Making Home

On the Redemption of the Ordinary

I called her Plumport. Partly because of the ornamental plum tree some previous owner planted outside the kitchen window. And partly because of what I wanted for her—to be a port in the storm of life, a safe harbor for me and for everyone who passed through her doors. She was the first home I ever owned. And I loved her.

She became mine, four months before my thirtieth birthday. I had no husband then, no babies either. But I wanted a home of my own just the same. Not because I was looking for a good investment or to save money on rent, but because I wanted a place to belong.

After eleven years of dorm rooms and rentals, I was tired of leases and moving and spending money making fixes that landlords wouldn’t make. I was even more tired of drifting through life, from college to grad school to work, with no family or home to anchor me in place. I wanted a home that was mine, a place that I could love and shape into something beautiful.

So, in January of 2005, two of my roommates and I said goodbye to the sweet but shabby rental which had housed us during grad school and moved two blocks east.

Our destination was a cozy old Craftsman Foursquare, built in 1915. She had a wide front porch and leaded glass windows, oak French doors that separated the living room and dining room, a whole wall of original built in cabinetry in the kitchen, and even a tiny back stairway with a hobbit like door at the top, through which you had to duck if you wanted to pass through to the landing on the other side.

Out back was the ornamental plum tree, from which the house took its name and which exploded into a riot of lacy pink flowers every spring. Upstairs, the bathroom still had its original tile—a black and white porcelain basketweave. Surrounding that bathroom were four small bedrooms, while two floors below was a basement just waiting to be finished.

Of course, there also was electrical wiring installed when the French were fighting the Germans on the Western Front. The walls upstairs and down were cracking. The ceilings in each of the four bedrooms were collapsing. And the kitchen bore more than a passing resemblance to a crack den, with a broken stove, leaking sink, and crumbling walls.

She needed some work. But that was okay. She was mine, and I knew once the work was complete, she would be beautiful. She would be home.

Making Home

During my first few months in the house, I fixed most of the electrical problems, but not all. Working alongside contractors, I learned how to repair plaster and mud dry wall. We patched the walls, installed new ceilings, repaired the old double hung windows, restored the woodwork, and finished the basement. The following year, I nursed a broken heart by restoring the kitchen—not the kind of fancy restoration you see on Instagram, but a more humble one, that corresponded to the less than stellar property values in the neighborhood.

After that, every year brought a new project. But, bit by bit, the home became every inch of the Craftsman beauty I knew she could be. She also became the home I wanted her to be, where friends were welcomed, fed, and loved.

Every week, on Thursday nights, I threw open my doors and cooked dinner for my friends and their children. Some nights, as many as 50 people filled my little 1800 square foot house, with the walls shaking from the conversation, laughter, and pounding steps of two dozen small children. On other nights, single friends would wander by for a chat and stay for dinner. While I chopped and stirred, they would sit at my kitchen table or perch on the kitchen stairs, drinking wine and talking about boys or politics or the pope.

On long summer weekends, the extra bedrooms would fill up with visiting friends and their babies. At Christmas, dozens of small children would decorate my tree, while their parents drank cocktails and ate bacon wrapped dates and miniature crab cakes set out on silver platters. On election nights, friends would pile into the basement and surround the television, armed first with laptops and later with iPhones, to monitor exit polls and social media commentary.

Once, we had a superhero party, where we all had to invent an alter ego, complete with costume and backstory. I was SuperChef, capable of rescuing a meal gone wrong with a single flick of my whisk.

We also had a Jane Austen party, where we watched Pride and Prejudice (the Colin Firth version, always the Colin Firth version), while eating cakes and drinking punches popular in Regency England. If you need a recipe for Syllabub, I still have it squirreled away in a box somewhere.

Twice, once in 2005, again in 2013, we had a pope party, celebrating our newly elected Holy Fathers with beer, wine, and the cuisines of Germany and Argentina respectively.

All these years later, it’s those parties I remember the most. I remember the way voices echoed in the rooms, the smell of the kitchen as I cooked, and the light that poured in through the south facing windows every afternoon, blinding me on summer evenings, as I washed and chopped vegetables.

I remember the tears, too, though—the tears I wept year after year for the man I loved who didn’t love me, the tears for the babies I didn’t hold, the tearsf or the deadlines I struggled to meet, and the tears for the friends who left, one after another, for new cities, jobs, and husbands.

Then there was the work. I wrote my first four books at Plumport, putting my heart and mind on paper and beating down all my fears to share them with the world.

I packed for Europe a dozen times in that house, then returned home another dozen times, armed with new recipes to try and new scarves to wear.

I read Agatha Christie books by the fireside in winter and drank wine under fairy lights in my garden in the summer.

I sat in a doctor’s office one day in 2009 and heard the words “possibly cancer” and “likely no children,” then drove home in a fog to grieve alone with Netflix and a bottle of Cab Franc.

I sat on a wine velvet sofa in the living room day after day, year after year and looked at Jesus on the crucifix hanging above me and tried with all my might, to say, “Lord, I love you. Thank you for giving me this chance to suffer with you.”

And on a December night in 2014, in that same living room, the man for whom I cried a million tears, kissed me. Then, he kissed me again. A year later, sitting on that same sofa, he slipped a ring on my finger. And five months after that, we came home together, as husband and wife.

The Redemption of the World

Almost twelve years had passed by then. I had never lived anywhere for quite so long—not even my childhood home. For me, those years were a lifetime. I was one woman when I signed the papers that made the house mine, and I was another woman when I walked back in the door with a new last name.

The house was different, too. Memories of parties, people, prayers, and tears filled every inch of it. Babies saying their first words over bowls of potato soup; houseguests sitting around in their pajamas drinking coffee; roommates perched on my kitchen steps, helping me solve the problems of the universe while I stirred risotto. Every corner echoed with stories of the millions of little moments that make up a life: all the laughing and singing, fighting and praying, kissing and cooking.

Those moments had transformed me. And somehow, in some way, they transformed the house. They seeped into its walls and floorboards. They changed the very air. The love, the laughter, the prayers—it all lingered. It was tangible. I felt it. Others felt it too. It’s one of the reasons that place never lacked for dinner guests. That and the risotto.

Years before, I’d traveled to Wales to visit a friend, and we ended up spending a long weekend on her family’s farm. They lived in a 400-year-old cottage, nestled into the greenest hillside I’d ever seen. Her father was a former Protestant pastor and a gentle, wise man. One night, he and I sat up talking about the palpable peace that surrounded their little farm. It was, he told me, a “thin place”—a place where so many centuries of prayer had worn down the veil between heaven and earth until they were almost touching. Grace felt more present there, and prayers seemed to travel more quickly to God’s ear.

That was what Plumport had become. All the work wasn’t just mine, though. I knew the families who had owned it before me—people of faith and prayer who had filled the house with their own love, tears, joys, and babies. They had done the heavy lifting, sanctifying the walls and the floorboards as they sanctified their days. I just completed the work, hanging around longer than most of its previous owners, who had quickly outgrown the house as babies came fast and furious. But together, one owner after another, we had created a place where, when people entered, they felt peace. They felt at home.

And that’s no small thing. It is, perhaps, one of the most important things any of us can do. It’s not the sort of thing that earns you raises, wins you awards, or gets you talked about on the evening news. It’s quiet, hidden work. But it’s glorious just the same. It’s redemptive just the same.

In Saint Paul’s First Letter to the Colossions, he describes us as Christ’s co-workers in the redemption of the world, “completing what is lacking in His afflictions (1:24). It’s such a strange thing, that Jesus would ask broken men and women to work with Him to heal this crazy hurting universe. Especially because Jesus doesn’t need co-workers. He’s God. He can do the work of redeeming, healing, and sanctifying all by Himself, thank you very much.

But it’s still His call to us. Jesus wants us to partner with Him in making this planet whole once more.

That work is both more ordinary and extraordinary than it sounds. It’s extraordinary because we’re not actually capable of doing it. God is like the father who holds his son’s hand while he learns to hammer a nail for the first time. Any good we do, any part we play in the redemption of this world, is with His help, by His grace.

The work is ordinary, though, because God doesn’t ask most of us to do what Paul, Peter, Francis, Dominic, Teresa, or Catherine have done. He doesn’t call the bulk of His followers to perform great, visible, and clearly miraculous work out in the world. Instead, He calls most of us to redeem the world through the ordinary acts of daily life—cooking and cleaning, mowing lawns and changing diapers, meeting deadlines and being nice to strangers we disagree with on the Internet.

It’s easy to think that we’re only redeeming the world if we’re marching in protests, leading non-profits, or writing bestselling books about the Great Issues of Our Day. Those actions certainly can be part of the work of redemption. But they can’t be the whole. And in this world, where grief just piles on top of grief, the fruit they ultimately bear depends on the much more humble and hidden work we do in our homes.

Christ is the only one capable of universal redemption. He is the only one who can sanctify the universe through one holy act of atonement. The rest of us must work in the realm of the particular. This city. This neighborhood. This home. This person.

“You are God’s field; God’s building,” Paul continues (I Cor 3:9). Which is to say, that you, me, all of us, as individuals are His place of business. We, first and foremost, are what need redeeming. We have to say yes to God. We have to let Him to the hard work of redemption in us. God always respects our freedom. He doesn’t demand our cooperation. He invites it. But when we say yes to that invitation, the renovation, the hallowing, the redeeming of us begins. And as it begins, it moves outward, starting in the spaces where we live.

In his book Hallowed Be This House, Tom Howard writes that each of us must:

“…see our ordinary routines as proceeding among the hallows … and by stirring up in our minds the things that we vaguely acknowledge anyway, to begin to hallow those routines by doing once more what men have always done with things to hallow them; namely offering them up in oblation to God, as literally Abel offered up sacrifices from his ordinary routine of work.”

To see life that way, changes everything. It charges everything we do in our homes, with a supernatural electricity. It makes the working and the cleaning and the cooking an act of redemption. From that perspective, nothing is ordinary. Nothing is unimportant. It’s all part of the cosmic liturgy of redemption, allowing us and all that our love encompasses to be caught up into what C. S. Lewis described as “the Great Dance”—the perfect worship of God through life lived in perfect accord with His plans—which allows every creature in Heaven to look back on the whole of their life from the perspective of eternity and somehow cry out about every last beautiful, broken, heart-wrenching moment, “Blessed be He.”

The Liturgy of Home

It’s been seven years since I sold Plumport. In that time, Chris and I moved to Pittsburgh, renovated a second home, and welcomed three babies into it. Now, we’re back in Steubenville, just a few blocks away from the first home I made my own. If I walk to the edge of our property and look north, I can see my old kitchen window looking back at me. It is hard not to walk right up to her and stroll inside. It’s also hard not to wonder if I did, would I run into me there—the me of 10, 15, 19 years ago? Of course I wouldn’t. I’m wondering nonsense. But the life my friends and I lived in that home was so shot through with grace and blessing, that it’s hard to not imagine it still existing in some way. It’s hard to imagine us not existing there in some way.

The peace of Plumport was the work of generations of families. It wasn’t just my work. But the peace I imparted to it took a particular form—the form I had given it. Every inch of that house bore my stamp. There was something of me in it. It reflected me in a way similar to the way my writing does. In renovating it and living life in it, I had remade it in my image.

That’s a God-like ability we all have. God did that for us on a macro-scale—creating a universe where every atom vibrates with His glory. We, who are made in His image, do it on a micro-scale—creating a place where the walls and floorboards of our homes speak of who we are and the life we live in that space.

How much of that lasts, though, when we go?

In the years since I left, new owners have made changes to her—new paint, new furnishings, new lots of things. Part of my story, written into the walls of Plumport, has already been erased, replaced with a new story by those who have come after me.

But what about the rest—what about the love and reading and the late-night conversations? What about the children who ran in circles, up one staircase and down another? What about the tears, shed over my kitchen sink? What about the days where I questioned God and the days where I praised God? And what about all the dinner parties, all the cooking, all the drinking? What about the polenta and the curries and cheesecake? What about the wine–the cheap Australian stuff we drank in grad school and the good French stuff we drank later? Did all that love I cooked up and poured out in my kitchen linger on in any way besides a stain to the left of the kitchen sink?

I don’t know the answer to those questions. But I think, I hope, I believe, it’s all still somehow there. I believe part of us, part of the life my friends and I lived in that house, lives on. I still feel it when I look at her. The graces given there were too thick to dissipate in seven months or seven years. Maybe in 70, if she’s still standing, they will be all gone. But I hope not. I hope that the graces we received there always make it easier for others to receive grace there, too. I hope the God who broke into our lives hour after hour in between those walls, remaking us as we remade the house, keeps breaking into the lives of all who live there. I pray that He can’t stay away from that home, that He won’t stay away from that home, because we made it His home, too.

Here at Visitation House, a few blocks away, we’re currently in the stage of renovating where it’s easy to get discouraged. The bills are mounting, the money is dwindling, so many unexpected problems have cropped up, and we can’t possibly afford to fix them all. At least not anytime soon.

But when I stand in our yard and look north towards Plumport, I breathe easier. The money matters less, and the issues seem smaller. They recede into the larger context of what matters most—of what my time at Plumport taught me matters most. And that’s not the color of the paint or the state of the wiring. It’s the children I gather up in my arms every morning. It’s the husband I kiss every night. It’s Toby orchestrating battles in the den and Becket dunking basketballs in his bedroom and Ellie chasing the chickens around the yard. It’s me tucked away in the attic with a laptop, trying so hard to hear God’s voice and write what He asks me to write. It’s also me walking back downstairs because the children need me more than Substack does. It’s Chris pushing children on the swing and cleaning out the coop. It’s friends standing in our kitchen drinking martinis and eating soup while little ones run circles around us. It’s the dish washing, floor sweeping, and clothes folding. It’s the diaper-changing, picture hanging, and Rosary praying. It’s the whole liturgy of life here—the prayers, the chores, the work, the play, the laughing and hosting and fighting and forgiving— all of it done with love and offered up to God, in one unending song of praise.

What Chris and I are doing to restore this house matters. It matters to the neighborhood and it matters to my family, just as what I did to Plumport, so many years ago, mattered to the neighborhood and mattered to my friends. But none of the plumbing, patching, and painting matters more than the life that is lived here. That’s how I consecrated my first home and my second home, and it’s how we’ll consecrate this new home. That’s how we consecrate ourselves. We live the ordinary moments as the sacred moments they are, allowing God’s grace to touch every one of them, knowing we are redeemed through every one of them, and saying yes to Christ’s invitation to redeem the world with Him through every one of them.

This work is messy. The redemption of both hearts and homes take time. The most important work is usually hidden and the most beautiful moments can’t be captured with a photograph. It’s not Instagrammable (nor does it require flowing dresses and linen aprons…though having chickens doesn’t hurt!) But it’s the very best work there is. I’m so glad I’m doing it. And I’m so glad I’m doing it now in the shadow of the home where God first taught me all this. Plumport is blessing me still, reminding me what matters, reminding me of what’s possible.

Somehow, even though she belongs to someone else now, she and I still belong to each other. We always will. Which I suppose is the way it is with every place that’s ever truly home. We never really leave one another. Somehow, we’re always part of one another, story bound up with story, redemption bound up with redemption, until the day we arrive at the home at which every other home has only hinted, the home where we will all finally and fully belong.

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