The Difference Between House and Home
My dad had one house at the top of a hill. There were two or three houses on the way up, but we were at the top. My room, which had a giant rock in it, was in the basement, and there wasn’t a bathroom down there. Late one night, I went up to use the half bath near the front door and saw that not only was the door unlocked, but it was open. Just the screen separating the rest of the world from us. I locked the door.
When I got up in the morning, my dad was still having his morning coffee, and I asked him how he could leave the door open, didn’t he know about murderers, and had he always done this? He laughed. No one is driving to the top of this hill to do a crime. I wasn’t satisfied. I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t lock the door, just in case. Then I realized we had five doors that someone could enter from the outside. I spent a lot of time locking unlocked doors for no reason. My dad was always right.
I didn’t understand the difference between a house and a home growing up because I lived with my mom in apartments in Brooklyn Heights. I saw my dad on the weekends, and we lived in a house, but I was just a part-timer. My full-time residence was second-floor apartment on Hicks Street, and before that a seventh-floor one on Pierrepont. Without a yard or a front door of our own or freedom from Dorothy Lapidus downstairs, who hit the ceiling with her broom so I would stop playing Nerf basketball in my room, I couldn’t understand house and home.
When I moved to Fort Lauderdale for law school, I got a pretty sweet rental townhouse in Plantation. I had an epic crush on the woman who worked in the development’s office. I beat my furniture there by a week. I was living in a house, sleeping on some pretty plush carpet in my living room, with only a TV to keep me company. It was far from a home, but in some ways it felt like one because it was mine.
It’s hard to make your house feel like a home when it looks like every other one. Welcome to Florida development living. When I bought my first house on my own as an adult, also in Plantation, it was the same shade of beige as all the others. I was in a line of about ten, all mirror images of each other. We were lemmings. They were so similar that many nights I came home drunk and sat in my car in the driveway wondering why my garage door wasn’t opening. Then I would realize the door two doors down was opening. Oops.
No one says, “Hey honey, I’m house.” Home is a state of mind. It was hard for anything to feel like home to me with my mom gone. Looking back, the difference between a house and a home, to me, was family. When I had my own family, I could’ve lived in a shack and still felt at home. Curated decorations help, but I still feel lonely when they are the only things to welcome me home.
© Jonathan Greene, August 26, 2026
