a few pieces of artwork for the bare walls. Part of me had hoped that the love that filled our house would be enough for it to become beautiful. A house without love is certainly not a home, but I intuited that it would take more than love to make our house beautiful. Not that beauty is contingent on material things, but I think the beauty of objects and material goods is necessary for our lives. Also, perhaps more selfishly, I wanted others to admire my house. After all, I am technically a housewife. And what good is a housewife without her palace of domesticity?
I huffed through my nose at the thought of anyone thinking our three-bed, two-bath farmhouse was a palace. But in all seriousness, it did occur to me that any guests or family we had over would probably judge me more than my husband over the appearance of our house. I mean, that happens to women who work full-time, not just to those of us who stay home.
Finishing the last sip of my iced coffee, I turned and headed for the exit. I hadn’t found anything on my list. I’d found a lot of stuff not on my list that I also wanted, but exhibiting the bare minimum of personal restraint, I left with nothing. Self-control requires patience. I wouldn’t find everything I was looking for in one day, but I knew that eventually, our house would become a home.