When I was very young my father used to read Uncle Rhemus Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit, and I was fascinated. Brer Rabbit begged and pleased with Brer Foz to do anything to him — boil him alive in hot tar, eviscerate him, eat him for dinner — but NOT to throw him in the briar patch, where, it turned out, he’d been bred and born. And precisely where he wanted to be.

From the moment my foot went through the punky front porch, this house, my home, belonged to me. And I belonged here. I’d grown up in the same kind of rusticity, my mother complaining about the lack of foundations, sloping-away floors, and self-ventilating walls. Whenever the wind blew and the roof leaked my father would say to her, “Why let a little thing like having to put a saucepan in the middle of our bed to catch a few drips come between us? What do you think this is — the Ritz?”

Susan Musgrave working in her house
in Haida Gwaii
BY Charlotte Musgrave

Carl Jung described a house as an extension of the unconscious, “a kind of representation of one’s innermost thoughts.” Since my husband and I moved in twelve years ago neither of us has had much time to think about our thoughts; we’ve been too busy fighting with the extension ladder. A day hasn’t passed when we haven’t had to tear down a wall, replace a rotten floorboard, or patch a leaky ceiling. When our multichild family outgrew a single bedroom lifestyle, we simply added on, so that the house has grown around us. It has also grown to embody our personalities.

Witold Rybczynski, in his book The Most Beautiful House in the World, says that by living in a house we make it alive. If we think of buildings as clothes, a house should be like a worn and carefully patched jacket that takes the shape of its wearer over time and becomes a sort of second skin.

He also says that houses should shelter daydreaming, that our houses take life in our imaginations. Which is why the places that people have fashioned for themselves are more touching than those — no matter how splendid — that others have made for them.

Last week I drove my daughter to visit a new friend in Eagle’s Nest Estates. The hill has been clearcut: not a tree left for an eagle to nest in. We all know the syndrome: you name the development after what has been destroyed to make room for it. It’s our culture’s way of paying tribute to what has gone before.

My daughter has reached an age when she is beginning to want answers to difficult questions: not where do babies come from, but why do we have to live in a dump with no foundations, sloping floors, a leaking roof and walls you can see daylight through?

She contemplates her plight as we drive by a row of mock Georgian ranchettes with electric wishing wells and a series of Tuscan Gothic bungalows with self-vacuuming eaves troughs designed for homeowners who think “upkeep” means turning a key in a lock. I tell her, our dump may not be dripping in elegance like these key-ready ranchettes, but it exhibits something, to me, that is more precious, what Rybczyski calls “the moving loveliness of human occupation.” Our house, with a real heart and soul and real eyes to see with, is evidence of how human beings can transform a place, “not by grand design but by the small celebrations of everyday life.” Ours may not be anyone else’s idea of a “dream home” but our house contains our dreams.