A House Of My Own
“Not a flat. Not an apartment in back. Not a man’s house. Not daddy’s. A house all my own. With my porch and my pillow, my pretty purple petunias. My books and my stories. My two shoes waiting beside the bed. Nobody to shake a tick at. Nobody’s garbage to pick up. Only a house quiet as snow, a space for myself to go, as clean as paper before a poem.”
- The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
I think I read this excerpt last night (too tired to remember) and I love it. I can relate to it a lot. I’ve only lived in a house for a short period of time, when I was little, then again in middle school, and up until the beginning of my freshman year of high school. Both times I’ve had my house taken away from me. When I was younger we had a horrible house fire and lost pretty much everything. After six years of rebuilding it, we moved back in and four years later we lost it to foreclosure. It was awful. I just want a house full of my stuff and memories and pictures. A permanent place. A sanctuary. And I don’t care if I don’t have a husband laying next to me at night or children’s laughter filling up the rooms. I just want a house. My sister and I talk about having one together; what its going to look like, the silhouette and the color, what plants are going in my garden, what our fridge is going to be full of. I’m really excited, but also very homesick.
