Evening Republican, Volume 17, Number 242, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 October 1913 — What is Meant by Home [ARTICLE]

What is Meant by Home

WHAT IS MEANT by that word “Home?" If out of your overpowing knowledge of men and women, and your varied experience*, you had the assurance to compile a dictionary, how would you define that simple little ’word "Home?" '

Isn’t it a place \you never had, but which you are alvfays hoping to have some day? A man will contend that it is the place where one ha* the right to be; meaning that it is the place where a man can enter, and depart, without quibble or question; where he can do as he pleases, throw his hat and papers on the floor, grumble at his meals, throw his collar and coat on the bed, look in flto ice box if he wants and roar because its contents don’t please him. It is the place, in brief, where he is proprietor, and a home where he isn’t, is not the home of his dreams.

If his definition is correct, then the majority of men and women are homeless, for few, having paid the price, find the rights that go with it If a man roars and grumbles and is disorderly because he Is at .home, then the woman who Is patient and picks up after him and 1 tries in vain to please him is homeless, for that is not the home of her dreams. “Home,” the sentimental man will say, “Is any place to a man so the woman he loves Is there.” Pretty and pleasing to sentimental women, but not true, for no man ever felt at home living with his wife’s folks though the woman he loves Is there with him.

“Home,” says a wife, “is a place where a man has a right to be a tyrant without fear of arrest.” “Home,” says the husband of an extravagant woman, “is the place where you pay for joys you don’t get.” "A place,” some say, “where sentiment is supposed to reconcile both the men and women in it for the price they pay.” “Wherever say-- the children, who have a hlghei* conception of some things tlip.n their worldtainted seniors. w

“The place the listeners sigh for when they hear a strain of ’Home, Sweet Home,’ and they sigh just as deeply and fervently if they live In what passes current for a home as if they live in a boarding house,” others will claim. “An air castle where there is never any troubles with drainage, chimneys or creditors,” others will say, and some will answer, “Nobody knows,-because nobody has one.”

After a man has boarded four or five years he takes the halos off all the saints he meets and piles them on top of anything from soup to pickles that Is home-made. At this period of his nomadic existence he marries that he may have a home, and after a few wpeks If asked what is meant by the “home,” out of the depth of his disappointment he will reply: “Home is the place where a man hoped to have home cooking, and finds he has exchanged the chef at his hotel for the woman who runs a delicatessen store.” Home Is something to idealize when away from, and to abuse when you are there. When compiling your dictionary, use that definition, and it will be found that it fits all human experience. If you have a better one, what is it?