H IS FOR HOUSE.

We have a friend moving in with us today. Our house in town is a modest dwelling in the suburbs. Technically three bedrooms, but actually only two as I have converted the biggest one to an office. It was already pretty full, with me and my husband and our two large hounds and two cats. It might be a little cramped with the addition of another adult and his five hounds. And a house, of course, is finite. It's made of bricks and mortar. Or, if you're rich and posh, vast blocks of stone chiselled out by hand many centuries ago. But whatever the material, it's a foundation and walls and a roof, and it doesn't magically expand.

H, however, also stands for home, and a home is another thing entirely. A home is not bricks and mortar and roofing. A home is made of love, and care, and patience, and the infinite small accommodations of goodwill that humans make for each other. A home is a living thing, and like most living things, it is stretchy. 

With the chaos of Moving Day, and the fitting in of everything, I've been inspired to really get into my declutter, which had rather stalled, what with injury, and eye surgery, and so on. I have always in my mind's eye the memory of my grandparents' house. They had what they needed, and nothing extra. Shopping was not a recreational exercise for my grandmother. She bought the best she could afford, took extremely good care of it, and replaced it only when it had worn out. Her whole married life, she had the same china, the same silver, the same furniture. There was none of this modern 'doing up' of rooms, either. All of the rooms in her house remained as they had been set up when she first moved in And that house was the happiest, most peaceful place in my childhood. So that's my ideal, although the category of 'things one needs' seems to be rather larger these days, with the addition of so much technology. 

So I'm really looking forward to seeing my house get properly weeded out, and embracing that more disciplined lifestyle that brings with it so much peace and comfort. But I'm also looking forward to discovering what our family will become, with the new additions. Because, above all, a home is made up of the people in it, and all the myriad connexions between them. 

We're going to be just fine.