The terms “house” and “home” are used as synonym, but they represent two different things. Most of the time, their meanings are regarded the same, but this statement is false if one person has a house means that she/he has a home. A house is just a building that is used as a base for daily activities and eating like shelter. On the contrary, a home is totally different.
A home is where true happiness lies. Happiness, love, family, and comfort are the most important things that make a house as a home. Anna Quindlen says “Home is where the heart is. There is no place like it”. Quindlen wants to tell people that home is something more than walls and beams. Home is where people can feel their true love, peace, and privacy. While a house provides people a place for living and eating. House requires more warm feeling, love, and family to be like a home.
A house is a building that is made of walls and beams. House represents the physical aspects. It’s a structure; Nothing more, nothing less. It requires technical knowledge, materials and some money to build. Quindlen uses some of the concrete language to describe house like “a chain-link fence, a narrow driveway…, and a patch of backyard”. She mentions these just to show the physical aspects of a house.
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When people hear these words, they can just imagine a “house”, but they cannot feel like a “home”. A lot of people buy houses and they don’t put their love, time, and feeling into it to make it as a home. People usually resell their house to get profit. As Anna Quindlen mentions “Homes have stopped being homes. Now they are real estate”. Most people have become like modern nomads. They try to move constantly and upgrade to something better. In this moving, they try to gain profit.
In this situation, a house cannot be like a home because it lacks that sense of unity and friendship between neighbors. In “Rhode Island” Jhumpa Lahiri says “The house in Rolling Acres will belong to other people; there will be no place there to pay my respects”. She feels that she does not belong there, and it is not her home. She has not established any feelings toward that place to feel like it is a place where she is accepted.
On the other hand, a home is totally different. “Home” is associated with warm feelings of happiness, love, and comfort. “Home” is the place that brings different kinds of emotions. This means that when people are far from their home, they may feel nostalgic. Anna Quindlen says: “Home is a place of certainty, stability, predictability, and privacy for her and her family”. She tries to give us the positive picture of home. she tells that home is more than a building for living. Home is the place where everybody can feel secure.
One of the important things that makes a house to be a home is family. For example, one can have a big house with a beautiful view; living alone in that place is going to be boring and it would remain as a house not a home. Didion mentions her home where she was born and where her family lives. She is stuck in past and she can’t create sense of home for her own daughter with her husband.
Didion says: “I would like to promise her that she will grow up with a sense of her cousins and of rivers and of her great-grandmother’s teacup”. Didion shows that for her home is where her family lives, where she has a history. Family and home are related to each other, and they are everything to her.
Another important thing that connected with home is happiness and acceptance; those feelings are one of the strongest emotions that make people comfortable and welcome. Jhumpa Lahiri says in “Rhode Island” about her mother that “One day, after she’d been working at the school for a decade, she started to receive anonymous hate mail. In Rhode Island, she had renounced her Indian passport for an American one”. The neighbors didn’t welcome and accept her mom. Also, her mom tried to refuse that she is an Indian. Otherwise, she was unhappy, and she didn’t accept the Rhode Island as her home.
In conclusion, there is a wide gap of difference between a house and a home. House is the place where people physically live. A house can be a shelter or a nice, large building. Home is the place where the family is, the place with love, happiness, emotion, peace and welcome. In another word, a happy home is the place where people can recover their wounds from pains. It’s fine if one’s home is not big, or fancy; as long as people are happy by living there, it is their home.
