The difference between house and home

RE: How MPAC helped me appreciate my home (July 15)

Latham Hunter’s article set me thinking about the difference between a house and a home. A house is a physical construct of walls, roof bricks and mortar. A home is abstract. It is a place where people and families live and build up memories over a period of time. As she has mentioned in her article “renovating and decorating are ubiquitous media topics and they seep into our culture.” Hence the huge popularity of home improvement shows on television.

We must renovate the slightly older kitchen with a new centre island marble top and the latest steel appliances, and so on it goes. My aunt from the Black Isle in Scotland cooked the most amazing meals for a family of six in a very small galley kitchen on a gas stove. No doubt she would have been delighted with a huge modern kitchen but I am not sure if the quality of the food would have been different!

On our street six of the older ranch style homes, some perhaps well over 60 years old, are being pulled down to make way for very large houses. I was given permission to go into one before its demolition to dig up some perennial plants and take out some old flagstones. One wonders about the memories left behind. The wrecking crews are there and it will disappear in a couple of days. Let us hope its new, very large replacement will build up its own memories over time.

Evelyn Paulssen, Burlington