Making a Home

Zach Hawkins
Lemont, PA

It took my wife and me three days to empty the cardboard boxes in our new apartment. I took care of the kitchen, unpacking mixing bowls and wooden spoons, placing them on unfamiliar shelves. “When will this feel like home?” I wondered. It didn’t smell like home: the woodsy scent of particleboard in the cupboards, the overpowering lavender soap left by the previous tenants. It needed something familiar, like the smell of baking bread.

So now that the furniture is in place, and our clothes hang in the closet, I find myself fetching flour from the pantry. My movements are awkward in the new space— I bump into cupboards, open every drawer in search of the tablespoon—but soon the memory of familiar work guides my hands, and I am turning a shaggy lump of dough onto the counter. It warms as I knead it, and the earthy aromas of yeast and wheat fill my lungs.

I put the dough in a bowl to rise. And my mind wanders to the moving boxes, flattened and stacked in the basement. They are waiting there, ready to be reshaped and fortified with packing tape. In just three years—after my wife finishes grad school—we’ll fill them up and haul them off to a different place. I tell myself, “This is just a way station. This doesn’t have to feel like home.” But I know this thought’s as empty as the boxes downstairs because I believe in making a home.

Twenty-seven-year-old guys like me aren’t necessarily known for our homemaking skills. I wasn’t particularly interested in Home Ec class, and I used to feel more comfortable scarfing down fast food in my car than making a meal from scratch. But as I get older, I feel a growing dissatisfaction with modern culture -- where people find community online instead of next door and a frozen dinner is considered a home-cooked meal. So I have learned to bake bread, to grow vegetables, to use a water-bath canner. I’m in pursuit of the time-honored knowledge that inhabits kitchens, backyard gardens, and the stories of grandparents—knowledge that brings me home.

I stop to check on the dough, pressing a finger into the rounded bulk. It has doubled its size, so I divide it, shape it into loaves, and let it rise again.

When the dough is ready I put it in the oven, and step outside. I’m contemplating doing some planting, and I’ve started tracking the movement of sunlight across the strip of grass between the house and the wooded area that surrounds it. It’s too late to start a garden this year, but I have plans to grow lettuce and spinach in some planters—to put down a few roots here.

When I walk back inside, the smell of the baking bread greets me as a surprise. I’d forgotten it was in the oven. But there it is, waiting for me: warm, and inviting. The smells of particleboard and lavender soap have been replaced by the yeasty smell of bread. The house feels more familiar already. More like home. And that’s good, because I believe in making a home.

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